CROSS CURRICULAR STUDIES - ONE

This section offers ideas for ways in which Andy Goldsworthy's Sheepfolds might be linked to several areas of a school's curriculum.

As well as providing a direct stimulus for students' own artwork in a range of two and three-dimensional media (see section THREE for examples), Sheepfolds could be a useful starting point for a study of local HISTORY.

It is impossible to live or travel anywhere in Cumbria without being aware of sheep and dry stone walling. These two elements have changed the nature of the environment over thousands of years. A study of sheep farming from the Bronze and Iron ages; through Saxon and Viking communities in Cumbria; the establishing of the great Cistercian wool industry of Furness and Holm Cultram Abbeys; to the devastating effects of the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001; will provide an interesting and relevant opportunity to examine ways in which this legacy has formed and is forming our landscape. Add to this the fact that 'most Lakeland walls were built after the Parliamentary Enclosure Act of 1801' (1) and it is clear that Andy Goldsworthy's Sheepfolds can draw our attention to Cumbria’s history and to the notion that this history is, in part, recorded by the marks we leave on the landscape, some short-lived, some more permanent.

Sheepfolds can be seen as a monument to that process, and allude to the changes in farming practice that have arisen from the mechanisation of agriculture and the loss of workforce, to the wider forces of global economics which determine agricultural and industrial patterns in the Cumbrian countryside and towns today. No longer can Kendal boast in its town motto that 'wool is my bread.' (2) These changes have resulted in the loss of many of the walls and other rural structures that now have little use, or are too expensive to maintain. Of an estimated 70,000 miles of dry stone walls in England in 1996, 70% were considered to be showing major signs of deterioration or were becoming, or actually were, derelict. (3) Most of the sheepfolds that once
dotted the fells have become redundant - Andy Goldsworthy is breathing life back into these vernacular structures.

Photographs
Marks on the landscape: Castlerigg Stone Circle; dry stone walls; old hedgerow; ploughed fields.

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