The Flavour Exchange Mystery Tour

Photo by Andrew Rushton

We gathered at Birmingham Moor Street Station to begin our walk in a mystery destination.
Still Walking had arranged a lovely souvenir ticket with a pot to collect things in on the journey, which worked really well with our ideas for interventions along the route.

A diverse group of walkers, different ages and backgrounds, we set off on the train, having discussed the idea of visiting all the senses on our walk.

Immediately, on arrival at our destination at Earlswood, we became aware of the different sounds in this place from the centre of Birmingham, only a 20 minute train ride away.

Photo by Andrew Rushton

We set off along the road but soon jumped over a stile to walk through a beautiful tree lined path and into a field of chest high rapeseed.

Through the gap and into the woods

a sense of squeezing through 

then an invitation to relax and breathe

Stumbling out of the field we entered the woodland of Clowes Wood. Again the sounds changed. Here we stopped for a while and listened, with our blindfolds on, without speaking for three minutes. Each person gave a word from their experience.

 

Time to Listen

Hum hum

Civilization

Chatter behind

Countryside

M42

Foraging

Pleasant drift 

Hand stitched dry oak leaf offering bowl

A little further on, as we became aware of the softness of the ground beneath our feet, we came across a beautiful oak tree that had grown to form a bowl in the middle of its trunks. We enjoyed the embrace of it, and began to place things in the hollows of its trunk roots.

People have always had a deep connection to forests, woodlands, trees; for the food, shelter and materials they provide, the symbolic and imaginative potential they hold, the habitats they provide for fungi, moss, lichen, other creatures and insects. During our scoping walk we decided it would be appropriate to make an offering / libation vessel to offer to the coppiced oak.

After the Listen Intervention we gathered by the tree and participants were asked to decide how they would like to use the bowl and what they would like to place in it. We brought a foraged oak sapling, water, birdseed, a plinth / stand. Eventually the group decided to fill the bowl with bird seed and that Richard should keep the sapling to plant in a spot of his choosing to replace the one he'd lost in his own garden.

Photo by Andrew Rushton

Wandering on through the woods, we came into a wider clearer space with tall slender beech trees. The wonderful dens that had been here when Carole, Jo and Ben had visited previously had collapsed, leaving a bundle of large sticks on the ground. And so we set about recreating something from the logs, allowing their shapes to lead us.

Photo by Andrew Rushton

A quiet enclosure, and other place to Listen

We found an empty concrete pillar that looked like it had once housed a plaque. Looking up, we could see the plaque high up on the tree above the pillar! So high it was hard to read - we speculated: had it been placed up there high, or nailed to the tree further down which had then grown and lifted it?

Further along our route through the woods, we discovered another empty post. This time we were prepared and fixed a new wooden plaque to the post. We decided on the words we wanted on the sign, and printed them using the blocks Carole had in her bag.

PEACE SPOT

LISTEN

FROM PEACEFUL ACORNS GROW PEACEFUL TREES

We finally reached the other side of the woods, opening out into the Lakes. We followed the path around the lakes, looking out for the kingfisher that had been spotted on a previous visit. Small markers intrigued us, mounted on posts and remnants from old lock systems.

Where the two lakes are split by a pathway through the middle of the water, we stopped for our final intervention: the Flavour Exchange. We all set out on a picnic blanket the home made and foraged foods that we had brought with us to share - what an excellent spread!

Well satisfied from the mutual generosity of everybody's flavour gifts, we then wrote luggage labels about our day, and tied them to a rusted fence that looked like it needed our attention! We left them hanging there as an intrigue for other visitors, and made our way to The Lakes station, where we were just in time to view each other's collection jars on the platform and then catch the train back to Birmingham.

Labels and thoughts

The beautiful tickets created by Pei, Wanting, Fotis and Bink, MA students at BCU on the VisCom course. The tickets joined together to create the title of our walk on the reverse.

The Ticket jars filled with all the items we collected

 
On the train we asked a passenger to draw the winner of our Outdoor Art Kit - our winner was Anna, who couldn't quite believe she had won!  We hope she enjoys the kit.

Our winners!

Thanks to everybody for their generosity in sharing flavours and sensory experiences. And huge thanks to Ben and the Still Walking team for allowing our walk to happen.

If you would like to see more of the Interventions and images from the walk follow this link

We're on our way...

Thank you to East Midlands Trains who have just rung me to confirm that they are happy with our proposals, so we are all set to do our first exchange activity on the Derbyshire trains.

Watch out for us in the week of 22nd August when we will be travelling between Cromford and Ambergate and Whitwell and Shirebrook stations.

New commissions and a little Coalville history

Carole and I have both got ourselves new commissions!

I will be working on my Myth Maps project at Snibston Colliery in Coalville.  Carole will be working on a project for Leicestershire Museums, which she has called The Held in the Hand Hoard.  I'll let her tell you more about that herself.

I am particularly pleased with my Myth Maps project as it draws together a number of things I have been thinking about, things I have been blogging about here and it links with this project.

Leicester & Swannington rail ticket

A little history...

