(dis)enchanted walks an evolving cycle of walks since 2018
often on the first Sunday of the month....
walking out on the enchanted City, wayfaring, walking-with,
sense-ing and discovering other stories and experiences...
Eco-curating: alighting on (dis)enchantment.
a walk about communication and matter....
Sunday 14 April. Bath
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Sunday 14 April
A circular walking-with from Walcot Chapel 3 miles max on level ground, one set of stairs and some footpaths Meet 10.30 for briefing return approx 13.00 Come prepared for the weather. Carry water and snacks! Pub at the end. Discussion Bring: pens notebooks mobile devices. Please no pet dogs, working dogs welcome. The walk is presented as part of Eco-curating. Walcot Chapel becomes a hub of eco events and artistic activities for 2 weeks in April exploring creative responses to climate change and interactions with our environment.
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How to communicate and act on climate change when it appears no one is listening?
The provocation:
Walking with enchantment implies a separation from that which is not enchanted. Awe and wonder are not an illusion, not something lost and needing to be retrieved or commodified. Place and Power intra-act in producing senses of belonging, exile and exclusion and are part of the processes that form our feelings of identity. Reflective walking and wayfaring offer attention to the situated knowledges and partial perspectives glimpsed through our experience and attend to the obscured, ignored, denied experiences of others. All place making is immanent and all material has agency. Gather with each other to share, talk, think, sketch and absorb sound, sensation and sight. |
Previous walks.....
A walk in search of local wisdom:
from Twerton to Sydney Gardens and back
Sunday February 3
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An all day walk in and out of the enchanted city, from Twerton Roundhill to Sydney Gardens and back. The return route takes us via the officially historic Bath and along the river walking back into the country and to the best views. Recceing a walking idea for the Forest of Imagination later in the year and perhaps Bathscape in the future. Considering local wisdom. Survival expertise. Asking questions maybe getting some answers.
A walk with much crunching in the snow, speculation on water sources and water courses. Why building were built where they were, lines of sight and lines of the sites. Imaginative town planners of the past with garden city ideas for Bath's social housing. Or just places to dump people who did the work.
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Looking for views and wondering what we can see. What we know in particular places, what we feel what we see what we can share. What we would like to know in those places. Maybe some strange surprises, things to think about.
Imagine a string of pearls, pearls of wisdom along a walk.....Lots of getting on and getting off points, join for all or part. There will be bridges. 
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Territories, Frontiers, Boundaries and Imagination
....a perambulation on the edge of Bath to open 2019
Sunday 6 January 2019
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a circular walk from Twerton Roundhill via Carrs Woodland and Englishcombe castle approx 8 miles
The walk begins on Twerton Roundhill...some kind of marker and territorial view point, a feature within the gaze of slaveowner Beckford and overlooking land owned by the future King Charles the Third, whose royal namesake founded the Royal Africa Company. For the Duchy of Cornwall the cash is still rolling in....
Our walk takes us past the remains of Bath mill owners homes whose predecessors' products were on the ships from Bristol to West Africa and we walk above the railway the profits earned by captured and enslaved people helped fund. So what you may ask? What are our responsibilities in these times? 
Through the remains of a wood planted on an estate razed for a housing development. In and out of boundaries and territories. Places of privilege and places without. What does welcome mean?
Across the Wansdyke barely a memory in the earth, we play hide and seek with the tip of the Roundhill on old country lanes. 
still walking in Beckford's gaze, speculating on the mindset of slaveowners and coalowners and how racism runs deep and has so masked the exploitation by the holders of power. Enlisting the exploited in exploiting their fellow humans for the profit of the powerful. Homophobic and fascist grafitti in the wood, trees bleed and scar. We hurt ourselves.
