Skylarks, the ‘blithe spirits’ of the Yorkshire Dales.

Posted on August 31, 2026 by hestercoxprintmaker

Larke, Laverock (Scotland & Sedburgh), Laverack (Craven), Song-Lark (Ackworth), Sky (Teesmouth), Our Lady’s Hen (Orkney), Lady Hen (Shetland), Learock (Lancashire), Rising Lark & Sky Laverock (Northamptonshire), Field Lark (Surrey), Short-heeled lark (Scotland), Lintwhite (Suffolk), Melhuex (Cornwall), Sky-Flapper (Somerset), Ground Lark, Skillie (Yorkshire)

Just a few of the various Skylarks I’ve encountered in the Yorkshire Dales over the years.

The Skylark (alauda avensis) is a bird that is common in many countries across the world but, due to the changes in farming, habitat loss and the use of pesticides, its numbers have declined dramatically in Britain in the twentieth and twenty-first century. It is a much loved bird and yet it has had a very chequered history concerning its treatment by humans. On the one hand it has been much celebrated in art, literature, poetry and music for many centuries with probably the most well-known poems being Percy Bysshe Shelley’s To a Skylark and George Meredith’s Lark Ascending which is said to have inspired the famous music of the same name by Vaughan Williams. Williams first wrote the piece just before the First World War broke out and revised it in 1920 when it was over, having himself spent two years as a stretcher bearer.

In comparison, records as far back as Anglo Saxon and Medieval times tell how people have hunted, trapped and killed hundreds of thousands of skylarks for food or sport. The poor birds have been subjected to such practises as luring with sticky lime twigs, the use of lights or specially designed ‘lark mirrors’ to blind, confuse and dazzle them into being trapped in large nets and even the deployment of other species to distract them. Tame Little Owls were tethered to posts and used to bring out the Skylark’s natural instinct to mob birds of prey causing them to become oblivious to the hunters who could then more easily lure them into nets.

In Nelson, Clarke’s and Boyes (1907) The Birds of Yorkshire: Being a Historical Account of the avi-Fauna of the County, under the entry for Skylark it is said ‘Historically, the Skylark, as a Yorkshire bird, can claim ancestry of great antiquity, for we find in the ordinances as to the price of food in the City of York, in I393, in the sixteenth year of the reign of King Richard II., that “the price for I2 larks be one penny”‘.

In Birds Britannica, by Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, the history of hunting larks for food seems to reach a peak in Victorian times when ‘The pre-eminent market for larks in Britain was Leadenhall in London where in early Victorian times as many as 400,000 were received each year’. Sackloads of skylarks arrived daily by train to Leadenhall. In the archive of the Dales Countryside Museum, I found a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book and Household Guide (1897) which not only had recipes for Larks in Onions but instructions on how to dress the tiny birds and for what price they could be purchased.

As well as the culinary market there was a demand for Skylarks as caged songbirds and often the males would be separated from the females and sold for that purpose. Horror stories exist of their deliberate blinding because of the belief that they would sing more freely when they could no longer ‘tell night from day’. Thomas Hardy wrote The Blinded Bird in 1916 which protested the practise of Vinkensport when male finches and larks would be blinded using hot needles or pins so they would sing more fiercely in competitions. In 1925, thanks to The Protection of Birds Act, this barbaric practise was made illegal in the UK.

So zestfully canst thou sing?
And all this indignity,
With God’s consent, on thee!
Blinded ere yet a-wing
By the red-hot needle thou,
I stand and wonder how
So zestfully thou canst sing!

