Visual Narratives: An Untold Story
Field Trip to Castleton: The Experience

For my first research trip I decided to visit Castleton; a small village at the end of the Hope Valley within the Peak District. This was due to the dramatic landscape it is situated that contains large hill formations such as Mam Tor ( 'the shiver mountain' ).
Whilst walking through the surrounding area I felt a great sense of solitude, this was in part due to the bad weather/time of year that meant there was a lack of fellow hikers about. However I think this feeling was more due to the features of the land itself. Disused tractors and ram shackled farm buildings were an ever present feature giving the impression of an area left behind by humans in which nature is the dominant force. The later point seems particularly true given that the road once leading round Mam Tor, is now abandoned and an alternative route has been built in its place as part of it gave way due to the unstable shale that makes up the lower part of the hill ( also the reason it is know as the 'Shivering Mountain' ).

However despite this you can't get away from signs of current human activity which manifest themselves in the form of the ever present dry stone walls and telegraph lines. They serve as an oddly fitting juxtaposition to the natural environment they are present within and when viewed from higher up carve the landscape into new unknown forms.

 The views from the top of the hills were incredibly dramatic and what I was was hoping to capture in regards to my initial thoughts towards this brief. In particular I found the landscape depicted in the bottom image to be particularly moving due to how, as far as the eye could see, the land below was just a vast nothingness of fields occasionally dissected by roads and walls.

                        

All the drawings I produced whilst on this trip were of an incredibly rough nature. This was due to a combination of both the appalling weather (cold, wet and extremely windy ) and time in which I had to complete my explorations before night fall. However in some ways this ties into the themes of this project better due to how rather than simply depicting objects/places they also convey a sense of the atmosphere/conditions and subsequent feelings I was experiencing at the time.

On the factual side of things I found a few fairly interesting if a little dry points relating to castleton:

Firstly that the walk I myself completed is traditionally routed in both life and death within Castleton and the village of Edale in the neighbouring valley.

This was because up until 1889 Edale had no Church of its own so inhabitants therefore had to carry there dead over pass at Mam Tor to be buried within the hallowed grounds of Castleton's Churches.

Strangely enough the inhabitants of Castleton had to use the same pass in a way that was both literally and metaphorically opposite to this as they had to travel to Edale to make a living in the cotton mill that was built there in 1792 by Richard Arkwright. 

Second I came across an old mine known as Odin's mine. Despite having been to Castleton many times I have never noticed this feature before and when I asked locals about it at the pub many either new nothing, or very little about it other than the fact that it was a hot spot for serious climbers.

( After looking online I found out it is an exceedingly hard climb and this video of someone completing it http://peakbouldering.info/areas/5-central-limestone/crags/132-odin-cave#.Vol8ofmLTIU ). They also suggested that it could be over looked due to the prominence of other mine sites in the areas most notably Speedwell Cavern and the Blue John mines.

Despite this I managed to find out online that it was in fact an active lead mine from at least 1260 to 1847. Some have argued it is much older was in fact worked by the Romans, Saxons and Danes. The fact that it's named after the old Danish chief seems to support this although no historical evidence exists. 

Although there is some potential to create narratives from these points, I do feel they are rather dry and boring and that I may have perhaps focussed too much on the actual place rather than my experience. The solitude experienced, and how I might go about capturing this seems to be the most and possibly only useful thing this field trip has given me.