Ten Words For A Northern Landscape: Episode 5: Escape

Ten Words for a Northern Landscape: Episode 5: Escape

A new podcast about an ancient dale from journalist and broadcaster Caroline Beck.

Somewhere high up in the North Pennines, between and everywhere and nowhere at all, is Weardale, a remote northern dale. It’s a place of old lead mines, deep worked out limestone quarries, and hill farming: the home of day-dreamers, explores, incomers, artists, philosophers, sky-watchers, story tellers and travellers.

Over a series of ten exclusive interviews with writers and poets Caroline goes in search of what it means to leave in England’s last wilderness.

In this episode Caroline explores two experiences of the North Pennines as home: considering it as somewhere that people escape from and escape into.

Caroline talks to Debbie Loane, an artist who relocated to Weardale as a young woman. Her painting was heavily influenced by the industrial archaeology and natural resources; this landscape remains the focus of her work despite no longer living there. Together they discuss the status of an outsider, and the deep and continuing connection that Debbie formed with the area.

Walking across the dale, writer Madeleine Bunting reflects on her childhood in North Yorkshire, and her relationship with her father, the sculptor John Bunting, who installed the family there. Madeleine moved away at sixteen, but returned years later after her father’s death and wrote her memoir The Plot.

Narrated and recorded by Caroline Beck
Produced by Jay Sykes

Ten Words for a Northern Landscape is commissioned Northern Heartlands and produced as part of Durham Book Festival, a Durham County Council event. The recording was made possible by funding and support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Arts Council England. Look out for Ten Words for a Northern Landscape on the New Writing North podcast and Durham Book Festival website.

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