Below Grit Fell is an observation and reflection on day-to-day experiences in a farming community. This allows photographer Johannes Pretorius to show how places become meaningful through recurring behaviour. The photographs were made in rural Lancashire in 2021 and 2022.
Selected work shortlisted for Royal Photographic Society IPE 164; featured on Photomonitor; exhibited at The Storey, Lancaster, Sept/Oct 2022.
All photographs in Below Grit Fell were made in rural Lancashire on a corridor east of Lancaster and west of a lonely hill called Grit Fell. They are about the multifaceted relationships between people who live and work below Grit Fell and the places that provide the contexts for their lives.
While this series draws on my personal experience, I argue it is relevant to a wider audience because it suggests the possibility of similar encounters. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman points out, the experience of local and global are increasingly blurred.1 One consequence is that it is not unlikely for someone like me, who spent their youth on the southern tip of Africa, to end up in Northern England in a muddy field below Grit Fell.
Time can be perceived as linear, like an arrow, where the past consists of successive events leading to the present. But time can also be experienced as circular. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes that repeated behaviour, cyclical in nature, is what lets a location “acquire a density of meaning and stability” so that it becomes a place.2
When I go out my front door, turn right, and walk past the bus shelter to the bend in the road, I can see an old farm below. What had always intrigued me were the crimson curtains in the doorway of one outbuilding. Even from a distance, I could see them moving in the wind. I could not imagine they provided much protection, so why were they hung there?
Then one day, I noticed the farm had been abandoned. A ‘for sale’ sign suggested why and I decided to photograph the curtains while I still could. As I left, I noticed a planning application stuck to a bus stop outside the farm. My suspicion was confirmed: soon the farm would give way to more than a hundred new houses. A few weeks later, the curtains were gone. It left me with questions I would never answer. What were the cycles of life on that farm, and how did they inform what it meant to its inhabitants? What did they think of the urban sprawl about to swallow the place they had called home? And how and why did those curtains come to adorn that doorway?
I did not know anyone in the area, but a friend had mentioned growing up on a hill farm below Grit Fell. He was willing to put in a word with his father, Dick Gorst, and a few days later I phoned Dick to ask if I could visit. “Oh, aye!” he said, “have you time on Friday?” When I arrived, I immediately noticed the old stone barn that dominates the farmyard. I could just make out ‘1667’ on the date stone above a door. I remembered the Dutch had only reached the Cape of Good Hope fifteen years before and it seemed like ages had since passed.
Dick and his son breed Bluefaced Leicester and Swaledale sheep and their purebreds are at the top of a three-tier system. The Leicester rams and Swaledale ewes they sell are crossed to produce Northern Mules, hardy and healthy sheep suited to the harsh northern upland climate. Mule ewes are then crossed with lowland rams like Texel to produce lambs for the meat market.
Dick also provides winter housing for cattle to other farmers. On a December afternoon, I watched him clear the cowshed and we drifted into the topic of change. He used to think that his mother, who had lived past a hundred, must have witnessed an incredible amount of change. Now he thinks that he, who is in his seventies, may have seen even more. When he took over the farm, he walked the fields to tend his sheep. These days, it is hard to imagine hill farming without a quad bike.
To illustrate the enormous change that humans have wrought in a very short time, the ecologist Wes Jackson imagines compressing the time since higher life appeared on Earth (750 million years ago) into a single year.3 In this imaginary timeline, at ten to midnight on New Year’s eve, agriculture is developed. And only in the last three seconds of the year, fossil fuel starts turbo-charging the changes Dick had alluded to. The date on Dick’s barn (1667) is just shy of three seconds to New Year in Jackson’s timeline. And it no longer feels that distant.
I met Ian Gifford in a field where he was unpicking a section of dry stone wall. As he took it apart, he explained its structure to me. It is capped by a ridge of topstones. Below that, two skins of close-fitting face stones form the sides and the gap between them is packed with small filling stones. About halfway down, at regular intervals along the wall’s length, are long through stones that bridge between the faces. This all stands on a foundation of large footing stones, just below the ground surface.
Ian was preparing a length of damaged wall to be restored. It borders Andrew Dawson's farm and a week later, in a thick fog, they were rebuilding the wall. Each stone was selected for a good fit by sight and, once picked up, rarely swapped for another. As the wall grew in height, the stones they used got smaller and every course was set in slightly to make the wall taper to the top. This, along with the through stones they placed, ensures the wall's stability. All the while, the men’s conversation shifted effortlessly from topic to topic – sometimes serious, sometimes lighthearted, always sincere.
