Slow storytelling

On a remote little pocket of hillside in the Yorkshire Dales National Park lies Oughtershaw Moss, a remarkable area of blanket bog. Nethergill Farm, which is home to Oughtershaw Moss, champions this special habitat. Although the Dales Way passes by Nethergill Farm, few people ever venture up onto the bog’s expanse.  

That all changed over a 6-month period in the autumn and winter of 2025/2026. Six special collaborations took place, between an artist and a community group, and culminated in a series of artwork which tell different stories about our peatlands and how people connect to them. Slow storytelling is the culmination of this work. 

Dr. Ali Foxon produced a piece called Seeing Nethergill with Fresh Eyes which focused on the practice of green sketching. She introduced local environmental group, Sustainable Swaledale to the joys and benefits of green sketching, a simple practice that helps people notice, enjoy and appreciate nature.

Juliet Gutch used a different medium with Ilkley Grammar students who worked with laminated, sustainably sourced sapele veneer to produce the piece titled in slow tempo. Each student made a three-dimensional form, inspired by the experience of going onto the bog. With the 15 shapes produced, Juliet created four suspended mobiles which aim to express the theme of interdependence: a community in which every element – like plants in a bog or people in a group – contributes equally to the balance and harmony of the whole. 

Adrian Riley's word box is based around the concept: ‘If the bog could speak what might that language be like?’. Working with asylum seekers and young people from Chapel FM, a community radio station in Leeds, and inspired by shapes, sounds and stories a series of symbols and words were formed. They bear the influence of journeys – from distant countries to the UK, from Leeds into the Dales, from this barn across streams and up the hill, and the journey of this landscape over thousands of years.

Charlotte Wilkinson used a printmaking technique called collagraphy to produce the illustration for our Peaty Dales Way leaflet. The exhibition displays illustrations from this work, which aim to celebrate the landscape’s key features. She hand-produced each collograph plate using textured papers and various materials. Charlotte ran two workshops sharing this technique with the Dales Way association and members from Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority's Young Creatives, who provided inspiration and insight for the leaflets design and content.

Hand-sculpted natural clay pieces created by members of Art 4 All formed Sian Atkinson's piece Held by the land; shaping stillness. The piece is reminiscent of cells within an organism and represents the symbolism of both the vessel of the peatlands as well as the human vessel of experiences. 

Dancing Peat, our final piece was a project of investigation focused on ‘bog wobbling’. After witnessing what happens when you jump on a peatland, Charlie Whinney investigated how this could be measured. Together with Yorkshire Dale Millenium Trust's Youth Environment Forum they tested 3 pole-based apparatus on Oughtershaw Moss.