Dales Countryside Museum – Sculpture Commission

This page shows the process leading up to the making of my sculpture –  follow links below for other details

Stages of Carving         Commission Brief         Design Statement         Grand Opening

How it began

The Sculpture Trail – the path leads round to an open area, with view of the river, and vast foundation stones, faced and worked by stone cutters employed in the making of the railway.

Visiting the Museum

I’ve visited the Dales Countryside Museum a few times, running stone carving workshops there for visitors and the Young Archaeologists, but never looked properly at the collection.

A cheese press made out of a great lump of stone, the weight of the stone block pressed the cheese.

Knife sharpening stone.

In view of my commission for the Scupture Trail, it was time to take a closer look.  The Dales Countryside Museum is a modern, bright building on the site of the old railway station and goods yard.  The collection is housed in one of the old buildings off the main reception area, and once inside the entrance I found myself in semi-light, separated completely from daily distractions, the busy reception and shop and everything else but the items on display.  They are warmly illuminated and I was drawn instantly to the objects in stone –  a cheese press, grinding wheel, a knife sharpening wheel, fossils, rowling stone, Roman carved stones, the history in the area of quarrying and stone working tools, a mason’s mallet, Neolithic stone axes, Bronze Age arrowhead, various Stone Age tools and the geology of the area.

Quarrymen with lifting equipment and tools of the trade.

A wooden Mason’s mallet.

Neolithic polished stone axes.

The second time round, I went more slowly, reading more and finding myself fascinated by the knitting sticks, lead mining, tinsmith tools and working methods, farming implements, webbing manufacture, excavated bones, Viking finds, the landscape when man first inhabited the Dales, and the rows of shiny glass bottles with their matching vintage labels in the apothecary, with dreadful stories of compounds administered.  I loved the agricultural tools, beautifully made, with worn wooden handles shaped by many hands.

Knitting sticks – the large one was called a ‘goose wing’ -they were held in the belt with a knitting needle inserted in the top and helped with knitting speed.

Tinsmith’s workshop

Ideas – The Geology of the Yorkshire Dales

This was an obvious choice for me – because it involves so much about stone and appeals in every way, in that I want to celebrate stone in general and love to immerse myself in the subject and in learning more about it.

It fit perfectly with the criteria set out in the Sculpture Brief – particularly in relation to interpreting elements of the landscape and how we see it, how we have used it as a resource and left our marks on it.

I know very little about the stone in the Yorkshire Dales, so this was such an interesting exploration.  Stone of course is the underlying material and what make the shape and look of the Dales, it creates the different habitats for wildlife and the specific look of walls and buildings, creating the character of the area.  A particular attraction was the forms showing by the carboniferous limestone pavement.  These shapes are just sculptural forms in their own right, and thoughts turned to standing stones with these beautiful soft, weather-worn undulations in them.

The actual formation many millions of years ago of the rocks of the Dales came about from sediments in water deposited over great periods of time – the limestone formed from shells and the skeletons of ancient animals – the sandstones, gritstones and shale formed from particles of rock carried by rivers and deposited.   As the layers accumulated, the weight of them compressed those below and created the hard stones we now see.  Earth movement uplifted, crushed and compressed the settled materials and gave us mountain and valley.  Erosion, the weather and the Ice Age have also caused huge changes to the look of the landscape and how the stone appears.

I am fascinated by what the Dales would have looked like when man arrived and settled in the area.  What did the landscape look like.  What did it look like before the Ice Age?  The Museum holds fossils showing us the types of plants that grew at that time, and also the animals that grazed, hunted or were hunted.

Sculptural shapes of plant material

I can picture the huge plants, in warm swampy conditions – giant plants growing in the lush tropical atmosphere.  There are plenty images here to inspire a sculpture.  The surface patterns of leaves, the over-size roots, the bulging organic shapes.  All so appealing to me.

Ideas – Rowelling Stone

When I saw the Rowelling Stone in the glass case I had no idea what it was.  I had never heard of one before.  It was displayed with other tools and instruments used in the veterinary care of animals.  Most conjuring images of extreme cruelty rather than cure.

A general panacea adopted for the treatment of ailing cows was rowelling or reulling, also called pegging or seton, recommended by the nineteenth-century books on cattle doctoring.  The principle involved the insertion of an irritant under the skin ‘to make the part laid open the seat of the disease’.  Years ago all milk cows, especially those in poor condition, were regularly rowelled.

Number 17 shows the Rowelling Stones

One method, possibly the earliest, was to make a pocket in the skin of the chest of a cow, immediately in front of the foreleg by cutting a slit about an inch long, inserting a finger and opening out quite a large pouch between skin and flesh.  Into this a few rolled up leaves of setter-grass (or felon grass) tied up tightly with string, were inserted for twenty-four hours – no more.  Instead of setter-grass a piece of onion or a wad of cotton wool and course turpentine was sometimes used.  Each day a ball of lard and salt was put in to keep the opening, which festered, running.  At the same time a drink of felon was given.In another method a rowelling or setter’s needle was used.  It either had a hole in the blade or a looped handle through which a tape or string was threaded.  The needle was jabbed into the dewlap, slanted downwards under the skin about three inches, and a length of tape with a knot at one end drawn through.  Then a second knot was made at the other end and the two ends tied together.  Each day the tape was pulled so that the wound remained open festered, and ‘all the evil humours were drawn out’.

