Warplands: Alkborough

Abstract

The river Trent merges with the Ouse and enters the Humber at Trent Falls, on the border of North Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. The landscape here is isolated, flat and agricultural; the skies are large. On the west bank of the Trent, the land is man-made, created by warping: by letting the silt-laden river waters flood and settle. At Ousefleet is the so-called ‘emptiest place in Britain’: the only one kilometre grid-square on a 1:50,000 scale Ordnance Survey map that is completely white, lacking any symbols to denote features either natural or constructed. On the east bank at Alkborough Flats, the river has been let back in, to create extensive wetlands in the first major UK example of coastline realignment. Contrasting twin processes: 19th century ‘winning’ and 21st century ‘letting go’. Shifting priorities. A seeming placid place where new and profound attitudes to, and relationships with, landscape and environment are being enacted. In 2011 – and building upon their Carrlands project <www.carrlands.org.uk> – Mike Pearson and composer John Hardy were commissioned by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Landscape and Environment Programme Director's Impact Fellowship to create Warplands, a performance combining text, music and projection which was premiered at the Royal Geographical Society, London on 1 September. The work is in two movements: this article describes its composition and includes the full text to Alkborough. As it traces the convolutions of Julian's Bower, a turf maze overlooking the realignment, it invites the reader to walk and contemplate, at least in the imagination. The aim of Warplands is to illuminate the historically and culturally diverse ways in which a particular landscape has been made, used, reused and interpreted; to help make sense of the multiplicity of meanings that resonate from it; and to strengthen regard for places off the beaten track. Primarily on foot…