Ghost stairs in the wood a place where once there was a fine mansion, home of the millowner, home of the coalowner, the pit reputedly kept open to claim the compensation when the miners were starved back to work. The miners got nothing. Who would have thought it in Bath? |
walking as conscientious objectors to
Bath's official heritage 
A great winters walk, thought provocations, strong discussion. The passing of the old year, climate change, social justice. Ideas set off as we walk questioning the space and our feelings walking through some of most underprivileged wards of the city. With the best views. Comments and sketches from the note books continue the conversation
Thoughtful and powerful responses to a walk in the edge of the enchanted city, walking 'as conscientious objectors' to the official heritage as one walker put it. In an email she continued:
I was particularly struck by several separate discussions we ended up having about burials and bones. I think we might have started talking about the trunk of the trees in the Carr’s Woodland Walk reminding someone of the trunk of elephants. And then a discussion about elephants and burying their dead...revisiting bones. We were interested in cultures in Mexico where the dead are celebrated – and flowers and offerings decorated skulls. The focus on the dead not being forgotten. And again in another conversation as we walked and talked...recalling the burial mound of the Workhouse in Bath. The forgotten voices of those buried and lost in Bath. I was left with the image ( after our discussions about Art Galleries and Portraits of Wealthy Landowners) of a wealthy landowner standing on a mound...like the Work House burial site at Bath. Kind of like climbing on the bones of the slaves and this includes the lives lost in the mines. ...One of my favourite writers Saramago talks about citizenship - “ we have an obligation to intervene and become involved.” 
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Traversing Beckford's Gaze:
from Twerton Roundhill to Kelston Round Hill
Sunday 2 December 2018
walking-with prospects, viewpoints and inheritance
pic: Niki Jewett
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A walk with an extension either 8 mile loop or 12mile loop from Bear Hotel,BA2 3AQ (all mileage approx)
An all day walk traversing Beckford's Gaze from Twerton Roundhill to Kelston Round Hill. William Beckford described the view from his tower on Lansdown, Bath as the finest prospect in Europe. Plenty of ups and downs to get our bodies working and thinking. A good walk, good people, great views and interesting conversation. A continuation of the Sweet Waters conversation.
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Ideas of prospect and gaze, and Europe, what that means for us walking and looking back from across, below and along, different angles, returning the look. Beckford, once the wealthiest commoner in England, was the third generation of his family to own sugar plantations on Jamaica and the people who worked them. All his wealth was derived from the work of enslaved people. None of the wealth returned to Jamaica..
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Our walk takes us through Twerton and across the River Avon where goods were produced to be sold in exchange for captured people in West Africa, up past the house where Haille Selassie lived and eventually to Kelston Round Hill where we may have more views down the River Avon and across to the Bristol Channel, where the slave ships came and went.
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Heather, one of the walkers Traversing Beckford's Gaze shares some thoughts and reminiscences inspired by the walk this attached file. Click to download.
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Steps to Heaven........an instant requiem:
walking-with memory, poetry and the Workhouse dead
A circular walk from Bath Abbey to the Bath Workhouse burial ground and back
Starting at corner of Abbey St and York St beside the Roman Baths, the site of the offices of Bath's Board of Guardians
we walked to the former Bath Union Workhouse and on to its burial ground
Starting at corner of Abbey St and York St beside the Roman Baths, the site of the offices of Bath's Board of Guardians
we walked to the former Bath Union Workhouse and on to its burial ground
The walk included a premiere performance by John Payne of his cycle of Workhouse poems.
Over a slow three hour walk we made an instant requiem. Musicians greeted us at the field.
This walk continues the process of raising awareness about the Workhouse Burial Ground considering the lives and stories buried there and what that field has to tell us now.
Over a slow three hour walk we made an instant requiem. Musicians greeted us at the field.
This walk continues the process of raising awareness about the Workhouse Burial Ground considering the lives and stories buried there and what that field has to tell us now.
image courtesy http://www.kypwest.org.uk/
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The Union Workhouse still stands high above the city, the birthplace of many Bathonians when it was St Martin’s Hospital. Rock ‘n’ Roll hero, Eddie Cochrane (Three Steps to Heaven) died there following a car crash, Eddie has a plaque, even though his body was flown back to the US.
