In August this year I was contracted to give a talk about Woollenline at the Mid Wales Arts Centre as part of program of activity developed for the Welsh Group exhibition entitled ‘Celf Gwyrdd, How Green Is My Art?’ An exhibition in which I showed some of my studio work as well as documentation of the work on Pen Trumau site of Woollenline.
In preparation I went up to see the site and how our lines of wool were doing. It is just below Waun Fach, the highest point in the Black Mountains, a site that has suffered extensive erosion and where the Brecon Beacons National Park, Bannau Brycheiniog, works hard to rectify damage. Most recently, with financial assistance from Welsh Government, Bannau Brycheiniog has had an intensive peatland restoration project in which materials have been flown by helicopter up onto the mountain to be used by contractors and volunteers in an attempt to arrest some of the erosion.
Life upon the mountain is violent. Wind and rain frequently blow and wash away the tiny green shoots of vegetation trying to re-establish on these eroded peat scars. Peat is stripped off and disappears as dust leaving behind bare mineral soil, sheep nibble off the fresh growth and erosion continues.
It is a place to witness at first hand elemental forces tussling with human activity.
It is easy to understand the imperative to heal these peat scars: they leak hundreds of tons of carbon blown away as gaseous compounds or washed into water courses. In the course of the 5 years working on Woollenline over 1,000 people got involved. They had discussions, asked questions as they and horses carried materials up onto the site, worked at pegging wool in place, planting cotton grass, making nets for wool sausages to plug erosion channels and eating cake and drinking tea. Blogs on this site record some of that energy and effort
In 2022, I walked up to see how the lines of felted wool and planting were doing on Pen Trumau and had been amazed and delighted to see that some of the effort of those 1,000 plus people had produced broad green lines of cotton grass linking the original islands of vegetation. A friend and colleague went up later in 2022 and, in clearing some of the hundreds of wooden pegs we had used, discovered the uplifting experience of seeing extensive new green growth.
So when in preparation for my talk I visited Woollenline in August this year I could not help being shocked to see, that in trying to arrest further erosion Bannau Brycheiniog’s peatland project had buried the work that was Woollenline with a mixture of geo-jute and coir. Wool had been used in some erosion channels and to make bunds to arrest peat being washed down the slopes of the site. .
The vegetation associated with the woollen lines will eventually grow through this new covering. But somehow, something was lost.
At the time of the Woollenline project a community of interest grew, toiled, questioned and thought: how am I part of this wild and dynamic world? why and how does this concern me? and can I put aside differences of opinion, personality and ability to join with others to explore a different way of doing things?
I can argue that wool is a local material, it is more financially expensive to use but it would have travelled a shorter distance and would have had its provenance more highly scrutinised. But more important than a carbon footprint had been the learning and the sense of a shared endeavour.
It is necessary to work hard to get at root causes of environmental damage, to resist the quick fixes demanded by the political arena in which we find ourselves. To stand up to funders and demand attention to the complexity of human interactions and to look for new ways of doing things that enable everyone to play a part in, so together we might live in harmony with and care for the natural environment to which we are inextricably bound.
Sadly I don’t think Bannau Brycheiniog have realised this.
And I received these images and message from Mark Fisher of the Black Mountain Gliding Club
A woollen line 