Sharp teeth and big cats

Through the wood of ancient trees

progress on The Wild Inside

remembering lost landscapes

In 1901, a young man working with his father in Victory Quarry in Dove Holes found some bones among the broken rubble after an explosion. Master Hick took his find to Buxton Museum where the curator, Mr Hill, referred them to Professor Boyd Dawkins at Manchester University. Homotherium sainzelli has more recently been reclassified as H. crenatidens but the scimitar-toothed cats of Derbyshire had growled into the light for the first time in a million years. (More information here)

Master Hicks (we don't know his first name) found some bones

Take away

Pubs and bars and shops.

imagining ancient landscapes

Take away

Houses and

Roads and

Streetlights and

Electricity and

Cars and

Gardens and

Watches and

Car parks and all our

Technology.

Take away

Dogs and

Cats and

Pet rabbits and

Hamsters.

Take away

Takeaways.

Take away

People.*

As part of the BM125 project for Buxton Museum and Art Gallery, the scimitar-toothed cats have been woken again. Artist Sean Harris has been animating cats running through a world of dreams and shifting shapes. Children from Dove Holes and Peak Dale Primary Schools have helped here, adding movement with the slow, careful precision of stop-motion animation, to the film and helping write the words that are becoming part of the score 

Sean is planning a world of Homotherium information

And we’ll take you over the hills,

 We’ll take you over the stream,

We’ll take you through the wood of ancient trees,

And there’ll you’ll see what you may see.

For over the hills and far away

That is where the sabre-tooths lay

                                                             

For now, the animation is still animating quietly in the background and recorded words are being edited but while those elements are brewing, we wanted to keep those cats running in our imaginations.

We’ll take you

Up and away and over the hills where the horses run

And there,

Beneath the rocks,

Between the hills,

There in a cave, a sabre-tooth waits

And watches the geese come in to land.

With the school work (and an event at the Great Rocks Club in Peak Dale) we have been asking people to reflect upon the animals that lived here once. In school we made landscapes that those animals might have lived in and at the Club we added finger puppet ancient mammals to the mix.

We called this work "the Wild Inside", because....

 

Geese

They no longer run over our hills here

But they run in our hearts

Hooves and paws and claws and feet

Running, roaming, walking, prowling,

Filling our dreams with excitement and screams.

We lost the hunters but we keep them alive in our hearts

We hold the Wild

Inside

With many thanks to our artists and friends at 

Dove Holes and Peak Dale Primary Schools, 

to the Great Rocks Club and to Sean 

for giving us all the reason to do this!

*The lines are extracts from our collective poem “The Wild Inside”