Over 3000 Bath residents died in poverty there when it was the Bath Workhouse, they were buried in the nearby field.. There is no memorial to them. The walk arrives at that field at about 14.00 on Saturday 22 September. Do join us, on foot or online @walknowlive #workhousewalks
Over 3000 Bath residents died in poverty there when it was the Bath Workhouse, they were buried in the nearby field.. There is no memorial to them. The walk arrives at that field at about 14.00 on Saturday 22 September. Do join us, on foot or online @walknowlive #workhousewalks
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The walk continues a walking-with on poverty and responsibility that began with a series of walks in the summer of 2017 in connections with the Museum of Bath at Work exhibition about the Bath Union Workhouse, researched by John Payne. All the social media trails of the walks are combined below
A Bathscape Walking Festival walk
Walkers are actively encouraged to use notebooks, mobile devices and gather sound and photographs. There will be poetry readings along the way and an invitation to write your own. Together we will try to make something respecting the dead in the Workhouse Burial Ground. This are creative walks, you can take part in many different ways and you are welcome to just walk.
A Walk for the End of Holidays...
along a once working river to the city farm
Walking with questions of poverty, memory and social justice, considering how a city buries its past.
Sunday 2 September 10.00-14.00 approx
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A walk along the River Avon
as summer comes to an end. It could be bucolic even elegiac. Thinking about work and listening for the ghosts of workplaces that no longer exist. We will follow the river round to the old quays and timber yards, passing former factories and the sites of huge engineering works. Walking through erased Victorian slums. Noticing absences and sense-ing presences.... wondering what it means for us now. Maybe see an otter or kingfisher! Then in a loop we will walk up to Bath's City Farm where we will stop for a rest at the cafe before returning to the city by way of the old railway line. 
North quay excavations Avon Street, Bath 2016.
Slums cleared for the second time.
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Meet: 10.00 below Pulteney Bridge
at the bottom of the stone steps overlooking the weir. Arrive: 12.30 (approx) Bath City Farm Return 14.00 Bath Bus Station 
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East of Bath:
out of the enchanted garden looking towards ancient views
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Interesting conversations and thoughtful moments, not a history walk but what we made of it.
The walkers mutinied. We came back on the boat. A strange tropical journey on the river dreaming drifting down the Amazon, the Congo...the great grey green greasey Avon. Imagining the stink of the city of Bath as we approached the bridges and darknesses of the old slaughter houses and leather works. Where dead babies once washed up at the bottom of the weir. East of Eden when the wind blows from the West was more than a place with knowledge. Here the piss settled in the night soil, here the black earth matured, soon for the gunpowder mills. Looking back at Beckford. Smelling it.
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Walking with questions.....
where does the idea of east of eden take us? Leaving the pleasure garden behind and along the canal we eventually arrive on top of Solsbury Hill. What views will this offer looking back at the enchanted city? Down into the valley we will traverse another (dis)enchanted garden, the remains of the Suffragettes arboretum at the back of Eagle House. 
A further climb did not take us back into Beckford's gaze, no return on the old straight track. We were already in his gaze., a return on the river was the only way.
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Walking slowly in an enchanted landscape
walking-with time and space
A walk on footpaths in parkland, mainly on gravel tracks and a field.. One short steep descent.
We walk for part of the time very slowly listening without talking.... writing and sketching if you wish as you move. Stops and talking/sharing space, opportunities to sketch, take photographs etc Some possibly factual information is offered, walkers shared knowledge and thoughts. Walking-with ourselves and each other and seeing what happens as we know more....enchantment and disenchantment. Part of the walk is within Beckford's gaze. |
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A story of a woman's black straw hat, found by a boy on Hampton Rocks and taken to the police. The hat in one of the pictures in the exhibition set the story off. A tale of bloody linen and a broken gold watch, the linen embroidered with AH Kerry, the gold watch repaired, is auctioned off. According ton the local newspaper, a man was seen agitated walking in the area without his hat.