(excerpt from The Blinded Bird)

For me, the song of the Skylark symbolises freedom and the open countryside. The male skylark sings whilst rising into the air and it is one of the most long and complex songs of any European bird consisting of a series of notes, trills and whistles hat can last up to thirty minutes! Hearing them, I often feel like my spirits are lifting as the small birds ascend higher and higher. I’ve watched them many a time and it is amazing just how high they fly until they become just a speck in the blue. Some of my most cherished memories are of fellrunning with a soundtrack of skylarks singing most notably shortly after dawn on the forty-two mile High Peak Marathon. Our team of four had spent the night running over icy peat bogs and snow drifts. We were fighting off cold and exhaustion but on the final miles we ran along a ridge to the sound of a single skylark singing and I had an overwhelming surge of happiness forgetting all discomfort and feeling energised for the last push to the finish.

We’re very fortunate in the Yorkshire Dales that there are still plenty of places to see and hear Skylarks. One of my favourites is on Sulber Common in May/June when the Bird’s Eye Primroses are flowering and you can see many Wheatears, Meadow Pipits and Skylarks. It is perfect for these ground nesting birds because there is a mosaic of short to mid-length vegetation amongst limestone so plenty of places to hide, forage and nest but also plenty of rocks for perching and defending their territories. This beautiful area is part of the Ingleborough Nature Reserve and is full of flowers, butterflies and birds thanks to the switch from sheep to cattle grazing (which I believe happened in 2004). Cattle graze differently to sheep by using their tongues to pull the taller grasses allowing smaller plants to survive, they also ‘poach’ the land with their hooves and spread seed with their coats which helps with germination (read more on this HERE).

Before Sally and I had come up with the plan for Cherish, I had already started making prints that connected bird species with the habitats that they flourished in and, inspired by my runs up and down Ingleborough, I made the collagraph ‘Bird’s Eye View’ which shows the gorgeous Bird’s Eye Primroses, a Skylark and Pen-y-Ghent in the distance.

Here are a few stages of its creation.

The collagraph is my earliest print for the exhibition and this wood engraving is my latest. A circular route from my house via the Pennine Way, over Whitber Hill and back via Horton Scar Lane is one of my ‘go to’ evening fell runs and I have had many this year when I have been serenaded by Skylarks. I chose the dimensions of this piece of wood because I wanted to emphasise the incredible heights that the Skylark ascends to. You can see Pen-y-Ghent silhouetted in the background and the path winding away towards it. I faced many challenges when creating this engraving and the main one was the sky but I hope I have captured something of the movement of the wind and the bird.

Currently Reading: Kristin Bluehmel’s Enchanted Wood : Engraving a Place for Women Artists in Rural Britain

Wood Engraving – In the Footsteps of Marie Hartley, Part 1

Posted on August 27, 2026 by hestercoxprintmaker

More than twenty years ago I purchased a few wood engraving tools and a bag of small ‘practise pieces’ of wood with a view to teaching myself wood engraving. I specialise in collagraph but am also a linocut printmaker and I rather naively thought it would be fairly easy. My first attempt was a hare stretching in the sunlight…it was terrible. I set at the wood using the tools wth no delicacy whatsoever and gouged away at it creating a very rough and ready print. I then got sidetracked and didn’t pick up the tools again until 2012 when Anne Desmet had an exhibition at the Mercer Gallery in Harrogate. It was inspirational and when she ran an introductory workshop, I signed up straight away. I learnt a lot, made a tiny crow on a little piece of boxwood and Anne very kindly sharpened my blunt tools for me. I really enjoyed it but still didn’t get back to engraving.

Then in 2018 I received an enticing email from Fiona Rosher, Museum Manager of the Dales Countryside Museum (DCM). The museum was celebrating the 50 year anniversary of Marie Hartley and Joan Ingleby’s book Life and Tradition in the Yorkshire Dales and she said they had an archive of wood engraving blocks created by Marie Hartley and that she wondered if I’d be interested in printing them for the museum for use in exhibitions. I was surprised that she asked me as my specialty is intaglio printmaking but I was intrigued. You can read the full story HERE. It resulted in a much bigger, funded project called Ink Inspiration and I fell in love with Marie’s gorgeous blocks, the majority still as perfect as the day she cut them around ninety years ago. I vowed that in the future I would create some wood engravings of my own.

