If you take the road signposted 'Tilberthwaite' off the main road from Skelwith Bridge over to Coniston, you enter a whole extraordinary world where greenslate was quarried from the 17th century ( or earlier ) till recent times. The way is narrow, winding, and hummocky - an old track tarred. Oak forest surrounds you. Crags rise steeply above slopes of natural scree. Man-made spoil looms in mountainous heaps and silver birch has moved in on them, the first generation in nature's reclaiming of ravaged ground.
This terrain covers many square miles. It includes the quarries of Hodge Close and Moss Rigg. So much rock has been blasted, carted and sorted, reft and sawn and dressed, that a new landscape of mini-fells and mini-dales has been created, like a vast set for 'Dr Who', or like Baghdad now it has been liberated. You stand amongst avalanches of slate and marvel at the labour which must have gone into the production of every one of these millions of stones. A few are as big as a Mini. Most you can lift with your own hands. Many have been reft along their natural plane, leaving a grainy surface like hand-cut granary bread. Many more have been sliced with the diamond saw, leaving a paler surface smooth as chocolate, and we don't take these, because they're too slick for our purpose.
We're filling a big trailer to haul back down from Moss Rigg to the site where Andy Goldsworthy the land artist and his team of wallers are building up a ruinous sheepfold and making a slate sculpture in each of its four walls. This is the culmination of his project to remake folds all over Cumbria. More than forty have been completed. Some of them house single boulders, which look like hefty penned animals. Some house six-foot-high cones, built up in layers of stone, which Andy thinks of as seeds, 'an expression of the fullness, vigour, heavy ripeness, and power of nature generated from a centre deep inside'. This fold at Tilberthwaite is special Each of the four walls is made of unshaped field stones and has at its centre a section made of slates half an inch thick . At the centre of each of these sections is a circular medallion or shield made of the same thin slices. Framed in the chunky walling stones, they look exquisite, like pencil drawings set into bulky sculptures. The field stones are bits of nature barely crafted by human hands. The slate pieces are intensively worked. It's a mixture which makes you think hard about how we adapt the world's materials for our use and our delight.
The medallions are about five feet cross. The grain of each one is different from its neighbour, the slates being either vertical, horizontal,or slant. It has taken sixteen trailer-loads to make the work, which is now ( March 25 ) two days from completion. Finding the stones that make up one load, carrying them up the tottering, ringing slopes of the spoil-heaps, loading them up, and unloading them back down at the fold costs three hours of fairly hard work. Once the trailer is full, we take a break and walk steeply uphill by the old cart track to the great gulf in the fellside from which all this stone was mined. The sheer cliff which makes its south wall is more than a hundred feet high. The north or back wall plunges in overgrown ledges from a crest which looks like some jagged skyline in the Swiss Alps. A big old larch on the quarry lip grows out into mid-air like a diving-board. Somewhere a peregrine is giving out high-pitched barking calls to warn a mate and/or intimidate intruders. I focus my binoculars on a white blaze on the larch trunk and see that it's a tiercel. His breast is snowy, his beak and legs yellow. The black of his bandido moustache is plain to see on either side of his face. After a few minutes he takes off, loops downwards, then veers off out of sight. Somewhere a woodpecker is drumming. Overhead a pair of buzzards are mewing to each other, as they do in spring and autumn. Trees and birds and moss are gradually reclaiming these huge works of man. The farm at High Tilberthwaite is still working and Andy's fold is taking shape nearby, a new version of an old form, handsome to look at and made strongly for its purpose.
