Our occasional series of features, ‘A Walk in the Woods’ returns with a visit to Yorkshire Sculpture Park, a mysterious place to explore on a foggy day.
AT 500-acres, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) is the largest of its kind in Europe. On a clear day, looking north across the estate from ‘Peter’s Fold’ (2021) at the top of Longside pasture, one can expect to see expansive views across the valley of fields, rolling hillside pastures, woodlands, copses and standards, lakes and formal gardens below the visitor centre.
Today is not that day. Instead, head of estates and projects Mark Chesman, marketing and PR assistant Dominique Lynch and myself are enveloped in a mid-morning fog. The distant whoosh of traffic on the M1 plays like an eerie backing track of a film in which even the tree crowns close to this sculptural installation are rendered only as vague apparitions.
’Peter’s Fold’, a dry-stone wall embracing the graze line of a lime tree crown, was gifted to the park by the artist Andy Goldsworthy to commemorate the retirement of the park’s founding director Sir Peter Murray CBE. Mark explains: “Andy identified this tree because of its graze-line and designed the wall to follow the edge of the canopy at that height. It is a feature that invites you in to enjoy the space beneath it.”
We enter that space. Surprisingly, it is a natural cocoon where all is silent and nothing stirs. A snap. Mark removes an errant twig, saying: “Lime trees are pretty vigorous. We were in here only three or four weeks ago, maintaining the grazing line by hand.”
The next two hours of this walk will be punctuated by a few of these surprising moments. In the interests of full disclosure, given Mark’s and Dominique’s time constraints and my sprained ankle, we drive much of the site in a shared fleet vehicle, walking where the clay soil terrain is flat.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) is an independent registered charity and accredited museum and art gallery, showcasing works by British and international artists in both outdoor and indoor exhibition spaces. With a changing display of around 100 artworks outdoors, any visitor walking through this landscape would be hard pressed not to discover works by Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Damien Hirst or site-specific installations by James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy and David Nash, to name but a few.
That the park is here at all is down to Sir Peter Murray, whose vision when lecturing at the college housed in Bretton Hall, was of setting art in this landscape. His idea was realised in 1977 with an initial grant of £1,000 from Arts Council England.
Driving back down Longside, recumbent cattle appear especially doleful as they stare towards the ethereal crowns of mature standards, a Scots pine windblown and uprooted and fenced-off young oaks and lime planted four years ago. “The protective timber fences came from Earnshaws, who also carry out high-level tree surgery around the Park,” says Mark. His team work only at ground level.
At the bottom of the slope, ‘Network’ (Thomas J Price, 2013), a giant man forever staring at his phone, guards this southern track where it meets Cascade Bridge. The bridge is the crossing point between Upper and Lower Lakes (a man-made centrepiece of the hall’s old pleasure grounds) and into Lower Park. From there, visitors follow footpaths across the country park or back up the slope to the learning centre and visitor centre, where we began our tour.
Last year, YSP welcomed around 380,000 visitors. Most would have begun their adventure as we did, on the ‘Walk of Art’, a pavement engraved with the names of paying supporters that leads to the visitor centre. Before our tour, the smell of hot breakfasts and percolating coffee drifting down from the first floor Kitchen Café was almost irresistible.
Joining YSP in 2005 as a member of the grounds staff, Mark now heads up an estate team of eight. He is responsible for all landscaping, heritage and ecology works throughout the park. “Since 1977, the park has slowly taken on responsibility for more of the land from the Bretton Estate,” he says. From the first acquisition (a small area close to what is now the learning centre) in 1977, “we added the country park (local nature reserve), then the pleasure grounds (Lower Park and lakes), which we began managing ourselves in 2011.”
In 2011, in conjunction with Natural England and old Ordinance Survey maps, the estate team restored the historic vista from Bretton Hall across Lower Lake to Menagerie Wood. Restoration included removing acres of self-set willow and reducing Menagerie Woods by 40 per cent. Preserving the vista “will be about monitoring and maintaining the designed landscape, although it is getting to the point where it’s ready for another thin.”
Surrounding Bretton Hall, Lower Park, a Grade II-listed historic park and garden contains a number of sculptures and ornamental standard trees, including a cedar of Lebanon with limbs lost to snow damage. Most of the trees lost during the last 5–10 years have been replanted and new species introduced, such as tulip trees and a yellow buckeye. Fallen timbers are often left in situ for habitat, although artists-in-residence do incorporate such timbers within their sculptures. Leilah Babirye is currently working with fallen beech for an exhibition in the Weston Gallery.