One of Marie’s blocks, a print and the engraving published in the book

In 2023 Fiona invited me back to exhibit my eight-year ongoing project ‘Within these Walls‘ which was a celebration of hay meadows and included a large installation piece that had been previously created for a barn in Grassington for the Grassington Festival. Wanting to create a new element of work for the show, I thought I’d make 12 prints documenting a calendar year in my neighbour’s meadows showing their traditional methods for managing them and the rhythms of sheep farming. I intended to create wood engravings but, with only six months to create the prints, I got cold feet and instead made twelve highly detailed 5″x7″ linocuts. I tried to make them have a feel of wood engravings and although that is impossible, I am quite surprised by the detail I did manage to get. You can read a post about them HERE

Roll on another three years and here I am, making work for my third (and joint) exhibition at the DCM, Cherish. This is third time lucky and I have proposed a series of collagraphs celebrating priority species birds in the Yorkshire Dales National Park and the habitats that support them. I have also promised a suite of wood engravings! With that in mind, I went on a wonderful 2-day workshop with Angie Lewin at Edinburgh Printmakers last June and managed to finish an engraving of a Lapwing. For my first proper attempt at a ‘picture’, I was fairly pleased but the main thing was that I came away full of enthusiasm and with a nice square piece of lemonwood to work on.

In April this year I took my tools and some blocks to Ålgården (a studio in Sweden where I am a member) and I chose one of my twenty year old practise blocks for my first engraving. I prepared it by colouring it with black drawing ink and then, completely against my usual way of working, I drew a Golden Plover feather from life straight onto the block and carved it. It was such a delicate and slow process and I loved it.

Spurred on by this success, I decided to plan a ‘proper print’ and designed a square image of a Lapwing and her chick for my lovely piece of lemonwood. The whole process from design to cutting, taking trial proofs and making adjustments until I had a print that I was satisfied with took about two days. I really enjoy the whole process. It suits my love of fine detail, forces me to slow right down and I get completely absorbed in the engraving.

I’ve since completed another engraving and am about to embark on a further one. I’ll be back with the next instalment of this venture to talk about Skylarks and two very different prints.

Currently Listening to: Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native audiobook

Currently Reading: Jenny Uglow’s Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick and repeatedly referring to Anne Desmet’s Wood Engraving: A Personal Approach

Currently admiring: Clare Leighton’s wood engravings and her ability to capture the natural world, country life and the working lives of rural people.

A Year in a Meadow in Linocuts

Posted on November 15, 2022 by hestercoxprintmaker

I’ve been beavering away on my meadow project and it’s time for a bit of an update. When I undertook my project with the Dales Countryside Museum back in 2019, I had always intended to create a series of linocuts as a homage to Marie Hartley’s gorgeous wood engravings but, as is often the case, I ran out of time and ended up sticking to collagraph. With this new opportunity to show my project at the museum I’ve been given another chance to achieve this goal. I decided that I will create 12 black and white linocuts that will illustrate life in a meadow over a calendar year. I have been taking note of everything that happens in our local meadows for the last eight years and have a wealth of photos, drawings and ideas. My neighbour that farms these meadows follows the traditional methods which means that she intermittantly grazes the meadows with a flock of ewes from September keeping the grass low enough to allow meadow plant seeds to germinate. In late October/November she introduces a tup to the ewes and he swaggers about the fields looking macho in his harness (it’s usually a texel and a friend rightly likened him to a nightclub bouncer). Then the ewes are back in with their lambs from early March through to the end of April. The fields receive a bit of farm ‘muck’ for fertilising at some point and then from May through to August, the meadows are empty of livestock and it is fantastic to see the speed at which the plants grow and the different species that are dominant at different times. The hay gets cut around mid-July and this year we were fortunate to witness the successful fledging of four curlew chicks.

