Egregore

 

Our work in recent years has looked at the mediators of communal memory; the stories, shared experiences and clues in the land that  help build a common sense of place, of its history and significance.

Still Waters looks at the repositories of those shared histories,  at land and water and the places they meet. At people and their role as agents of place-memory, not as separate observer-recorders but as something acted upon, subject to the same forces as  land and water; indivisible from anything else in the landscape.

And we return to the idea of egregore; spirit of place.

 The Alexanders have fished the Duddon Estuary from Askam for over a century. These are the Alexander Stakes. They mark a claim, a fixed point on the shifting muck and sands,

If you look for a particular kind of relationship between people and water ,they resemble ritual constructions like the Whitby Penny Hedge, or  Ghost walls from the Iron Age. If you look for another, they speak of a greater comfort, less of fear and more of understanding and pragmatism   There are deeper similarities; both are functional, both draw on a reading of the tides, and are founded on knowledge and experience and on rights established over time. 

The difference is that the Stakes will feed you.