YSP contains 100 acres of woodlands, approximately 1,400 trees managed under a woodland plan written by consultants Enviroscope. All are surveyed by consultants Tree and Woodland. “We have just completed ‘high priority’ works and are costing up ‘medium priority’ works for safety and for longevity.”
“There are a many formal paths, but because of the way the sculptures are placed, there is open access across the entire estate,” says Mark. “For longevity, in Lower Park, we (the in-house team) have decompacted several root zones, removing the turf, forking through the compacted earth and spreading over a heavy mulch (recycled green waste from a local depot to reduce its carbon footprint) to aerate the soil and facilitate an exchange of air and nutrients.”
For urgent decompaction works in the country park, Terrain Aeration brought in bespoke equipment, “hammering a metal probe into the ground though which they fired compressed air
to create fissures. You could see the ground lift. They then filled all the holes with dried seaweed mixture.”
Bordering Lower Park, both (dammed) Lower Lake and Upper Lake are classed as reservoirs and managed by Wakefield Council. Both are also local wildlife sites for Barnsley and Wakefield. While we do not see any kingfishers, there are plenty of swans, egrets and gulls paddling around Lower Lake’s island heronry.
Surrounding Upper Lake, the historic woodlands (managed as deciduous) contain a mix of beech, oak, horse chestnut, sweet chestnut, with a small amount of larch, redwood and fir. “It’s about variety. We are managing for amenity, so we don’t need to remove them (conifer).”
On Upper Lake’s northern shore, a wide path winds through Bridge Royd Wood. A 350-year-old beech tree shelters the ground where swathes of bluebells display each May. A mixed-species canopy shelters ‘Idee di Pietra: Olmo’ (Giuseppe Penone, 2008), a bronze tree cradling a stone. “Where sculptures are placed in the woods or below trees, we do perform additional surveys, because our visitors are drawn beneath those trees.”
A neo-classical 19th-century summer house is one of several follies originally built for the amusement of hall residents and their guests. Behind it, the dark green of deliberately planted yew makes the blonde stonework ‘pop’. An obelisk. A straight and stately 200-year-old sweet chestnut. A younger redwood planted sometime past.
In small clearings, tall deadwood left standing for biodiversity can appear as sculptural in form as some of the installations. Antony Gormley’s curvy torso ‘One and Other’ (2000) makes use of a smaller standing deadwood stem that was only recently identified for felling. “The sculpture has moved three or four times already, each proposed site first being assessed by the artist. It will stay here as long as the deadwood can sustain it. Having that good relationship with an artist is vital, given that we work with emerging artists right through to when they become established.”
Some gaps left in the understory are the result of rhododendron removal. Aided by eight long-term volunteers, the grounds team cleared more than two acres. “For large-scale tasks like removing ponticum, Himalayan balsam or pathway work, large numbers help significantly.” In wetter areas near the lake, Himalayan balsam is staging a pink-flowering return.
Both lakes were dug out by hand in the 1760s. A dam was built to maintain healthy water levels and the majority of the water flowing east-to-west in the River Dearne was rerouted through the Cut, a purpose-built canal that rejoins the river’s original path below Lower Lake’s Dam Head Bridge. In 2010, the removal of self-set trees and scrub rectified the canal’s previously sluggish flow.
The headwaters of Upper Lake once accommodated a series of islands that were used for staging firework displays for the hall residents and their guests, who would watch them while floating in boats. The space between islands is now mostly silted up and colonised with reeds, providing new habitat for birds. A landlocked mossy-roofed boathouse containing ‘Eddy’ (JocJonJosch, 2014), a boat with three oars, is at least 20-metres from the current shoreline. Dominique says, “The old boat house reminds you that this was once open water.”
On the south side of Upper Lake, Bath Wood grows up steeper slopes that level out towards Cascade Bridge. Water flows down culverts into the lake. “During intense periods of rainfall,
pathways wash away. The 18th-century culverts are always in need of repair and modification.” The lake is an algal green, courtesy of the warm summer.
A steep lakeside slope supports a 250-year-old beech that blew over last winter. Mark says that storms are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change. “We have half a dozen a year, losing five or six mature trees each time to windblow. Usually, we would bring this down in sections. Because of its location, if we remove the branches, it will roll and that is not safe, so it will stay.”