Marie Hartley’s wood engravings show some of the stages in the haymaking methods of the 1930s & 40s and my aim is to show contemporary methods with my images. I’m not an adept wood engraver (maybe one day!) but I am pretty competent at linocut, having done it on and off since I left college, and the look of it and way of working share some similarities with wood engraving. They are both relief print methods and so you are printing the raised surface of the block. The image is created by the removal of that surface with sharp tools. In effect, you are creating white areas that don’t print plus the block is a mirror image of the final print so it does require a bit of brain power to design in that way. I sometimes think that printmakers have very specific kind of brains in order not to feel befuddled all of the time!

In the above images, you can see the linoleum (made from a mix of linseed oil, cork dust, resin and gum pressed onto a jute backing). It is normally grey but I’ve stained the surface with printing ink so that it is easier to see the cuts that I’ve made. I also use a white gel pen to draw on some more complicated areas so that I don’t make mistakes when cutting. You can’t easily put back what you’ve cut away so it is important to keep track of what you’re doing.

I’ve taken some time to look at the work of other artists known for wood engraving and linocut and the research has been really enjoyable. Having printed all of Marie Hartley’s blocks, I’m very familiar with her work but I also looked at the engravings of artists such as Charles Tunnicliffe, Clare Leighton, Howard Phipps & Clifford Webb. It is interesting to see how they handle different skies, how much detail they choose to put in and what kind of stylisation they employ. I’ve chosen to keep mine quite illustrational and very much about a specific place so you’ll see Penyghent cropping up in a few. Here’s the first proofs for May & June, I may ‘tweak’ them a bit before I edition them next year:

The photos are of proof prints in my sketch book so I apologise for the quality of the images!

I’m also making a series of smaller square linocuts that will depict some of the diverse wildlife species that rely on the meadows, and the plants/trees growing on the fringes, for their food and shelter. There is a delicate balance at work with certain insects only eating specific plants and then birds and animals relying on feeding from the seeds of certain plants or eating the insects of the meadows and further up the chain you have birds such as barn owls looking for the shrews and voles that live in and on the edges of the meadows and birds such as curlews relying on sheltered places to nest and raise their chicks. I hope that this print series will help to communicate the ecological importance of these traditional meadows.

Sketchbooks and Wood Blocks

Posted on May 21, 2019 by hestercoxprintmaker

At the time that I’m writing this, I’ve just printed the last of the Dales Countryside Museum’s collection of wood engraving blocks created by Marie Hartley MBE. I’ve completed ten public sessions at the museum and met some very interesting people connected by a shared love of the legacy created by Marie, Ella and Joan. Artists, farmers, writers, photographers, people that knew her and people that didn’t (but wish they had). Many had stories to share, brought their own prints by Marie to show me and were pleased to have the opportunity to see her exquisite wood engravings close up. I’m now entering the next phase of the project and I will be continuing my research on her life and work by reading her notebooks and looking at her sketchbooks. I’ve read the three ‘Dales books’: Swaledale, Wensleydale and Wharfedale and have also read her beautiful memoire to Ella Pontefract, ‘Yorkshire Heritage’. Other works that I’m finding particularly useful are ‘Forms and Colours’ (about her artwork); ‘A Favoured Land’ (an appreciation of all of the books with essays); Yorkshire Cottage & The Yorkshire Dales. I’ve also started exploring certain areas which I intend to make my own work about.

I love this image from Marie’s Swaledale sketchbook. It features a sketch of Crackpot Hall before it became a deserted ruin and the resulting wood engraving. Those combined with the notes, boot and ghostly birds are the distilled essence of the project for me.

