Cold water and icy rocks: children's adventure stories

Between cold water and icy rocks: 

adventures in the Moorlands

Hollinsclough Cof E Academy

Come with us,

Let us take you on a journey

Into the lost worlds of Hollinsclough.

 

c/o Kieran Metcalfe

We started with old stories, with Gawain and the Green Knight, with tales of foxes and rabbits and crows. Then we shook it all up, added our favourite places, seasoned with heroes and villains and wonderful animals, stirred in a spoonful of treasures shook it all about a bit and let everything to ferment

HollinscloughC of E Academy is a small school resting on the land between the headwaters of the Dove and the Manifold Rivers and under the shadow of Axe Edge. And I was there as part of a project for Borderland Voices with funding from South WestPeak Landscape Partnership to use old stories to inspire new responses to the aldnscape and communities of the Staffordshire Moorlands

It all got a bit carried away….

Lud's Church

We peer down deep, dark, creepy holes, and see a glowing eye,

And see an awful hand reaching out with a deadly pie,

And on through a gorge, under a starry, cloudy sky

To a mysterious temple where legends live,

Until at last we

Sit beside an old crumbling castle

Waiting for the pig ghosts to come snuffling through the woods,

The pig ghosts that will haunt us.

We gathered ideas grew a story poem for each class then left individual stories for children to pursue: there were tales of nightmares and reindeer, and rabbits. There was at least one flying carpet and the castle that we can’t find any more

c/o James Lampard

Where a lonely owl calls,

A long empty voice

Like the ghosts of lost children,

Echoing through the forest,

As the owl swoops between the trees,

Flies through the arches of the old bridge,

And disappears.

Then we recorded the poems…..

So can we invite you to

Find a hare who sits on a stone in the sunshine,

Follow the hare as it leaps through the grass,

Follow the hare over the field where the rabbits play,

Hopping home to the castle where they dig burrows under the stone.

And visit some of our poem slideshows….

Ancient animals of the Moorlands: Badger class,(4 – 7 years old)

Ancient animals, round

Between coldwater and icy rocks, Foxes Class ( 8 – 12 years old)

The old woman round

An extra nightmare

The voices are those of some of the children who wrote the pieces

With many thanks

to all our artists, storytellers and poets

to Borderland voices and South West Peak

and to James Lampard, HelenKennedy 

and Kieran Metcalfe for the use of their photos 

(the Lud's Church image is my own)

c/o Helen Kennedy