browsePeople of the Hills
Richard Grassick (Photographer)
Photographer's statement, 2003:
The People of The Hills project has slowly evolved from a long-term commitment to the Durham Dales, which developed through a series of smaller projects. The work, which goes back as far as 1977, began in the town of Crook, which until recently was a considerable source of employment for people in Weardale. There I documented a number of factories on the town’s small industrial estate for Beamish Museum, most of which were to close in the first years of Thatcherism. By 1990 only Ramar remained, and its closure was the focus of my project Ramar Goodbye.
In the 1980s I worked with a small group of photographers from Darlington in Frosterley, examining the legacy of quarrying in this Weardale village built on mineral extraction. Working the Landscape was produced just as the industry was shrinking towards virtual extinction.
In the early 1990s I met David Crouch, a cultural geographer with a long-term interest in allotments and their culture. The idea of People of the Hills began to come together as we discovered a shared interest in interpreting the mixed lives of people and their affection for and struggle in a particular place. David’s work on the culture and landscape of allotments had already developed a novel approach to places and the way people make these places part of their lives. David had written a book for Channel Four in which he developed a ‘national allotments heritage trail’ of especially interesting sites. This turned the usual idea of Heritage as Important on its head.
The collection of images here draws on our subsequent examination of the lives of two key groups of Hill People, small-holders and hill farmers. As an area with little arable land, Weardale is home to a large number of part-time farmers, smallholders who are unable to make a living from their work with the land, but who see themselves as part of the farming community. Many of these families have to work away from the land in order to survive, but have an endless passion for some aspect of the farming cycle.
In Weardale live two distinct groups of smallholders. The first have lived in the dale for most or all of their lives, inheriting the family farm from parents or near relatives. The second, as a response to city consumerism, seek out a rural sanctuary in which to escape from the rat race of urban life. Yet for most of these, such a dream must be funded by continued immersion in the very rat race which requires escaping. As a result of the demand, Durham Dales house prices have soared to ridiculous proportions. An empty barn ‘with planning permission for conversion’ now costs more than an average Newcastle house.
The small-holding can be anything from a large allotment to a small farm. It has its roots in the history of the dales, when quarrymen and miners, like the deep coal miners of East Durham, had their small plot of land to help subsidise a meagre, low wage existence. The tradition has continued despite the increasing influence of city money. Children are still brought up in a relatively free environment, free that is from the fears inflicted on town parents.
The smallholding in many ways typifies the economy of the industrial dale, which has always been essentially a mix of manual work, both farming and industrial. But small-holdings are not in themselves economically viable, and are increasingly susceptible to the lure of city money. Because of this, there is little local debate about the value of smallholdings, except amongst those who can afford to buy the lifestyle. Full-time farmers refuse to allow smallholders an active role in their organisations. Their farm work is generally seen as a 'hobby'. Smallholders have no organised voice. But the urban demand for smallholdings is an important contributor to the wider effect of rising prices for rural housing. Therefore the young people of Weardale have nowhere affordable to live when they want to leave home, and are leaving the countryside in their hundreds. Housing has become a hot political issue.
Hill farms are in many ways like a quarry or a coal mine. In all these cases, the landscape is transformed by human activities on it. And the work involves hard, manual labour in often appalling conditions. However, coal miners and quarrymen produce what are generally regarded as eyesores to the casual visitor, but the hill farmer's workplace is felt worthy of a holiday visit.
Behind the scenic tranquillity that we can observe from a safe distance lies a fraught world of poor quality grazing, adverse weather conditions and marginal economic returns. And with the introduction of subsidies, both national and European, hill farming has become a political hot potato. Very few people choose to get into hill farming. Of course, there are those who reject the consumerism of city life, but most are either born or married into this life.
What makes a farm a hill farm? It is inevitably a stock farm, of course, given the poor quality of the land. A lot of work can’t be mechanised either. So walling, for instance, continues to be done in the traditional way. And the resources of the farm are finite. There are only so many sheep or cattle that can be reared given the balance of the land. And because up in the hills winters are long and summers short, there is not a long enough grazing season to sustain even a small flock. Over 50,000 make a meagre living out of such farms in the United kingdom alone. Now, their existence is threatened by a New Labour government keen on ‘restructuring’. The reason for this is simple - subsidies.
Subsidies come in all shapes and sizes, from the European Union and from London government. They were first introduced here in 1946 in the Hill Farming Act to help pay for the feed that has to be bought from elsewhere to make up for short summers. Subsidies pay for the preservation of historic sites, breeding certain livestock or using fewer chemicals. One subsidy system which affects many dales farmers is the SSSI - Site of Special Scientific Interest. Isolated areas of upper Weardale and Teesdale harbour micro-climates which spawn rare alpine flowers. To ensure that they proliferate, farmers are paid a small subsidy if they agree not to use chemical fertilisers and cut their hay late, after the flowers have seeded.
The key UK subsidy for hillfarmers is known as the hill livestock compensatory allowance (HLCA). This subsidy, which cost £165 million in 1997, is now being challenged for the simple reason that few other subsidies exist in other industries any more. ‘Giving millions to farmers when the Government aren’t giving it to anyone else does raise some rather obvious political questions,’ says the National Farmer’s Union economist Tony Donaldson. Others go further, arguing that Scottish farmers could just as easily be compensated for lack of sunshine. In reality, income from subsidies on these hill farms far outweighs income from actual farming. Typically, a local farmer earns about £15,000 from farm work, but £25,000 from subsidies. It is getting increasingly difficult for the farming community to justify such payments.
Like much else in the Dales, hill farming forms an important branch of the local economy, yet the world of the hill-farmer is often far removed from that of his/her non-farming neighbour. Because it is so all-consuming a life, farming can exist within a self-sufficient world of its own, with little time for dealing with the other communities around. Social ties are often stronger between hill farmers and their big-time colleagues in arable North Yorkshire than with quarrymen, cement workers or professional incomers. The farmer is isolated and lonely, not simply because the work is lonely, but because the culture can be lonely too.
In 2001, the foot and mouth crisis hit many of the farmers and small holders appearing in this exhibition, and their experiences were recorded in the exhibition In the Shadow. Some of the images from this work appear in this selection. Further work has since been done with caravanners, and in 2004 I shall embark on a year-long run of new production for the project.