I have a full calendar year in which to create my new prints and I intend to make use of that by visiting specific places regularly throughout the year, observing the changes in the landscape and the different flora and fauna. Narrowing down my subject has been extremely difficult and I’m hoping that my research will help with that. I have started by deciding to concentrate on places written about in the three Dales books as these are illustrated by the wood engravings. I’ve then used my research so far to work out places that Marie and Ella repeatedly visited or had a particular love for and I would like to include some locations from each book. As a fellrunner, I am particularly keen for each place to centre around at least one prominent fell. I’m currently visiting:

In Swaledale: Kisdon with the surrounding areas of Muker, Keld, Angram, Thwaite and most probably heading up into Birkdale which was a firm favourite for Marie and Ella. There are some fascinating manmade structures within this area that tell the story of its past mining and farming practises and combined with the rich ecological habitats, it really is a gem of a place that I’ve totally fallen in love with.

Overlooking Crackpot Hall towards Muker with Kisdon on the right (Oct’18)

In Wensleydale: Addlebrough from Semerwater with Raydale, Cragdale and Bardale and the moors above Stalling Busk. As the second largest natural lake in North Yorkshire (the first being Malham Tarn) being concealed from the main road it is almost a hidden wonder. It is also the source of the river Bain which, at only 2 miles long, is the UK’s shortest river.

Overlooking the old ruined 18th Century church at Stalling Busk towards Semerwater.

In Wharfedale: Penyghent from Littondale including Foxup. I am delighted that it is included in ‘Wharfedale’ because I have always loved Littondale and Penyghent is my favourite hill which I have explored extensively in all weathers and at all times of day (and night). I can see it from my studio!

Penyghent viewed on the ascent of Fountains Fell (Nov’18)

I’m also exploring Wether Fell, Dodd Fell & Snaizeholme and I will be settling on more locations as I do more research.

I’m looking for places that have their own special character making them distinctly different from other areas. The fells within each area often rise as singular hills which are easily recognisable from all directions. I also want to look at areas that are noted for their special scientific interest in terms of their flora and fauna. It seems apparent to me that the Yorkshire Dales has changed dramatically since the time that Ella and Marie wrote the books. They captured and recorded a way of life that was on the cusp of changing forever being affected by the technological advances in agriculture, the increased use of cars and tourism. However, what hasn’t changed is the geography of the area and combined with natural processes and human influences, the Yorkshire Dales National Park is home to some of the most diverse wildlife habitats in the UK. I want to explore those and to see how their history is written on the landscape.

In future posts I will be writing about these places and my experiences when working in them, more about Marie and her life and the things that I discover as I continue my research.

Printing Marie’s Wood Engravings

Posted on April 10, 2019 by hestercoxprintmaker

I’ll be writing a bit more about Marie Hartley MBE, her life and work in a future post but in the meantime, I’ve been busily making prints from her exquisite wood engraving blocks to create an archive for the Dales Countryside Museum. For those that are not familiar with wood engraving, it is a form of relief printing in the same family as linocut and woodcut. The principle is pretty simple, parts of the surface of the block are removed with special tools and what is left behind (the raised or relief surface) has ink applied to it and that ink is transferred to paper using pressure which can be from a press or from a hand tool such as a wooden spoon or print baren. Wood engraving differs from wood cut in that the endgrain of slow growing wood is used instead of the longitudinal plank of the wood. The wood is highly polished to create a very smooth surface and fine metal tools, with wonderful names such as ‘spitsticker’, ‘scorper’ & ‘tint tool’, are used to scrape away tiny amounts of the wood surface to create the design. The surface area that is scraped/cut away won’t print and will form the white parts of the design. The design also prints as a mirror-image so it is important to reverse sketches on the block first to avoid a ‘back-to-front’ print. Wood engravers often use a leather sand bag for resting the wood on as this enables them to tilt and turn the block whilst cutting. I think Marie Hartley must have used a magnifier for at least some of her designs as one block that I printed had the word ‘Ingleton’ written in reverse on a finger post and the letters could not have been more than 2mm high!! She created the wood engravings for the three Dales books in the 1930s when she herself would have been in her late twenties and early thirties. I don’t know what her eyesight was like but mine certainly wouldn’t be good enough to do that kind of work without help from a magnifier!

