A Year in a Field

Yesterday evening I went to a special screening in London of the film A Year in a Field. The event was organised by Stone Club, a brilliant arts and culture collaboration led by artists Matthew Shaw and Lally McBeath, that celebrates the extraordinary monuments left behind in the landscape by our remote ancestors. The event was also attended by the film's director, Christopher Morris, and producer Denzil Monk.

The evening began with another film all about the creation of a new standing stone in a field near Lewes, West Sussex. Known as the Gurdy Stone, this huge 12 feet tall monolith was erected in April 2023 to mark the '50,000 year return of the Green Comet and release of The Hurdy-Gurdy song on Heavenly Recordings.' The people behind the stone are the band Local Psycho - Jem Finer and Jimmy Cauty. You might remember Cauty as a founder member of The KLF - the band that famously staged an art event in which they burned £1 million - and Finer as a member of The Pogues. What's fascinating about the Gurdy Stone is that Cauty and Finer have placed a device under the 1.5 ton shard of Welsh slate that makes their music resonate within the structure of the stone - you can only hear it if you place your skull against the bare rock. It's an extraordinary thing. They are now planning to find a site to erect a Hurdy stone and to create 'a new ley line'.

Here's a film of the stone being placed:

We then got to see A Year in a Field.

Director Morris lives in West Penwith - the chunk of Cornwall I spent the first ten years of my life in - that takes in Penzance, Lands End and all points between. And it was while out walking his dog near the Merry Maidens stone circle, near Lamorna, that he came upon a standing stone in the middle of a farm field. The granite menhir is called Boscawen-Ros - or technically Boscawen-Ros East as there was another stone nearby (west) that was sadly removed by a farmer decades ago. Also known locally as the Longstone, the monolith overlooks the sea near the hamlet of Boleigh and has stood there since it was erected nearly 4000 years ago. It's seen a lot of history.

Morris visited the stone many times and took a lot of photos. And then he started to take short films on his smart phone. By sheer coincidence he had been reading ecologist Michael Allaby's seminal book A Year in the Life of a Field, which is set in a Cornish field near Bodmin. And an idea came to him ... could he chart a year in the life of this one extraordinary stone? 

So that's exactly what he did.

Starting from the Winter Solstice in December 2020, he filmed the stone throughout 2021 - the changing of the seasons, the wildlife, and the agricultural activity in the field. He caught sunsets and sunrises, south-westerly storms ('I got very, very wet!') and a rare atmospheric effect known as a 'moondog' -  a strange optical illusion caused by ice crystals that creates a halo around the moon and the appearance of 'mock moons' on either side of the real one. He caught badgers and foxes, rabbits and field mice going about their business. 

But all of this was happening at the same time as various globe-wide environmental catastrophes - heatwaves and mudslides, wildfires and floods. It made him reflect upon the natural world and what we're doing to it and, although it was never intended as a film about climate change, it became one. His sensitive and informative narration really gets you thinking about the harm we've done since Boscawen-Ros was erected. For a start, the stone's name means 'Hill of the elder tree' and it may well have stood in a wood or copse long since destroyed to create a farm field.

'The overarching theme that emerged is my own inability to grapple with the climate crisis,' Morris recently told The Guardian. 'What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to react to things that are happening in Brazil – a place I’ve never been to – or the Arctic? I’ve never strapped myself to a tree, never even been on a protest march. That’s not in my nature, that’s not me. But standing quietly in a field, a sort of one-man direct action seemed kind of appealing to me.'

As the project evolved he worked hard to keep it as carbon neutral as possible. Foley and natural soundscapes were volunteered by amateur recordists. The hauntingly beautiful soundtrack was provided by Bristol-based musician Sarah Moody and 'recycled' from pieces she had already written but hadn't used. The result is a powerful, visually stunning and important film. I loved every one of its 86 minutes. 

What then followed was a Q&A with Morris and Monk led by Stone Club's Matthew Shaw. It was humble, funny, poignant and I got to speak a little Cornish with Denzil.

If you get the chance to see it, SEE IT.

It's a glorious piece of cinematography and collaborative film making.

10/10.