Round Oak Piece

Making the most of this week before my next Semester starts at art school, I decided to stay home today and walk my local patch. More snow fell last night so there is a good three inches still laying. Grateful for my long-johns and gore-tex boots I trudge off through the scrunchy snow for a woodland walk.

The path begins a few hundred metres from my front door, at Holden's Firs Bronze Age barrow cemetery. It is incredible to think that there were people living and being buried on this site during the time of the biblical patriarchs. What was this landscape like back then? Not a managed conifer plantation but probably oak forest with areas cleared for agriculture.

Much of the land in this area is now owned by the Englefield Estate,which has been in the ownership of the same family since 1603. Mostly down to managed woodland, with gravel extraction and timber being the main products, along with shooting and riding. The heir of the Estate is also the local Tory MP - it was ever thus! However, the Estate is well-managed for wildlife conservation and public access. A network of maintained footpaths criss-crosses the woodland allowing local people to enjoy the woods.

(Some optimistic Gorse is in flower beneath the snow.)

I am heading for Round Oak Piece, about a mile away; one of my local birding spots. In the summer this is one of the best places in Berkshire to see and experience the nocturnal appearances of Nightjar and Woodcock at close-quarters and I am to be found as dusk falls, being bitten to bits by midges and watching these wonderful birds on the wing. The scene is very different today, under thick snow. The tracks of a couple on intrepid dog-walkers and several deer are impressed in the snow ahead of me. Probably our native Roe Deer.

I am a member of contemporary art group arjeea21. We have an exhibition coming up next month, in Bracknell, where I will be showing two or three pieces of work. I have to think about my biographical details to send to Robert, the curator, for inclusion in the publicity. I'm thinking about this as I walk.

(Time to do a quick sketch - un-gloving my fingers; today's tally of bird species scribbled across the top as usual.)

(Two Goldcrests are feeding in the tops of the pine trees, dropping down occasionally to rummage in the bracken in their search for food. The UK's smallest bird, neat, greenish and capped with bright yellow, they are always a welcome sight. It is a wonder they survive these cold winters but they seem to do okay.)

My artist's statement should give an indication of the type of work I'm doing. That's quite tricky as I seem to diversify with every new project... I settle on a form of words:

"Peter Driver’s practice employs drawing, painting, printmaking, and other media to explore everyday objects, poetic and societal themes and embodied experience of local landscapes. Formal concerns include compositional strategies, uses of text and language within visual artworks, and human interaction with landscape.

Peter is studying BA Fine Art at Winchester School of Art.  He lives and works in Berkshire and exhibits regularly with arjeea21."

That just about does it.

(My first Treecreeper of the year drops down to the base of its next tree-trunk. Working it's way up the trunk with agile feet, it's white belly contrasting against the bark, with its elegant curved bill it seeks whatever insects or grubs are lurking in the crevices.)

(The Oval Pond is iced-over. Quite a large pond, it drains through a sluice into a small stream through the woods. It is a useful water-source for wildlife and regularly attracts Little Grebe, Mandarin and Mallard ducks as well as the resident Moorhens. There is not a sign of any of them today but the trees above the stream are full of the peeps and seeps of Coal Tit. The star bird of today's walk; Coal Tits are like a sepia-toned miniature Great Tit with a neat black cap and broad white strip from crown to nape, their warm buff tones appear more colourful than usual today against the snow-laden branches.)

I am pleased to note that there is ice-free water at the marshy end of the pond, as well as in the stream below the sluice so the wildlife have access to drinking water.

Heading for home I reflect on how this use of the land by one rich Estate enables a range of leisure uses for the local population. There is a sense of benign patronage in this relationship. I am not sure how to engage with what feels in some ways like a throw-back to the feudal system. I am grateful for the opportunity to access this landscape. There are over 500 hectares of scheduled ancient woodland within the estate and a sense of responsible stewardship pervades all the work that goes on here. As a council estate kid, only two generations away from the Victorian workhouse, I carry a sense of my class but it does not define me. I wonder if the weight of 'stewardship' is a heavy burden for the responsible rich.

(Only 24 species seen today. That is to be expected on a walk without a significant water-course or wetland habitat).

Walking the 'green block' in the snow

On the second day of being practically snowed-in at home in our village in West Berkshire, I decided it was time to get out and get some fresh air. We have a 'green block' walk of about two and a half miles which we do from our house fairly regularly. It is all on tarmac lanes and which form a loop around wooded farmland. The Berkshire/Hampshire border bisects the circuit so half of the walk is in each county. Snow was laying about 3 inches deep, with some drifting. 

Keeping a note in my sketchbook of the bird species observed as I walked, I began thinking about something I'd read last night by McKenzie Wark, in his introduction to The Beach Beneath the Street: the everyday life and glorious times of the Situationist International:

     "We are bored of this planet. It has seen better centuries, and the promise of better times to come eludes us. The possibilities of this world, in these times, seem dismal and dull. All it offers at best is spectacles of disintegration. Capitalism or barbarism, those are the choices. This is an epoch governed by this blackmail: either more and more of the same, or the end times. Or so they say. We don't buy it. It's time to start scheming on how to leave this century."

(Nuthatch calling.)

This was backed up this morning in a report by Oxfam reported on Radio 4. They had calculated that the richest one hundred people in the world could resolve world poverty four-times over from their personal wealth. What on earth that could mean in practice is another issue - but for how much longer will the poor majority continue to tolerate the glaring injustice of the accumulative Capitalist system?

(Sparrowhawk over. Flying like an arrow into a row of trees across the snowy field.  The lattice pattern of tree-scattered hedgerows describe the contours of the fields, receding in aerial perspective towards the horizon.)

I remember Jurgen Moltmann said something interestingly related to this train of thought in his interview in Third Way Magazine last year: 

      "The Occupy Movement is a bourgeois youth movement but where we are really suffering is in Africa and Asia - if you want to learn the power of hope, go to these miserable quarters of humankind. The rich don't have hope, they have only anxiety because they have something to lose, but those who have nothing to lose but their chains, as Marx said once, have real hope in an alternative future.
"Today I think we need a movement to liberate nature from suffering and violence and injustice. I think humankind will learn either through insight or through catastrophe, and I think most of the people in the First World are waiting for the next catastrophe".


(Time to stop and make a quick sketch of the snow-covered field and the tree-line - looking from Berkshire across to Hampshire. Behind me, children and youths with sledges are playing on the steep hill into a dip beyond which is the village. A flock of seven Fieldfares overhead; handsome winter thrushes) 

(A Red Kite approaching at tree-top level, hanging majestically on the air, it's wings tilting and adjusting constantly - the forked-tail twisting like a rudder, the orange-tan and grey patterns of its plumage clear in my Leica Ultravid binoculars.)

We were talking about this in the run up to the end of 2012, when some cranky new-agers and other suggestible people thought the end of the world might be about to dawn. It seems easier, we concluded, for people to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of the Capitalist economic-system. But it will end and we need to be imagining a better future than the miserable barbarism that is threatened by those who have too much to lose.

(29 bird species spotted on a walk of about an hour and a half - the snow is falling again, with a cold wind making it slightly too uncomfortable to make any more sketches).