A Distant Alarm

Response to Andrew Black’s film, ‘On Clogger Lane’ (2022) shown as part of the artist’s solo exhibition at LUX, London in 2024.

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A village in the Washburn Valley, Yorkshire is lost to the flood. West End at the bed of a reservoir. West End no more.

Tomato-red text on images of bucolic landscapes.

Stories hidden beneath rolling hills. Bodies buried one on top of another. No markers for poor poor souls.

Papers bearing long lists of names. To have a headstone you had to have money.

2008.

154 bodies exhumed. 22 names.

132 with none.

Washburn Valley. Watchmen Valley. Watch. Men. But not Men. Children. Indentured labour till 21. Then freedom. Freedom to do what?

Hidden voices in limestone quarries and legacies swirling at the bottom of the reservoir.

Bleeding sheep. Rams horns. Cattle.

A dead crow lies on the grass, flies swirling around its damp black body. An Elizabethan melody. A spider. A fly. Neolithic cup-and-ring stones.

These hills saw the Iron age. The Bronze age. Guy Fawkes.

A burnished orange moon shines in an inky night sky.

Each voice uncovers another layer of the story. Local residents touch the land, the stones, the waters. An ’in-touchness’ with the past.

Some things lie just below the surface. Deep time and shallow time.

A part of witches. Witches are a ‘bad do’. A dastardly deed. Persecuted and banished. Deeds far worse, have since been done.

An all-seeing eye at the bottom of the reservoir.

Giant, white, silent golf balls on the rolling, green Menwith Hill.

Giant eyes spying upon the land. What secrets lie within?

Dissenting voices hands clasped together in a ring. Wimmin. Women. Raise voices against the bomb.

No to war. Radio static and rumble. No to war. No more bodies beneath these hills.

Their voices rise.

Fall.

The land returns to silence.