William Turner, arguably the greatest English Landscape painter, is reputed to have lashed himself to the mainsail mast to better experience and understand the storms at sea, which were the subject of many of his paintings. Less extreme but equally radical, John Ruskin’s much quoted words referring to his preference to teach people to love nature through drawing rather than love drawing through nature, seems to point to a similar process of making art to explore the interface between people and the natural world around us.
This short description of “Walking The Land”, a participative arts and landscape initiative, developed in the Stroud Valleys in Gloucestershire, focuses on:
How a combination of walking and drawing/photography/digital arts is being used to enable people to better understand and respond to landscape
How these responses are being used to collect and map landscape values
How this information and process can be integrated into decision making about landscape change and management
It also begins to explore the interesting and less tangible questions of the relationship between the nature within us and the nature around us.

Sowing seeds
As part of its work to sustain the Stroud Valleys’ woodland landscape by integrating social, cultural, economic and environmental policy and action plans, The Touchwood Partnership1 has instigated a number of initiatives to increase opportunities for experiencing landscape in different ways. It has also developed processes to record the various ways in which local landscape is valued. These include:
“Valued Walks”. These were developed as part of a national research programme into the Environmental Capital Methodology2. A number of people volunteered to take the researcher/writer on their own favourite walk and were asked the same questions relating to how they experienced and valued the landscape being walked through.
A Landscape Festival which, in collaboration with the Visual Arts Festival and Open Studios3, ran a number of “Walks with Artists”, whereby local writers and painters led personal walks and described how they valued their local landscape, how they were inspired by it and how it played a part in their work.

Pitchcombe and Edge walks and exhibition
As part of Site04, the name of the 2004 visual arts festival, a group of artists4 walked together, recording and discussing what the walk meant to them. From this they produced an exhibition called “Walking the Land” at a local village hall, over two weeks in June. Over the two weekends, people were invited to walk with the artists to produce their own work that has since been curated on a dedicated website.
Since then, three of the artists have refined their aims and processes and are currently preparing to undertake a similar piece of work in another valley this summer, planning to exhibit at local pubs and run workshops at the Stroud’s Museum in the Park as part of Site05.

Aims and objectives
Overall, long-term Aim
To develop our work in response to walking as a group and to show this
work as a catalyst for working with members of local communities to
produce a web based archive of responses to local landscape.
Objectives and process to:
• walk as a group, reflect and produce work as a response to these
walks.
• show work as a catalyst for community engagement.
• develop a range of appropriate items such as maps, post cards etc.
• store images, sounds and words about the work on the web.
• invite local people and other participants to ‘walk the land’ with
us, encouraging them to produce work which both develops their own
work and expresses their response to the landscape.
• run workshops to develop this work, curate and exhibit on the web
and other appropriate venues.
• engage with other landscape initiatives and projects.
Holiday and Activity workshops aims:
to provide appropriate and stimulating creative activity that develops
as a result of a direct interaction with the landscape and natural environment.
Outcomes:
that at the end of the workshop, participants will have:
• developed their creative skills and abilities through a direct and
informed appreciation of the countryside. (skills)
• exercised critical judgement to select material suitable for web and
other exhibitions of resulting work. (judgement)
• used a choice of various media to create images, events, video, etc
that communicate their ideas. (communication)
• created images and material that display an inventive ability,
experimentation and the possible development of a personal style.
(invention)
• have had a blisteringly good time. (fun)

Early Observations
The project will continue to research how people value and respond to landscape and some initial thoughts are already surfacing. Amongst these is the relationship between our internal landscape and the landscape around us. We all have our pictures of what the world is like and carry it around with us most of the time. When producing images representing that world around us, we have noticed a strong tendency for people often to be reluctant to observe what is around them, instead looking for images that reconfirm their idea of what the world is like. For example, some people joining us on the walks were reproducing the Cotswold rural idyll.
By showing our own work we have encouraged people to find look differently at the world we’ve been walking through, such as by exploring natural phenomena in new ways. Although it is early days, it does seem as if people respond openly to these natural features, finding in them a deeply satisfying subject matter. Without jumping to any conclusions, we do wonder if it this could be seen as finding a refuge or a return to some touchstone; contact with base line data by which we reprogram ourselves. Are we making contact with the nature within us or just revisiting familiar friends?
Some of our work asks people to notice the impacts that we all have on the landscape and recognise that these changes have a direct effect on our internal landscape. This seems to raise two challenges; one is about being respectful to landscape as it’s our shared inheritance, a fairly well rehearsed sustainability standpoint, and another is about recognising that our material needs, be it for water, food, shelter or energy impact on our spiritual needs for quiet and space for reflection; our inner world.

Shaping the Landscape
Change is inevitable. Touchwood is facilitating the development of a Strategic Landscape Partnership that aims to continue developing the dialogue about landscape and provide opportunities for more people to generate a vision for the landscape and has successfully bid to The Heritage Lottery Fund to increase access to the Landscape Heritage under the Landscape Partnership Scheme5.. One intention is to develop a duty of care, based on developing a common understanding of the many meanings of landscape as developed through “Walking the Land”.
It is intended that those people and organisations with a role and responsibility to manage the wider landscape will use the work produced in community-wide dialogue to inform decisions, to plan action and shape the future landscape.Capel Mill
Experience of landscape is not an either or, more a question of quality, meaning and relevance. The Capel Mill Development Company6 is developing a former mill site on the edge of Stroud to provide increased opportunities for landscape experience through:
visits and tourism – a starting point for walks and holidays, café, meeting venue, exhibitions of arts and crafts
skills training and development – woodworking courses, creative development workshops, landscape guide training, workshops and conference facilities
education – Schools Out7: creative approaches to understanding the natural environment
providing space for rural social enterprises – micro brewery, “Walking The Land”, “Schools Out”, Woodworking studios, catering
linking between town and country
The intention is to develop it as a hub for the work of the landscape partnership, a place to learn and experience landscape, a place to make a living.

Playing in the hedgerows
“Walking the Land” as described here is based on an aesthetic appreciation of what is considered a rural landscape, a landscape not dissimilar to the one I grew up in, playing in hedgerows and cycling through a landscape shaped by generations of people making a living from the land.
In fact the Stroud Valleys agricultural landscape has attracted cloth mills and canals, railways, roads, industry, artists and crafts people, market towns, enterprise and innovation and this built and cultural heritage can be experienced on a walk through this landscape, as well as the agricultural and natural heritage. The way we make a living from the land clearly influences the landscape experience we have access to, from the slowly evolved rural scene of the Cotswold edge to a more transitory one where nature can be found in hidden corners; so called weeds pushing up through pavements, crested newts turning a disused and rain filled metal tank into a Site of Special Scientific Interest, sycamores colonising disused railway cuttings or great plane trees transforming roads and walls into dancing, leafy light shows.

Increasingly the question of what kind of out of doors environment we want to experience seems less to do with agriculture than lifestyle. Whether this move away from food production is desirable is one question, another is how do we collectively decide what kind of landscape we want to experience? Hopefully the solutions to these complex questions will take into account form and function in the same way as any good design solution so that our future landscape, perhaps with energy crops, wind turbines transport corridors and food production also allows for places where people can experience nature and get in touch with what is called out inner selves.
Although playing in hedgerows has given me a specific relationship with the environment, I hope that walking the land with others will broaden my understanding of how people value landscape and in turn contribute to the debate about our future landscape.

Richard Keating is a Sustainability Consultant, participatory artist, Director of the Touchwood Partnership, a Director of The Capel Mill Development Company and a founding member of Creativity at Work, Creative Learning Association. keatree@globalnet.co.uk