Going to see bulls with Harry, and other trips we've made, has taken me to whole other parts of the country. I've been to Northumberland several times before, on holidays and for an art journey once, but I've not been inland. One of the great things about being involved in farming, especially on a temporary, travelling remit such as this (and wwoofing), is that you get to see places and parts of the country(side), that you wouldn't usually as a tourist. Understand and know it, don't just have to follow land marks, visit particular famous sites, castles and beaches and so on. Working in it, having a purpose, gives you a different perspective. It's a different way of occupying space. It feels different.

I went with Harry on a visit to a sheep farm inland, up towards Scotland: the Cheviot hills. His farm was at the end of a long and beautiful, almost desolate valley. He'd been encouraged to host visits on his farm because of rare wildlife in a hay meadow, but basically had no idea of how much else there was on his farm that would be interesting to others, children particularly. I felt such a mixture of emotion towards him: admiration and pity; sorrow and respect. About the place and his connection to it, the difficulty and the pleasure. About how far removed it was 'from the rest of the world' and about whether that mattered or not.



I went on a bit of an 'art pilgrimage' with Harry's son Peter and his friend Emily. We drove west for an hour, across the Northumberland moors and Cheviot hills, to Kielder, just south of the Scottish border. An expanse of forest and parkland surrounds a huge reservoir, and an art and architecture programme commissions permanent works. With its endless coniferous trees, Kielder has an other-worldly feel - almost Canadian - and feels like another country. I couldn't believe that I'd had no awareness of this kind of landscape in England. How could I not know...? How could I not imagine...?



We saw the James Turrell piece, Skyspace, a chamber built at the top of a hill with a circular viewing space in the roof. The light is projected onto the wall, and the circular hole 'frames' the sky, as a painting, or a screen. It's very, very simple, but quite beautiful, and exquisitely thought out, in location and design: just too high to climb up and vandalize; big enough to have an almost-sacred feel to it; small enough to be intimate and to comprehend, physically, in its entirety. What really struck me, was the way that its utterly simple shape echoes land monuments: burial chambers, but particularly the stone sheep rings which can be found on the Northumbrian moors. They are so beautiful: so simple but evocative of magic, monuments to farming activity, and reminders of the harsh weather (they are built to shelter the hill sheep in storms).



Driving back from that remote Cheviot hill farm (did you know that the word 'bereaved' comes from the 'reiving' of English and Scottish raiders, stealing sheep from across the border), we stopped to look at the landscape. I pointed to the extraordinary difference in colour between the different fields, areas: purple heather in the wild uplands; rougher yellow grassy areas; bright green lowland fields. "None of what you see is natural" said Harry, "It looks the way it does because of hundreds of years of work and investment in the land". Moving stones. Managing heather. The years.