Two boys find a body in a cave two years later, Dismembered and decayed. A mystery. The woman is identified as a maid, who had disappeared two years before. The watch is traced, the initials on the bloodstained cloth were those of her employer in at Cheriton House, Bath. The police have lost the black straw hat. 
https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/16728648710
Two boys playing in the old quarry caves find the body. Men decided her fate. Elsie Adeline Luke 'Wilkie' . We thought about that maid and all the other women of the enchanted city in the years before the vote. Standing where once a warm sea was home to ancient creatures, our ancestors, and slowly deposited that rock.
,,Above the holes left when the 450 million year old rock was hacked out for canals and palaces, a golf course. In 1914 it was a men only golf club, Suffragettes dug up the 'link's and left slogans on luggage tags on the flags and golf irons. Campaigning for the vote. More than a century after their action and less than a century since an equal franchise we luggage tagged the bushes alongside the golf course. Slogans of solidarity for the passer by and the curious golfer.
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Collected Shadows:
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Cycles of war... still in Beckford's sight:
old wars and stolen gold
Sunday April 1 Circular Walk approx 8 miles
Bangs and whooshes, memories of blood, guts, urine and the slave trade. Dramatic views across Beckfords 'prospect'. Easter eggs on the runway where war planes took off to light up targets, some returned. A gunpowder mill owned by slaveowners. We shared thoughts on the escalation of conflict and the exercise of power in West Africa fuelled with materials produced on Bath's back door. With Bath's best Black Soil. This was no Easter egg trail, and we did not see any rabbits. No legs. 
A walk immersed in layers of lives, a thankful village its wealth gained perhaps from the manufacture of the lethal product from which their sons and daughters were spared.
Knarled split trees marking ancient wells, workers clothes hanging like bodies from the scaffold, the ground not perhaps as slippery as I had feared but all the rest as tangled and slippery as could be expected! Trusting the process at least.
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From almost outside Beckfords Tower east into the valley and up to a disused World War Two airfield then looping back round passing a Civil War battlefield and the place where the Brinks Mat gold was melted down. We returned to the Lansdown Park and Ride where we began. A circular story of gold, greed and body fluids!
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Walking into Beckford's Gaze: considering legacies
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Circular Walk approx 7 miles
A spring walk beginning on the river where once there were wool and brass mills, across the edge of the city and up to Bath's reluctant monument to slave-generated wealth, Beckford's Tower. From here he said he commanded the finest prospect in Europe. We wont be visiting this time we may glimpse a ghost of that view from below. We walk on and make our way down via Kelston Roundhill to the river. 
A continuing exploration of the undersides and othersides of the enchanted city of Bath from a creative and social justice perspective. Take part on foot or onlineline @walknowlive #walknow
check out the draft route here: http://my.viewranger.com/route/details/MTY4MDIwMw==
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Mirror in the Bath(room) Returning the gaze of the city.
walking where mammoths trod and dolphins swam
looking into the mirror, considering Beckford's gaze,
looking back 
on the playing fields, once the city's rubbish tip once the gravel pit for the Victoria brick works that produced bricks so hard that even today they blunt the sharpest drill bit in seconds. Here before Beckford looked out was the bed of a warm river and here a dolphin lost its way or just grew old. Gravel beds hold a story of glaciers and their watery end, mammoths followed and left their teeth. And people chipped flints to perfection.
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Sunday 4 Feb leaving at 10.00 a circular walk
From the river out into the country and back. Approx 7 miles. We begin and end at the old canal bridge to Weston island outside the Locksbrook Inn, formerly the much loved Dolphin. Here there were mills, we'll listen again for the ghosts.
