Richard Gilbert
In search of the perfect hill
The starting point for this work about the Herefordshire Beacon is part of an ongoing project on hills in the Marches that began with working on the Malvern’s. What followed was the search for how to present the Malvern’s bare ‘hilliness’, not to select an ideal viewpoint but to work out how to represent the landscape's energy as well as the stillness. I ask myself why I feel hefted to this hill. Perhaps it comes down to head-space since when I am elsewhere it’s the kind of place where I would often like to be but when I am there, I don’t feel the need to be anywhere else. In its raw and rude monumental shape, Herefordshire Beacon often seems transfigured, more a vast work of land art than a hill, as W.H. Auden intimated, ‘a fathom of earth, alive in air’. Its labyrinthine paths offer countless vistas where you can be a part of that conversation where the elements, earth and sky, are forever in dialogue.