My first trip into the Cheviots. There were stunning views as it was a lovely clear day, and the expansiveness and openness was breathtaking - as a town and city dweller, it's not something I'm used to seeing. In this kind of environment, the experience of being in place is one that I don't know how I'd try to portray. My photographs don't do it justice - most of them I deleted - and unlike on the previous two walks, where seeds of ideas for working in place were beginning to sow themselves, I felt no particular inspiration for creative work here. Maybe this is because it's so new to me. Maybe it's because the long stretches of relatively featureless landscape don't afford much to work with. Whilst it is a fantastic experience to be here, it feels to me like being up one hill in the Cheviots must be a very similar experience to being up another. What is missing for me is the specificity of place which has caught my imagination elsewhere.
My leaning towards the specificity of place is evident in the photos I chose to keep from this walk - the majority are close up shots of things that interested me - lichen, plants, animals (mostly sheep and horses) and trees. This wasn't representative of the photos I took, many of which tried (unsuccessfully in my view) to capture the wide expanses of open space. Something about these photographs just didn't work for me. They were too poor a representation of the experience of being in that place.
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