The Complete Farmer: or, a general Dictionary of Husbandry describes – ‘the rowel is to draw off all the bad and corrupt humours from the blood, by a sort of magic’

It was believed that the blood and other bodily fluids were regarded as “humors” that had to remain in proper balance to maintain health.

I can’t quite make out if the stones were threaded and pulled through to keep the wound open, or if the stones were used to keep the hole open by trapping them between flesh and skin to prevent the opening healing naturally.  Sometimes a leather disc with a hole in was used, or a piece of bone.

Interestingly a dictionary describes rowelling – Variant of rowel

noun

a small, revolving wheel with sharp projecting points, forming the end of a spur

transitive verb roweled or rowelled,  roweling or rowelling

to spur or prick (a horse, etc.) with or as with a rowel

The Northern Earth – Adventures in the Landscape tells of some fascinating traditions for medical care and magical cure.

More traditional were the four-leaf clover, rowan sprig or holed stone placed in the shed. The naturally holed stone, sometimes called a hag, holey or dobbie stone, was widespread in farmyards. It was thought to offer protection against all kinds of unworldly misfortunes, from the evil eye (which the holed stone might be thought to resemble) to hag-riding (when beasts were found sweaty and tired in the morning, it was attributed to them having been ridden hard by witches or fairies during the night). Limestone was used in the Dales, but flint was especially efficacious; as John Aubrey declared “To hinder the Night Mare they hang on a String a Flint with a hole in it (naturally) by the manger; but best of all, they say, hung about their necks…”. Often attached to the keyring for the animal sheds (where the iron of the keys added an extra element of protection), or suspended just above an affected animal, it can still be seen on some farms.

The use of a naturally holed stone was widespread as a protective amulet for humans and animals.

Other techniques were legion. In Yorkshire, cattle were regularly rowelled to maintain their condition – this involved opening the cow’s flesh, either a pocket in its chest or holes through the dewlaps, and keeping the wound open until it festered. A leather or tarred twine cord was tied through the dewlap holes, sometimes with a holed stone attached; the running wound – which did not seem to cause discomfort, but stank – would draw out ‘the evil humours’ preventing a cow from prospering; elsewhere, a scopperil – a piece of wood with an amulet hung from it – was used, specifically for the ‘quarter-ill’.

My thoughts were that the shape of the stone, with hole through could be represented in a sculptural form, perhaps with something threaded through – I have always rather wanted to carve chain links, as something of a skill challenge – and this thread running through stones holds the same attraction.  I’m fascinated and horrified at the same time, by reading about rowelling and early medical and veterinary practice.

There is a lot to work with here.

Ideas – Fossils and Bones

The Museum holds a wonderful collection of bones and fossils  – telling of a time when man first arrived in the Dales, giving evidence of human activity and animals present since the Ice Age.  Archaeological evidence shows that man had to respond to rapidly changing climates and developing woodland environments.  To do this he had to adapt his hunting technology.  He changed from using spears to hunt large herd and fur bearing animals (including reindeer, wild horse and arctic fox) present during the arctic tundra conditions at the end of the Ice Age (end of the old Stone Age), to using flint barbed archery equipment to hunt elk, red deer, roe deer, wild ox and wild pig in pine, birch and hazel woodland during the Middle Stone Age.  The final transition came during the Neolithic/Bronze Age times when man moved from hunting and gathering, to become pastoral and arable farmers within a deciduous forest landscape.

The bones and teeth of these animals are in the collection, giving an accurate account of the animals and wildlife present.  The stone of the area is full of traces of what went on in times long past – I began thinking about how I could perhaps make a fossil type sculpture of a creature which was an amalgam of many animals, using the parts that most appealed from the pieces in the collection.

It made me reflect on how I view wildlife around me now – I enjoy watching and learning and offering help in conserving, but early man had quite a different view.  He needed food and warmth and used the animals around him for this.  There was a much closer affinity with nature in general, and a huge respect for the natural world and a deep spiritual understanding.

I was very taken with the Aurochs horn and imagined this beast roaming in herds and being hunted for food and hide.  I wondered what it must have looked like.As a sculptor I am hugely inspired by the wildlife around me, and many of my carvings are of animals and birds – so these bones, teeth and fossils really excited ideas for a sculpture.  I wondered if I might populate the wooded area of the Sculpture Trail with animals as once they had roamed the woodlands many years ago.Even the bone shapes themselves, and some of the teeth too were beautiful shapes which could be the basis for a more abstract sculpture.

Decision Time

All the areas that I chose to shortlist brought their possibilities for my sculpture, but after a number of sleeps and looking at where my heart lay, I knew I had to choose the Bones and Fossils and carve an animal of sorts.

I checked this idea fit with the criteria and objectives of the Dales Countryside Museum in creating the Sculpture Trail.

Initially, in my mind,  the scale of the piece was enormous!  But time to complete the commission and the budget kept these notions in check.

From the bone evidence of which animals were in the landscape when Homo habilis, Homo erectus and Homo sapiens walked the Dales we see that Mammoths roamed the lands, Cattle, Deer, Elk and Wild Pig.  The Aurochs horn raised a number of questions for me.  I wanted to know more about this animal and so it became my focus.

BOS PRIMIGENIUS – this beast is the ancestor to most of our moderncattle and measured up to ten feet long.  First domesticated some 6000 years ago.  It ranged North Africa, Europe andAsia.

Making this my choice seemed to pull bits from all four of the areas, they overlapped in part anyway, but to me it seemed the Aurochs connected them all.