Bruce’s piece questioned acceptable uses of the countryside and asked participants to consider how it is both used and managed for the future. If the land is no longer the source of food, what is it for? By encouraging people to engage in an apparently ‘leisure’ activity – bouncing round a preset track on a space hopper – he humorously raised awareness of how we physically engage with ‘landscapes’. He also raised consideration of how people take travel for granted in the West. If we had to put as much effort as bouncing on a space hopper requires into our daily journeys, we might be more circumspect about our expectation to travel considerable distances on a daily basis.
Filed under: Happidrome 4, Sara Bowler | Tags: croft noweth, folk tale, piskies
Abandoned briar at Croft Noweth
Tale of the Croft Noweth piskies, Anon.
Location map showing paths to Croft Noweth on Goonhilly Downs
peeping piskies
dancing group
piskey look out
elderly piskey
watcher
family returning from piskey hunting
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.
