Installation

The rocks that form Stanage Edge are dark grey and mottled with lichen. Their scale is enormous, yet they have the appearance of having tumbled, lightly, down the escarpment. One feels small in their presence. There is a comfort in this (in their company), a feeling of being safe and somehow coddled in the shelter of their enormity.

About an hour before dawn the sky softens a little in the East. The light is indirect, diffused, and muted. There is the feeling of being undisturbed in this light, of sharing a secret (of quiet stillness) with the landscape. The ground and foliage are wet from overnight rain. It is cold, only a few degrees Celsius when I arrive, a little after 6am.

The rocks at Stanage edge were formed three-hundred-and-fifty million years ago when what is now the Peak District was submerged beneath a warm, shallow sea near the equator. An abundance of life – shellfish, corals, sea snails, crinoids – thrived in this sea. Sinking after death, the calcium of their bodies was deposited in swathes on the seafloor. The rocks that their bodies formed, incrementally, are solid and impregnable now, moved by millennia of tectonic shift from that warm sea to present-day Yorkshire. From the first until the eighteenth centuries these stones were mined and exported – from Stanage Edge across Northern Europe – for use in mills to grind grain (Stanage Edge, Peak District, no date). I cannot see evidence of this quarrying although I am not sure what to look for.

The speaker feels unreal in my hands. Its plastic casing suggests a flimsiness and yet it is heavy. Its exterior is almost featureless, black with only the yellow triangle of the manufacturer’s logo. It feels mass produced; designed for obsolescence. The unreality of the speaker is compounded not only by the context of the rock formation but by its sounding of the music, streamed over Bluetooth from my iPhone. Somehow, I expect mechanism. I hear the recorded creak of Halla, Marie, and Hanna’s fingers against the gut strings of their instruments, imagine Guðrún pressing the keys of her harpsichord, imagine the instrument’s plectrum taught against the wire of its strings. Yet, the speaker stands resolute and dumbly unmoving.

Stanage Edge is four-hundred-and-fifty-eight meters above sea-level. I can see many miles across the Peak District, to the villages of Bamford, Thornhill, Aston, and Hope. Perspective is warped. Landmarks seem both vastly far and close at hand. Before the horizon, some six or seven kilometres from where I stand and occupying the centre of my vision, the chimney of an enormous factory billows its grey smoke into the sky. Later, on Google Maps, I learn that this is Breedon Hope Cement Works. In the Satellite image I can see, to the Southeast of the factory, an enormous gouge in the landscape where materials are quarried. Breedon’s website tells me that the corporation is a leading producer of cement, aggregates, and asphalt in the UK. They have a ‘strong asset backing, with around 1 billion tonnes of mineral reserves and resources’ (About Us, no date). Their share price is 99.10 as I write this, up 0.2% on yesterday.

I film the music three times in different locations along the escarpment. The wind is strong and loud however I can make out two bird songs: a high-pitched chirrup and staccato notes, repeated, that echo against the rockface. As the dawn progresses, human sounds become more frequent. Cars and vans seem impossibly loud, the slope of the hill acting as an amphitheatre to funnel the sound of engines upward. Occasionally, I hear a train in the distance. Remembering the philosophy of the work (that of flattening divisions between man and nature), I am resolved to accept all sounds.

When I am finished, I walk (the speaker in a large rucksack on my back) to Hathersage train station, a little under three kilometres away. The ground is sodden. I walk through moorland – heather, purple moor-grass, bracken, and ferns – and I’m charmed by the flora. It is not yet 8am and so I am entirely alone in this landscape. Some weeks before my visit to Stanage Edge, I had seen sheets of smoke drifting across the Peak District. I feared catastrophe however, reading, I learned that the moorland in Yorkshire is burned each year (between October and April) to sustain the habitat for grouse farming. The sport is profitable. Half of the land in England is owned by less than 1% of its population; a third by the aristocracy (Evans, 2017)

The global mean temperature for 2021 was around 1.09 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average (State of Climate in 2021: Extreme Events and Major Impacts, 2021). On the train, I Tweet and update my Instagram.