Ramble 1 - Week 1

Residency at Junction Cambridge with Straybird (Becky Edmunds and Lucy Cash)

This post should actually be called the The Long Round Walk as that is my main memory of the week - a long round circular walk that we did full of lots of getting hopelessly lost and stops for refreshments when it all got too much. 

It all came about as we decided after spending a couple of days researching hedgerows and nature online/in books to get out and about in search of some 'good hedgerow'.  Tips from everyone we spoke to seemed to indicate that one of the first things we should do is go to Grantchester.  So that's what we did.

Becky points out the route Photo credit: Lucy Cash

It was a really hot day (of course it was) and one of the first things we seemed to do was spend a few hours circling Cambridge in search of where to start.  We came across a dragonfly, some green-blanketed water, lots of dappled light and an empty egg shell...  

Photo credit: Lucy Cash

We also found a fantastic security guard who was really nice, but didn't seem to believe we were doing a project about hedges. However it wasn't all good. Being surrounded by tennis courts and grand houses was a particularly low point, as was finding ourselves literally standing in the nook of a river (ie where it split in to two offering us no way forward).  We made it eventually though (as it really isn't that far to walk), did lots of talking and looking and definitely rambled.  

In fact, on reflection a lot of the key things we ended up focussing on in the four cine-films made at the end of Ramble 1, were encountered on The Long Round Walk.  Thoughts about August, wasps, thistle-down, boundaries and feeling like we were constantly being directed away from places or encountering private land and about how to look again at what we seeing.  

At the end of week 1 we drew together a list of all of the territories we'd covered unceremoniously titled "Hedge post-it note list".  It of course got edited in week 2 but here it is as it originally was:

Spider fluff, Photo credit: Lucy Cash

Petrification

An insect / butterfly held in the hand
Different views of England
Notes in Hedges
Of 22 ministers 6 didn't go to Oxbridge
Shelter-belt
Not knowing what anything is called.
Mr Burdon & Mr Bowen
Pen and ink illustrations
Light loss
Enclosure / Inclosure
Edge
Cine Poem
'And little kindly winds that creep, Round twilight corners, half asleep'. Rupert Brooke
Dragonflies, insects and palm sized objects.
Borders
Places we couldn't access
The rotted fence
Circles and circling in search of a route
Hedged about with doubt
Eliza Brightwen - "Educated at the shrine of nature by no end of clever teachers."
Eliza Brightwen - Name and title - "A lover of Nature, protector of everything in fur and feathers".
"Unkempt about those hedges blows, an unofficial english rose'.  Rupert Brooke
Taking time, slowing down. Pace... Rambling...
Hedge weave
Arcadia
Hedge prefix as 'lowly'.

Thistle-down fluff

Hedge-born, 

Hedge-schools, 

Hedge doctor

Eliza Brightwen: Recreations: Searching for beetles and everything that flies and hops.
Leylandii hedges: Anti-social behaviour act.
2008 "you wouldn't believe the misery hedges can cause".
Tracing history of land. 

Tithe.
Boa constrictor on the loose after being thrown into a hedge.
Hedging in writing: qualifiers, passive voice, quotation marks.
Land acts
Swing riots
History of Cambridge
Mrs Brightwen's pets and animals
"The saxon shits in his breech, the cleanly Briton in the Hedge".