Knowing When You're Beaten
Burial Mound, Arras Wold, East Yorkshire, SE945392
I’m not much of a landscape photographer. I’ve always enjoyed walking in the countryside but no photo ever seems to do justice to the experience. And in a time when even non-climbers with enough money can pay to be led to the top of Everest why wouldn’t you go for the full sensurround of a physical experience rather than a photographic replica of it? After all, the way in which you reach a place very much affects your experience of it. If you doubt that, just try cycling to the top of a local hill to appreciate the view rather than driving up there. So generally speaking, I don’t take my camera with me when I go walking. I just soak up surroundings as I go along. But a year or two ago, I decided to do a project on burial mounds in the county where I was living. This involved a lot of research in gazetteers and poring over maps but it was very interesting and gave me a reason to tramp over the countryside with a photographic goal. It didn’t turn out well though. Photographing a small hump in an otherwise featureless field was pretty challenging, especially when I was possibly trespassing and also not sure if I was imagining the hump. But it was also very moving. For every few tumuli marked on the OS map but now farmed out there was one which generation after generation of farmers had carefully steered around so that the work of our distant ancestors might remain as a memorial of otherwise forgotten generations. On one occasion while I clearly was trespassing on farmland I bumped into the farmer himself. He was pretty good about it and directed me to the inconspicuous copse intriguingly marked on the OS map as “Danes’ Graves” which I was looking for. He told me that no one knew who owned the land and no one coppiced or maintained it but he gave me directions to the exact spot where lay the graves. When I got there I found small mound after small mound hidden away here in this corner of forgotten woodland lost in quiet English wolds. Sunlight filtered through wind-rustled trees and bird song occasionally laced the silence. I sat down and felt myself shaking. I knew before I even started that no photograph could do justice to this beautiful place. Mine certainly didn’t anyway. Several months later I managed to take the one above on a different, open field site. I thought that it brought out the slight, often almost hidden, line of the barrow against the characteristic spaciousness of the region. Honour was satisfied, I decided, and at that point brought the project to a close.