The estates team assesses which trees have been lost and restock every winter. New plantings generally have a specific focus. This year it is planting standard trees, field-grown by Beardsworths, in the parkland and wood pasture. “YSP is supported (funded) as an arts organisation. Not many museums or galleries are custodians of woodlands.”
This circumnavigation of Upper Lake ends at ‘Silence: Alone in a World of Wounds’ (Heather Peak and Ivan Morrison, 2021). This slowly decomposing circle of timber, thatch and packed earth (made to look like concrete) set amid a birch tree stand is the artist’s answer to the Oak Project’s question, ‘Can art save us from extinction?’. YSP’s technical team helped to create the installation over several months, using materials sourced from the Bretton Estate and the artists’ own woodland. Dominique says, “The installation encourages visitors to listen and to silently consider their natural surroundings. It will degrade over time leaving a ring, like we find today from ancient civilisations.”
Along the northern edge of Lower Lake, the wildflower meadow landscaping around ‘Gold Lame’ (Tony Heaton, 2014), a vertical gold Robin Reliant, has yet to take. Elsewhere, copses of birch, horse chestnut and willow dot the embankment.
Unexpectedly, David Nash’s ‘49 Square’ (2013), 49 Himalayan birch trees (planted in rows of 7x7 to eventually form a white cube) comes into view. Called a ‘growing sculpture,’ the trees have grown considerably since first photographed as whips, mostly obscured by long protective tubes.
In an interview, Nash cited one inspiration for his ‘growing works’ as hearing that the British navy had planted oaks in the 1800s to build a fleet in the late 20th century.
“These trees are maintained in collaboration with the artist,” says Mark. “Our grounds team are in direct communication with him and his studio. He passes on the method of trimming and visits annually to check on progress.”
An ex-forester, Nash has five installations within the park. All incorporate elements of trees, timber and coal. Opposite ‘49 Square’ is ‘Black Mound’ (2013), differing-sized tree stumps set in concentric circles. All the stumps are blow-torched black.
From the lakeside woodlands, a stroll onto Dam Head Bridge prompts an involuntary expletive. With the fog lifting, across the Cut in the country park, the hand on the far side of the ‘The Virgin Mother’ (Damien Hirst, 2005), a 10-metre sculpture of a pregnant woman, is revealed as holding a flayed buttock. This sculpture looks towards others by Hirst and towards the Weston Gallery, a single-storey building made of FSC-certified Douglas fir with a wild-flower rooftop, winner of the RIBA Yorkshire Award (2019).
In the country park, large leafy oaks grow near the route from Dam Head Bridge back up to the visitor centre (20 minutes had we been walking). “We have 11 veteran oak and beech, fantastic features in the landscape.” One of these oaks is ancient.
There is one last stop to be made solo and on foot. Mark and Dominique have an intern’s presentation to attend. It is the culmination of five weeks of work on the park’s environmental policy and action plan. “She has spoken with all our staff to consider how to improve our carbon footprint and increase biodiversity, to then identify areas where we can improve our environmental credentials.” The estates team, run John Deere Gators, with tipping trailers to transport tools and materials. Four are diesel and two are electric, with the older diesel models being replaced with electric models over time. The diesel fleet vehicles are also slowly being replaced with electric models, as are mowers and power tools. “We can always reduce our energy usage and reuse and recycle what we use on site. It’s important piece of work.”
Solo and fuelled by a scone filled with jam and clotted cream from the visitor centre’s Kitchen Café, a turn around the Bothy Garden reveals (among others) the endless legs and headless torsos of Erwin Wurm’s temporary exhibition ‘The Trap of Truth’. Running in the Formal Gardens until 2024, Daniel Arsham’s ‘Relics in the Landscape’ exhibition contains six ‘future relics’, including ‘Unearthed Bronze Eroded Melpomene’ (2021), a very large head cast in bronze.
From the ‘Walk of Art’ to the mound topped with ‘LOVE (Red Blue Green)’ (Robert Indiana, 1966–1998) at the top of the country park, southerly views across the valley reveal just how much there is to explore here, amid the hillside pastures, lakes and woodlands, and the copses and standards stretching up Longside.
For now, down the hillside, past Henry Moore’s ‘Large Spindle Piece ’(1968), just below ‘Deer Shelter Skyspace’ (James Turrell, 2006), a fenced-off hollowed-out wonder, is exactly where Mark said it would be. Possibly 500-years-old and seemingly unaffected by ADB, this leafy ash is YSP’s oldest ancient tree.
www.ysp.org.uk
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