Commissioned by the St Michael’s Princetown Trust, I spent a six months’ residency roaming and photographing the landscape of Dartmoor (Devon, UK) across an autumn-spring season. The heritage of the monastic tradition is present through a layering of time, like so many geological strata of the well-worn walking trails between Buckfast, Buckland and Tavistock Abbeys, the lichen-covered markers of over 140 primarily medieval stone crosses, and the weathered chapels and steepled churches that form today’s communities of faith. These axes of vertical and horizontal exploration seemed to me like a mapping of spiritual and cultural indices carved into the granite outcrops and tors, much like the Ten Commandment Stones on Buckland Beacon (originally carved 1927), or the church of St Michael de Rupe on Brentor (the highest church in the south of England at 330m above sea level).

Photographically this intellectual/historical exercise became coloured by sensory and spatial immersion in the landscape. When working with the liturgy written for the Methodist and Church of England congregations on the moor, the words seemed hewn of their worlds in rock, light, and water; and in seasonal change and colour. In turn, the landscape deepened with biblical symbolism and a Ruskin/Wordsworth illumination. In many ways, a docu-journey became a pilgrimage. My discerning of spiritual pattern in this place emerged in the panoramic Four Seasons on Dartmoor, together with interactive maps of Dartmoor Past and Dartmoor Present created for the Dartmoor National Park Authority, giving expanded visual sense to this joined-up story. At the end of the residency, prints were displayed in various venues on the moor and at Exeter Cathedral. They are now held by St Pancras Church, Widecombe in the Moor.