Filed under: Happidrome 4, Sara Bowler | Tags: goonhilly, landscape, taskscape
Goonhilly Taskscape presented history, stories and folktales connected to the Downs. The area has been described as a ‘dreary waste’ but it is evident that the presence of people has fundamentally shaped what happens there and how it looks today. The topography of the area was created to scale in local soil, based on a cardboard contour model of the 1:25000 Ordnance Survey map of the Lizard. Numerous models from different historic periods were added, referencing the area’s ‘stories’, from the satellite dishes to Goonhilly ponies and the reputed Dry Tree gallows. The piece encouraged people to consider the Downs as an evolving landscape that is neither static nor 100% natural. The presence of people has shaped how the Downs look and continues to influence what happens today. For instance, in the next year or two it’s likely the satellite dishes will be removed, while larger wind turbines are currently being installed to replace 14 smaller ones that will be taken down. Curiously, the area has never been permanently settled but it has been utilised for symbolic and experimental purposes, which continues today.
Silhouetted satellite dishes
1930′s day trip to the Lizard
Hiker and wind turbines
19th Century Milkmaids and 20th Century tanker
Spitfire and airmen
Tiger Moth and airmen
Goonhilly ponies, now extinct
Mid-20th century car – Ford Cortina
WW2 anti-aircraft gun on Bronze Age barrow close to Croft Pasco forest during World War II
Satellite dishes, anti-glider defences, receiver masts, Dry Tree standing stone and Dry Tree gallows, 3,500BC-2000AD
The murder of William Hancock by John Thompson and John Barnicoat (who protested his innocence) but was still hanged at Bodmin for the crime in 1821. Both Johns were subsistence farmers at Croft Pasco and Croft Noweth respectively. The farms fell into disuse after their deaths. The piskies of Croft Noweth are a near forgotten folktale about the first farmers there.
People invent all sorts of things – but what’s real and what’s imagined? Piskey farm of Croft Noweth will take the adventurous on a stroll across the Downs to explore an abandoned farm and ponder the impact of nature on our imaginations over thousands of years. What’s fact and what’s fiction?
For Happidrome Four I’ve been working on ideas to do with the impact of human agency on Goonhilly Downs. The more I look into the history of this apparently empty landscape, the more I find. Goonhilly Taskscape plays with these ideas, challenging our understanding about what is meant by rural, natural and man made.
In the midst of the dreary waste of Gornhilly, which occupies a large portion of the Lizard promontory, is a large piece of water known as “Croft Pasco Pool,” where it said at night the form of a ghostly vessel may be seen floating with lug-sails spread. A more dreary, weird spot could hardly be selected for a witches’ meeting; and the Lizard folks were always – a fact – careful to be back before dark, preferring to suffer inconvenience, to risking a sight of the ghostly lugger. Unbelieving people attributed the origin of the tradition to a white horse seen in a dim twilight standing in the shallow water; but this was indignantly rejected by the mass of the residents.
Popular Romances of the West of England; the drolls, traditions, and superstitions of old Cornwall (1865)
Robert Hunt (1807-1887)
I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark
G.M. Hopkins (1844-89)
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent this night!
What sights you, heart saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this.
But where I say hours I mean years, mean life.
And my lament is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent to dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn.
God’s most deep decree bitter would have me taste: my taste was me.
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours.
I see the lost are like this, and their scourge to be as I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
