“…if unsheltered, treeless lands are repellent to you, have a look at Saddleworth when it is half asleep – when getting up in the morning and going sleepily to bed in the evening, it is loveliest then…

…then you will see something or you are hopelessly blind; you will feel something, too, among those silent, mystical moors, a sense of loneliness which is not loneliness, but the most exquisite companionship. You will feel that the heather, the bracken the knolls, the hollows and the great moors themselves are holding some kind of converse of which not a syllable is heard, but which something is felt…”

These words by Ammon Wrigley, from his 1912 book Songs of a Moorland Parish, are echoed in spirit by only a few in literature, the usual response to our native moorlands, it seems, is one of indifference or disdain; Daniel Defoe, travelling through eastern Derbyshire in 1725 proclaimed the moors ‘a waste and a howling wilderness’. In the visual arts there seems to be even less love for this landscape. When one looks at the work of the artists who shaped our (early) visual perception of Landscape we only find one artist and one painting that depicts the moors – Turner’s 1816 work Grouse Shooting on Beamsley Beacon. The painting and its story are sublime doing nothing to alter the clichés framing this landscape – brooding and barren, a place of misfortune.

When the weekend walkers are out ‘enjoying’ this landscape they more often than not cling to its edges and take for its rewards the views back down into the valleys below, not the heart of the moor itself, where tales of hikers lost, sucked into its black bogs, persist, acting as a deterrent. Within photography it doesn’t get much better, Jem Southam has commented, when discussing wilderness: “I have tried Dartmoor but it is a particularly challenging place to make pictures” and states that he has rarely seen anyone “successfully tackling the moors”.

Robert Macfarlane’s thoughts, when experiencing the moors of Scotland, might help shed some light on our problem with these ‘flat terrains’.

“They seem to return the eye’s enquiries unanswered, or swallow all attempts at interpretation. They confront us with the problem of purchase: how to anchor perception in a context of vastness, how to make such a place ‘mean’

…we find it hard to make language grip landscapes that are close-toned, but that also excel in expanse, reach and transparency.”

Heading into this landscape myself, even with thirty years of walking around, over and through it, I found myself unsure of making work here. I had to consider where the moors begin, where on my approach I should tune-in and what, for me at least, is at its heart? My way-in came through the process of walking itself, the mapping of this terrain and the mechanics of navigation, with its bearings, timing, and pacing. This landscape doesn’t have the distinct ridges and cols of a true mountain landscape but instead groughs, faint riverbeds, the grouse moors’ trappings and micro-topographical contours. It’s through these markers on the land I’ve attempted to build a picture of the moorland and, now, I feel this is only a beginning.

The chapters within the book as a whole are journeys, experiments – some of which failed – some were made in a day, others over repeated visits. Whether I have, referring back to Southam’s challenge, successfully tackled the moor, I’m not sure and it will perhaps be down to those others with a genuine curiosity and understanding of this landscape to judge that…