I am drawn again to the site. An involuntary drive makes me want to look around? So I park my car in the place I always used to and walked in.
There is a JCB working close by. I walk on and notice new orange fencing up using what I call pig sticks (curly pigs tails on the tops of the metal stakes) and more excavations started. The Brook of Plenty is dried up, completely dry, I have never seen that before. I walk across and onto the tunnel of graffiti, I feel alienated as the work by writers I was familiar with has all gone, and the new stuff that’s up is not reaching me, I can’t read it and it’s the same as you might see anywhere!
A feeling of what I knew disappearing with change, and new uncertainty washes over me as ‘My Country Park’ – ‘My Mental Exercise Yard’ – My Late Companions Favourite Place’ – ‘My Retreat From Urban Bustle’ kind of melting before me, as development and progress march on. This was an oasis, a place with no time, a secret place of recuperation, a place of interesting things, I wish I looked harder while it was quiet and a sense of regret seeps in…..but
I see a butterfly I don’t recognise and remember seeing on Twitter there being a national butterfly count happening, asking for day-dreamers like me to count butterflies and send the tallies off to their central HQ. So I counted what I saw, and sent the data off when I got back.
I walked back in and walked past the original excavations the two ponds, they still had water in the bottom. I passed a tractor with a guy doing nothing in. It was lunch time. I think his job was grass cutting. I saw a Green Woodpecker and also noticed all the trenches that had been previously dug were filled in! I paced out the scars on the ground they were about 32 yards long. The same as when I measured the trenches. There were dozens and dozens of them all filled in. In fact that is what the JCB was doing, filling in new ones!
There were 29 butterflies of 6 different species. I had to look up on the internet and found out they were called Speckled Woods. I saw 12 browny orange ones called Gate Keepers. I liked those they felt right for this place.
For a while I have seen signs on the main road saying “New Sports Hub” at the entrance to this former golf course. I have often thought I must go in there and see what’s been going on. I never do this as I have no reason to go in there now. But yesterday I went in to have a look and see if the there any developments.
It probably been about 3-4 months since I was in there and a large area fenced off with lots of trenches dug all of them seemed to be the same length about 32 yards long, with all the soil piled up at ther side of them creating a strange landscape. I was unable to understand what they might be. So I looked on the internet for clues. I found the some old stuff about housing developments, sports communities, flooding mitigation and a lot about landscape and ecology. I found something I had not seen before
‘the proposed development includes provision of extensive semi-natural greenspace in addition to a network of wetland habitat including an enhanced watercourse corridor and a number of new ponds. A number of further enhancements will be incorporated into the built development, including nest boxes for birds, roosting units for bats, clear span bridges for Water Vole and ‘hop-over’ features’.
So our new development will have healthy people using the sports ‘Super Hub’ and they will be surrounded by wildlife and modern living has reached new levels. I was appointed onto a very similar project to this and got very excited about it. But my plans were never implemented and the artworks I created never installed, though I’m led to believe now 4 years later installation could still happen!
So I watch this now unfold with a sad feeling in my soul as I tried to champion all these good things, believing I was creating something worthwile , but somehow I was kicked into the long grass.
So what can I get from this….I don’t know but I feel I should continue to walk around occasionally and have a look at the building works.
The sheep have been gone a few weeks now, so it thought it time to have a walk over there and see if anything had been going on.
First of all, I walked over the part I call the meadow, this is a small section that has wire fences preventing the sheep from grazing there. It has had no land management of any kind for about 18 months and there were two greens in this section. Both these greens have animals living under them now. I found their tunnels, Cosmo put his head right inside and investigated. I don’t know if these holes were big enough for foxes? But I have seen one or two over there.