The colliery at Coalville, as I blogged before (see Preservation and Persistence), includes the wonderful historic railway track.  A line was put down by George and Robert Stephenson for the Leicester to Swannington Railway (L&S), one of the first of England's railways, opened in 1832 to bring coal from pits in west Leicestershire (Whitwick, Ibstock and Bagworth) to Leicester.

The Leicester & Swannington Rail Line

Whitwick Colliery, 1926

George Stephenson was known as the "father of railways", having built the first public railway using steam locomotion (the Stockton and Darlington Railway).  His son, Robert,  worked with his father and developed the famous "Rocket".  Robert was the engineer for the Swannington line and George opened the Snibston colliery the following year.

Midland Railway Station in Coalville, 1889

Sidings at Bardon Hill quarry

So the history of Snibston colliery and the railways are intertwined.  It was the success of the railways to speed up the transportation of coal that enabled the coal industry from west Leicestershire to thrive, which enabled the opening of the pit at Snibston.

Coalville East Station

Thanks to the Coalville Heritage Society website for these pictures.  Also, they have a wonderful sound archive of Coalville dialects, called Covill Tork - click on the link if you want to find out what the following mean (and make sure you have your speakers on!):

Woreeawreet?
Ayoopmissusenthemassteeratom?

Covill Tork 

romanticism

One travels to escape from it all, but that is the great illusion: It cannot be done, since one travels with one's mind.

 Ella Maillart (travel writer, 1903-1997)

The romanticism of travel still persists.  Yesterday I saw a 7 year old boy at the station platform waiting for the train with his family.  Mum looks tired, carrying all the bags - they are on a trip to Skegness, they had to get up early to get things ready.  The boy, however, is full of beans, he's beside himself with excitement and announces to the platform crowd "We're going on a train! choo choo!"  followed by the dance:  he strides up and down the platform, rotating arms bent at the elbow, "chuff chuff, woo woo!"

Where, I wonder, has he got this image from?  Has this young boy ever actually seen a steam engine that goes "chuff chuff woo woo"?  Certainly no trains at this platform will be making that sound.  Somehow the excitement of the romantic image of the train lives on in this child - he does not talk about the excitement of the seaside, it is the journey itself that has him enthused.

Alas, not so for the rest of us this morning, commuting to our various places of work.  How different the weekend train passengers are from the Monday morning.  The train is equally noisy, but nobody here expects the journey to be exciting, or even fun - most people have brought some form of distraction for themselves:  headphones, books, mobiles for texting, spreadsheets to pore over, dark sunglasses to sleep under.  No child's voice trilling over the conversations of colleagues, no sense of anticipation, just a sleepy, weary monotony of the same old journey...

I once made a piece called "Interruptions"which mused on travel... how travel is a series of interruptions, a story to tell and the "interruptions are what make a journey worth relating."  The daily commute has no sense of story, there will be no interruptions... it is the efficiency of the train that takes away the anticipation, the unexpected, the romanticism...

It is the unknown that excites us, the sense of exploration, the romanticism of the train only lasts for those for whom it is a novelty, who don't know what to expect, who knows what could happen... like a 7 year old boy.

Travelling slowly

I think a lot about travelling slowly.

I have a project, Paths of Desire, which has been running since 2004, off and on.  Paths of Desire is about walking.  About the Dérive, wandering, exploring, choosing where you want to go instinctively rather than following set routes.  We try to explore the unexplored, to wander across dug up land and find the edges not yet touched by town planners.

Walking is about travelling slowly.  When we take our walks we spend more time noticing, appreciating the small things.

Just the other day I heard artist Grayson Perry interviewing a neurologist who said that when we are being creative the brain's neurons make its connections more slowly.  Like Grayson I love the idea that creativity is about being slow.... it happens when your brain is relaxed.

Travelling by train suggests an oxymoron to me.  The train moves incredibly fast, and therefore I as a passenger am moving incredibly fast too, but as I stare out of the window at the blurring world it seems that I slow down.  My mind drifts and wanders, I have more creative thoughts.  Unlike on a walk I cannot dwell too long on one thing as each image I see lasts only as long as a blink before being replaced.
Train travel jumbles up images, one blurs into another, throwing together visual connections in random fashion.  A collage.

Paths of Desire is exhibiting some of its routes around the edges of Corby on Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th July.  Pick up a map from Corby Swimming Pool and follow a walk through the woodlands to find our images.

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber

″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

A new journey

Welcome to the beginning of our new journey: Undiscovered Networks.

We have started this blog to open up our conversation as our new project develops.

Following our last project, which took place in Corby, Northamptonshire, UK, (please visit Fingerprints on the Pew to see our project book), we became interested in the new train station recently reopened. When a new rail network is re-opened, how does that connection affect a town? We started thinking about the idea of connections, networks, and undiscovered places.

We have selected 12 places that are linked to Corby on the network. 12 places we don’t know, 12 undiscovered places. Our project will find connections between these places.

Corby
Metheringham
Cleethorpes
Blythe Bridge
Peartree (Lincs)
Thetford
Dore
Haven House
Langwith-Whaley Thorns
Fiskerton
Whatstandwell
Wittlesea
March