Ten Words For A Northern Landscape: Episode 7: Exile

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

Somewhere high up in the North Pennines, between 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, explorers, 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 live in England’s last wilderness.

In the seventh episode - Exile - Caroline goes on a journey across the uplands, meeting and talking with Syrian refugees, curators and poets.

Caroline talks to the poet Gillian Allnutt about their time at a textiles workshop put on for Syrian refugees. Gillian has been working with refugees and asylum seekers in the North East for years and Caroline visited her making textile butterflies with a group of Syrian refugees who have been settled in County Durham. The collision of home and exile is explored through needlework, talking and singing songs.

Caroline also visits the exhibition, Craft and Conflict, curated by Karen Babayan. Award winning ceramicist, Paul Scott’s work is celebrated for capturing the history and mood of Damascus, with the families agreeing that the exhibition has successfully mixed the two cultures together, provoking memory, thought, grief and happiness.

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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