The second encounter was the most shocking and extremely sad. If you scroll back through this blog you will notice the maps I draw, and on some of those maps I have marked a Horse, living alone in the corner. Well we went to see that horse, see if he wanted any grass or a pat on the cheek? We found him standing in a muddy coat on a concrete pad with steel box section marking out the floor plan of what had been his stable. Three rooms marked out and the horse standing in one of them as if the room was still there. Probably the one away from the door and most cozy. The remains of the stable pushed up against the nearby fence. It had been burnt down and only a pile of charred wood and black burnt posts and beams stacked up in a pile. All that was left was a metal framework marking the layout on the ground. A horse with no home, he did not even walk over to us. I do not know how long ago this happened, but so sad to think of him standing where there used to be shelter in the howling wind and pouring rain, wearing a filthy muddy coat.
The third encounter, real evidence of some kind of building development. Some kind of large plant machinery had driven across the golf course leaving deep furrows in the grass to this particular site? Then taken off the top layer of grass and excavated a large oval shaped patch divided into two halves. These two shallow depressions had filled with water forming two ponds. The other thing was this oval had perimeter outline marked by low fence about 18 inches two foot high, made from black polythene sheeting stapled to regular spaced wooden posts. I would say probably over half this plastic barrier had failed and the sheeting torn away from the posts. I did not stand in the ponds to see how deep they were, but I suspected it would go well over the top of my wellies.
So it has happened again! There are hundreds of sheep grazing on the golf course. This is great for sheep and reducing the local councils maintenance bills, but sadly not so good for dog walking. But they were only on there a few months last time and they had gone before Xmas, so it will be interesting to see if they are taken off by next year.
Instead of walking over there I have decided to design a series of flags. These flags are alternatives to the ones that would have marked the holes on the greens. I have slightly over 18 posts on this blog now, so I have taken each blog post and sketched out a design for a flag for each blog post. This then builds a visual set of 18 flags spanning the history of the site while it is dormant, a period of about 2 years.
I dont know if I will ever actually make the flags and stick them in the ground at the points that are relevant to their content. But a series of designs is a start. I thought they were quite heraldric and if ever I redesigned them I go down that route. They are a visualised version of this blog in a kind of secret language!
But for now this blog will go quiet again untill the sheep go, as I took a photo of the sheep it occured to me that it is cooler now and Autumn is here. Autumn that’s a good topic for another blog.
I walked over the golf course this afternoon and remembered the grass had been cut.
Recently I had walked here and it was waist high and acually difficult to wade through, I had kind of liked it, and could only just locate my dog who was drowned in it, though he didnt mind. It was wild with acres and acres of wild meadow with white flowers as tall as me. Felt primeval, pre historic, I was a first nation hunter gatherer. I lay down in the grass, dog, sun, trees and wild flowers and grasses it was so simple. Was this what art should be about? Then I was a soldier who was seperated from his unit, behind enemy lines and lost in a foriegn land.
Then I remembered that at the start of this blog I was hoping for exactly this scenario with meadow land making putting greens, fairways and rough indistinghable.
I was going to design a series of 18 flags and place them on where I thought the greens had been. The flags were going to celebrate the new wilderness, champion the flowers and the return of the birds and wildlife…..never did it and now the grass has been cut and the whole thing gone off the boil and I never designed the flags. Never did it,
Have I forgotton how to be an artist.
I wondered why I could not motivate my self to do this, grown lazy fed up with making art little designs on little bits of paper,
just pointless why what for I was not getting paid to do it lost all motivation I believe that I may have to discover myself all over again.
The world of art for money has so many limitations,
so compromised,
so unspontainious.
I have lost it I need to find new ways of working.
FIRE has been the highlight of this and the previous visit to the golf course. School kids set fire to the cut grass which lay over the entire area. I saw the smoke, saw people running away, then soon heard the sirens. I was walking several hundred yards away, a land rover 4×4 came driving across the grass. It even made a slight deflection in its couse towards the fire to come over to me! A tattoed elbow poked out of the drivers window and some guy with a fireman passenger said ‘the path is over there’ pointing. Then drove off. I didnt say anything. Then again today a fire around two tree stumps. Very nearly out with just a little smoke seemingly coming out of the ground. I stamped and trod kicked and scuffled it to try and put it out! I actually made it worse and it started smoking more. So I thought it best to walk away and not aggrivate it, it was so nearly out…best left.
