One Year on Ilkley Moor

Beginning in 2024, the Moors for the Future Partnership, in conjunction with Bradford Council, Rebel Restoration and Friends of Ilkley Moor (FoIM), has undertaken restoration work on Ilkley Moor to restore peatland and improve flood and wildfire resilience.

This work has involved the installation of hundreds of stone, timber, coir and heather dams to stem the flow of water from the moorland. The planting of 200 trees and 31,000 sphagnum plugs also contributes to natural flood management. Bracken and heather have been cut to diversify moorland vegetation, and 36.2 hectares of Sitka spruce have been cleared.

Four fixed-point photography posts have been installed to enable members of the public to document areas of moorland where restoration and re-wetting work has taken place, creating a visual record of the terrain's gradual transformation within the wider landscape.

I came across these posts while making work for an ongoing project. I assumed most people would rest their phones on them rather than use a proper camera, often in less than ideal weather or light conditions. Given how much time I spend on the moor, I felt I could contribute higher quality files that more accurately reflect the character of the landscape, rather than the heavily processed, AI or HDR-enhanced images generated by phones.

As I made these pictures, I realised that although the posts were shifting slightly in the ground over time, their relatively stable positions would allow me to create timelapse videos over a 12-month period. I set a schedule that accommodated my travels abroad and was lucky that the weather more or less played along.

I'm happy with the end result, though the low winter sun made life difficult at a couple of the fixed points, either due to shadows in the frame (Fixed_Point_Ilkley_2), or because I was forced to shoot directly into the sun (Fixed_Point_Ilkley_3). I worked around this by adjusting the time of day I made pictures from these specific posts.

While working on the moor, I also became aware that the restoration efforts are not always well understood, with some people I spoke to complaining about 'boggy' or 'muddy' conditions. Even if the restoration work has affected the footpaths – and I haven't seen evidence that it has – people might be more receptive if they had a better sense of how the work contributes to water resilience and flood mitigation in the valley, as well as its wider significance with regards rural habitats.

With this in mind, I plan to exhibit the films with a grid of prints from their constituent frames, alongside related work, in an attempt to articulate both the landscape's slow transformation and the environmental stakes involved.