Maybe dry stone walls offer a lesson in restraint. Some time later, I found Ian repairing one in another field. “You have to know when to stop,” he said. Gesturing to uneven stones further along the wall, he remarked that it is always tempting to go just a little bit further. But there is a risk that taking out the next loose stone will just make more of the wall crumble. It reminded me of a passage from the Belgian author Dimitri Verhulst: “Humanity has built too much already. If this generation doesn’t get started on the demolition, we’ll be in serious trouble.”4
John Berger, who was an acute observer, writes: “With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchanges. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.”5
As you approach Grit Fell travelling southeast from Lancaster, Andrew Metcalfe’s farm is the last before the common land at the top. I was there one day when a policeman pulled up and called, “anyone missing a dog called Chester?” We were all puzzled: we hadn’t seen the dog for a while, but how could he know its name? It doesn’t wear a tag! It turned out the officer had reprimanded a bewildered walker on the main road for not having ‘their’ pet on a lead. Just then, Andrew's neighbour drove past and recognised the dog. It must have shadowed the walker as they came down the public footpath that passes the farm. Andrew's laugh boomed across the yard as he took delight in the animal’s mischief.
Andrew’s livelihood depends on animals. He keeps a herd of dairy cows, which he milks twice a day. During the monthly veterinarian visit, he urges each one on with “come on, sweetheart” as he nudges them on to be individually examined. During one of my visits, he was worried about the back hoof of one of his Friesians. The vet found an abscess, which was drained and cleaned. The animal also received anti-inflammatory drugs, so her milk could not enter the food chain for a few days. Andrew keeps detailed records, which will flag up the animal when she is milked, but to make it obvious he also sprayed a big red cross on her udder as he said, “a soft bed of straw for you tonight.”
In the essay quoted above, Berger remarks of every animal, “its lack of common language, its silence, guarantees its distinctness, its exclusion, from and of man.” By being like and unlike humans, animals were historically seen both as intermediaries with the past and as a sources of sustenance. Berger goes on, “vestiges of this dualism remain among those who live intimately with, and depend upon, animals.”
You can recognise remnants of old hedges by a horizontal kink in a tree’s trunk just above the ground. At some point, it was laid – a procedure where its stem was partially cut and then bent close to the ground without severing it completely. This encourages vertical shoots and a row of laid plants will, in time, produce a livestock-proof barrier.
I helped Andrew Metcalfe put in a new hedge one spring. We planted saplings 200mm apart by making a slit in the ground with a spade, inserting the roots, and then closing the soil with the heel of a boot. A few days later, I was in a field with Andrew’s father, John. It is sheltered from the frigid wind that blows off the fell by woodland. John recalled how he had planted those trees fifty years before. The tall conifers and hardwoods were small saplings just like the ones Andrew and I had put in the ground. “Fifty years,” he shrugged as he shook his head in disbelief. Later that day, he unhooked some branding irons from a tool store rafter to show me. They are still used to mark their sheep's horns and carry his father’s initials ‘I.M.’
Every object suggests a story and it is tempting to try and photograph and describe them all. The Italian writer Italo Calvino warns – writing long before the advent of social media – that this leads to one of two outcomes.6 The first is living a life only to be photographed and the second is madness. I wonder if, instead of regretting the stories left untold, we should recognise their value? Is the appeal of the stories we do have not enhanced by the ones we do not? It seems to me that the value of stories are that they allow us to imagine how we might have acted (or would have liked to act) under a set of circumstances. And this is possible only because untold stories give us room to speculate.
There is a solitary tree at the edge of a field not far from my home. Its wind-flagged shape has made me walk up the hill toward it many times. I had tried to photograph it, but could not get close enough without trespassing. Late one afternoon, on my way back down the hill again, I saw a farmer on a quad bike approaching. I impulsively raised my hand and when he stopped, I pointed to the field and asked if he knew whose it was. “It’s mine,” he said and suspiciously added, “why?” I explained my interest in the tree and asked for permission to come back to photograph it. “That’s fine,” he said in a less guarded tone, “I’m surprised it’s still standing with all the wind.”
The next week, I returned to photograph the tree. According to a reference book, it is a black pine, a non-native species. I was fascinated by how it shared the field with an electricity pylon, a huge six-armed creature. While the pine had given way to and was sculpted by the climate, the pylon resisted it with cold efficiency. It made me wonder which was more alien in this landscape: a tree from the Mediterranean, whose form appeals to sentiment, or a structure borne of mathematical economy, whose form appeals to reason?