Up the hill to explore spaces that city visitors rarely visit and discover views and open spaces enjoyed by those who generated the city's wealth. Shifting sands and other lives Walking to reflect on all this, to sense and decipher boundaries and feel the elements. Moments to stop and talk, sketch, write, reflect; time to be with our thoughts in the sounds around us, to be bodies alive. A moment on the hill being the eyes in the mirror. 
here's the social media trail of the walk
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The Underside of Bath
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....a short winter walk to start the year....
From the Bath Workhouse Burial Ground. A 6 mile walk in the underside of Bath taking in some views and a few interesting relics A further take on the Workhouse Walks...thinking about poverty and responsibilities in a good society, Considering remembering and forgetting, decay and erosion and as we return with our visual sense restricted through the tunnels thinking and feeling what our senses sense. Here's the route http://my.viewranger.com/route/details/MTYxNjI4Ng%3D%3D A walk sense-ing the past, the deep past in the underside of the city. We walk under spaces left by quarrying towards a city built from the stone that once filled those spaces....absence and presence. 
social media trail from Viewranger
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Short and longer creative performative walks along the River Avon between Bath and Bristol sensing legacies of slave-ownership.
Wayfaring in obscured histories, reflecting on flow, cycle and memory; alert for sounds, voices, tears, sweat and blood suspended in the water. Opportunities to gather sound, and images, sketch, share talk and think. Its not a history walk, we will make it what we make it. Its about us |
Sweet Waters: the walks
completed June 2017
as part of Bath Festival Fringe, Fringe Arts Bath and Festival of Nature Sweet Waters: Soundings
at Saltford Brass Mill October 2017
an audio and video installation of documentation and new work working with materials gathered on the walks |
Workhouse Walks:
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On 23 July 1856, the boys from the Bath Workhouse, with their schoolmaster William Winkworth, completed a circular walk of 16 miles from the Workhouse around the northern fringes of Bath. These walks are an attempt to explore on foot and with our bodies that journey and to examine the themes which may emerge as we reflect on those times from these times The first walk begins at the workhouse, the last returns us. In July we walked as close as possible to the route they took in 1856. This project is developed in collaboration with Dr John Payne whose exhibition ‘Workhouse to Hospital’ at the Museum of Bath at Work closes at the end of September.
This cycle of walks completed in September, check out the Project page for developments. New walks to be confirmed for 2018 |
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Sweet Waters:
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Three Free Walks. Bath Festival Fringe. Fringe Arts Bath.
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...sensing the legacies of slavery and slave ownership in Bath and along the River Avon. An all day walk.
44AD…the Time Machine 4 Abbey St, Bath BA1 1NN
The Time Machine was curated by alldaybreakfast 27 May - 12 June 2016 part of Fringe Arts Bath Selected artists, performers, writers, musicians and scientists will have a day to play in the Time Machine. Their responses will be filmed to create a concomitant, evolving and cohesive multilayered durational installation. |
Walking not Drowning
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Utopia/Dystopia:in conversation
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1330 for 1400 - 1700 Lecture Theatre Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe Guest speakers include: Kate Rigby, the newly appointed Professor of Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University and author of Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe; Linda Williams, a specialist on human-animal relations, climate change and mass species extinction; and Rachel Withers, writer and critic, focussing on art and ideas. Walk2: Wayfaring in the Enchanted City 17.00 The conversation continues in the café, online and on foot walking through the heart of utopian Bath, approx 19.00 arriving at “Bath’s Artisan Quarter” for exhibitions and the utopian/dystopian pub, The Bell, in Walcot Street. Walk and share on social media. Follow and contribute @walknowlive and #walknow |
Meet at: Bath School of Art and Design
Bath School of Art and Design
Bath School of Art and Design
Sion Hill, Lansdown BA1 5SF utopia:dystopia A series of exhibitions and events inspired by the 500th anniversary of the publication of Utopia, Thomas More's reflections on the concept of an ideal society |
Gallery
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