The best wood for this kind of printmaking is generally regarded to be Box wood, Buxus Sempervirens, but there are other woods in frequent use such as cherry, apple, holly & Lemonwood (which is not actually from the lemon tree but gets its name from the citrus smell that emanates from it when it is first cut). Larger blocks are often created by bonding smaller pieces of wood together. Care should be taken of the blocks so that they don’t get damp or too hot as this can warp them and bonded blocks can part company with each other. I’ve printed a few of Marie’s blocks which have acquired damage over the years and a few need a bit of restoration in order to get a flawless print but the Dales Countryside Museum have done a good job of storing them on their sides and keeping them in good condition. To think that some of them are almost 90 years old and yet still producing perfect prints is amazing. Each of Marie’s blocks has been given an accession number and has been catalogued to include any extra information such as if/where/when it was published.

I had always believed that the wooden blocks were used for printing the books and would have been clamped in with the letterpress type but on reading ‘Yorkshire Heritage’ (Marie’s memoir to Ella Pontefract) she talks about ‘electros’ being made of the blocks for printing purposes. Electrotyping is a process invented in the mid-1800s and there is a good description of it here. This process was developed to protect the master blocks as publishers would require literally thousands of prints to be made and the wood was vulnerable to damage. A metal printing block is made from a mould of the original wood engraving and it has all of the fine detail and is a perfect replica of the artist’s work. In this way, the original blocks could be retained as ‘masters’ and protected for future use.

To print the blocks, I have been using a lightweight and very smooth paper called Zerkall Extra Smooth which I have bought from John Purcell Paper. I tested lots of papers before selecting this one. There are so many different papers suitable for hand printing, including some beautiful lightweight Japanese ones, but I was looking for something that would be relatively robust for use in the museum and that would give the crispest details in case the museum decide to reproduce the prints at any stage. I am printing all of the blocks by hand and not on a press. This allows me to do the printing in the museum so that people can watch the process and it also allows me more flexibility because I can alter the pressure across the block to compensate for any small dents that have occurred over the years. I use a carbon black letterpress ink from Lawrence Art Supplies. It is a linseed-oil based ink and I am cleaning with a soft rag and Zest-It so that the blocks are ink-free after use but there are also no harmful fumes in the museum. You could use vegetable oil but it can leave a sticky residue. White spirit is awful stuff!

To apply pressure I am using two beautiful tools. The first is a burnisher made by Chris Daunt, a supplier of materials for wood engraving and a wood engraver himself, it is made from yew and has a piece of horn on the end. It is perfect for the tiny blocks. The second is a baren made by my step-dad who is a wood turner. I was bemoaning the fact that despite all the barens available, I find a wooden spoon to be the best tool for printing linocuts and he said he’d have a go at making me a wooden baren. Not only is it a beautiful object in its own right but it sits perfectly in the palm of your hand and is comfortable to use. Mine is made from laburnum wood which came from my sister’s garden. The prints have been perfect. He is now selling them via his etsy shop! Here are a couple photos of him making a baren for a customer.

Using the burnisher and baren, I carefully rub over the back of the paper in a circular motion taking care to cover the entire block. It is a bit of an art in itself and takes lots of practise to get just the right amount of ink and even pressure so that all of the detail prints perfectly. I’m using a cutting board as a registration board so that I can position the blocks centrally on the paper. They all vary in size and this way I can avoid making lots and lots of registration papers. I just count the squares, simple! I also use some uncut blocks placed around the inked block and these help when I lower the paper onto the wood engraving. They prevent the paper flopping about and the image smudging. It has been a steep learning curve but I now have a good rhythm going and not many ‘rejects’. I’ve also learned the hard way that I need to write the accession number of the block on the back of the paper before printing so that when I come to file the prints the following week, I know which blocks they come from! It is amazing how a small pack horse bridge can look very similar to ten other bridges when you are trying to identify it. Fortunately I also have all of Marie’s books so I can cross-reference them too!

