Melissa Davies

Immediately I understand how much this project will be about the individuals who participate as it is about the valley. My focus is forced upwards to the faces as we speak; yes we are talking about Eskdale, about land and nature BUT these words can’t be taken in isolation from the voices who speak them. 

One participant talks about the paths she walks on and the trees that they have planted, her reluctance to own a piece of the valley itself and to be distracted by the responsibility that would entail. Her husband has an artist’s eye comparing colours to velvet and again, we touch on awareness as a way of having dialogue with land. Their Eskdale is the trees, feeling rain and wind as it blows in off the Irish Sea, it’s sensory and it’s very much rooted in nature. They are connected to the land. Listening over twenty years to understand which landscapes it wants to saturate back to bog and which it yearns to shelter under native woodland.

A couple of days later and I’m listening to an endurance cyclist share her connection to the valley. It’s impossible to pluck the road collision she experienced overseas from how she experiences Eskdale. In ways her connection is with layers of her own memory. To return, on an exact replica of the bike that was destroyed. To ‘reconquer’ Hardknott Pass. It’s a place that can reassure, she remains connected to the woman before who was strong enough, unbroken and certain, to take on England’s toughest climb. The connection is with her self and her sense of self yet it weaves messily into place which is essential for its geographic features. 

Another conversation is so heavily focused on human connection, I find myself seeing Eskdale with refreshed eyes. There is, this participant says, a sense of intent in everyone who comes to the valley due to the remote, slightly inaccessible nature of the place. Those already there are proud of their place, this place, but with an openness that wants to share through recommendations, stories, invitations to join swims or walks or conversations. Our twenty minutes together is filled with people, none of whom she can name, but who have each sewn her one stitch deeper into the fabric of the valley. 

I’m already excited by incredibly beautiful phrases that slip between anecdotes and misremembering. But these initial conversations are also drawing my attention to a lack: I need to find those who have a commercial connection to the place as well as those who have a purely digital connection, aren’t able to physically visit the valley itself. 

The more connections I encounter, the more I understand I have yet to tap into. 

THAT drives Heaf forward.