So that is the process and I have four more public printing sessions to do. They are from 12-4pm on Sunday 14th April, Tuesdays 23rd & 30th April and, finally, Tuesday 7th May. Museum admission charges apply but you can come and see me print as part of that. The museum is a gem and well worth the entry fee. If I don’t get all of the blocks printed in the remaining sessions, I may well add an extra date and I’ll be sure to publicise it if I do.

In the Footsteps of Marie Hartley MBE

Posted on March 27, 2019 by hestercoxprintmaker

Back at the beginning of 2018 I was contacted by Fiona Rosher, Museum Manager at the Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes. The Museum was celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the book ‘Life and Tradition in the Yorkshire Dales’ which was written and illustrated by Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby who founded the Museum. Within their archives was a collection of 130 wood engraving blocks created by Marie Hartley MBE and Fiona wanted to know if I would be interested in printing them so that they could have a set of prints for use within the museum. This sounded intriguing and what followed was a series of meetings with Fiona where we discussed the possibilities of the project. It soon expanded and developed into one that would culminate in an exhibition of my own work in the summer of 2020. We agreed that I would begin the project by printing the blocks in the museum so that visitors could watch and I could talk to them about their memories of Marie, their experience of the Yorkshire Dales and about printmaking. I would then carry out research about Marie Hartley which would take the form of reading all of her books written in collaboration with Ella Pontefract and Joan Ingleby and I would be given access to the archive of sketchbooks, notebooks and diaries that the museum owned. This would help to form a picture of the woman herself and help me to find an angle for my own work. I would then go out ‘into the field’ to draw, print and develop ideas for a series of brand new works. In other words, a dream of a job!

Anyone that knows me will know that I work very hard to make a full-time living as an artist and I am often so embroiled in various exhibitions, shows, teaching workshops, running art groups and the accompanying admin that’s involved in doing those things that I often feel that there is very little time and headspace for making new work. It is one of the reasons that I disappear off to Ålgården Studios for a few weeks every year so that I can have uninterrupted time to develop my printmaking. With that in mind, we realised that I’d need some funding to allow me to take a bit of a step back from other commitments for a while and really make the most of this opportunity. Fiona was brilliant in campaigning for the project and we are so fortunate that the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority and the Friends of the Dales Countryside Museum have provided the necessary support needed. In return, I am printing the blocks within the museum to allow the public to see the process, will be giving a talk to the FoDCM and will be running a number of printmaking workshops at the museum in 2020. I’m also updating the archive records for the wood engravings as I progress through the printing, making notes of any damage and any links to preparatory drawings that I discover in Marie’s sketchbooks.

Most of the wood engravings that have been published were created for three books that Marie wrote with Ella Pontefract: Wensleydale, Swaledale & Wharfedale. I’ve decided that I will concentrate my own research on those areas of the Yorkshire Dales. I’m a keen fellrunner and my plan is to run some of the routes described in these books, get to know the places and then I will identify particular points of interest that I would like to return to for sketching and printing. I’ve got a tentative plan to take my campervan on some of my excursions and set up my portable press so I can actually print directly in the landscape. I like to feel that it would be in keeping with Marie and Ella’s explorations of Wensleydale carried out in their little caravan that they christened ‘The Green Plover’ (see a sketch of Marie’s now held at the Leeds University Art Collections by clicking here)

I shall be writing regularly about the project and sharing snippets of research, images printed, anecdotes from the people that I meet and anything else that I find interesting. In the mean time, if you would like to see me printing some of the wood engravings, I will be at the Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes from 12-4pm on consecutive Tuesdays up to and including the 7th May 2019 (excluding Tuesday 16th April when I’ll be there on the previous Sunday 14th April, 12-4pm). Do come and see how exquisite Marie’s work is and I’d love to hear anecdotes from those that knew her and stories from your experiences of the Yorkshire Dales (please note, museum admission charges apply).

Hester Cox: Printmaker

Thoughts from Hester's printmaking studio and beyond.

Tag Archives: Wood Engraving