Art and the Pebblebeds Project

From the inception of the project it seemed important not just to investigate the manner in which pebbles had been used in the prehistoric and historic past, a four thousand year period, but also to create something new with them in the present, to take inspiration from their forms and material properties in the context of the very special landscape in which they are found.

The Pebble Cairn

The first project to be undertaken was the construction of a small pebble cairn about 2 m in diameter and 0.6 m high by Chris Tilley. The aims were twofold: to learn about techniques for building something out of pebbles and to create a visually striking contemporary monument. Two cairns were constructed. The first cairn lasted only a couple of weeks before it collapsed. The second cairn that was constructed differently has remained stable.

The First Cairn

The material for most of the cairn was transported from four different places along two streams (without names) that run east with their sources high up on Colaton Raleigh and Woodbury Commons. The northern stream runs through Newton Poppelford, the southern stream through Colaton Raleigh itself. The pebbles are easily collected along the eroding stream bed. The most distant sources were in the area where the pebble beds themselves outcrop at Hawkerland, by the road, and at Stowford where there is a ford just to the east of Kettle plantation. These are just over 2 km from the construction site. Material was also collected from the southern stream 0.8km away and by the stream next to the cairn construction site in Colaton Raleigh. In addition small pebbles were collected from the top of Colaton Raleigh Common in the vicinity of a large barrow Bronze Age barrow where they are exposed along tracks crossing the heathland (see map for pebble sources). The southern stream running through Colaton Raleigh has three sources and is one of the longest streams in the area running for up to 5 km from its source before reaching the river Otter. This stream is of particular interest because its three sources are all near to barrows. One spring arises a short distance to the south-east of barrows 17 and 18, the two largest barrows to occur on the Pebblebed heathlands. The other two sources are in the vicinity of barrows 11-12 and 12-15 that includes the two cairns that were excavated in 2008-9 (see Fig. 2, The East Devon Landscape website pages). These streams effectively link up all these eight barrows and connect them to the river Otter and thus to Budleigh Salterton and the sea. All this material was collected from late September 2007 until mid December of the same year.
Initially the cairn was constructed in Colaton Raleigh right next to the stream to emphasize the connection between the stream and the pebbles to which it had given birth. The site chosen was in view of High Peak in the distance to the east, a feature it shares with all the prehistoric mounds. The smallest pebbles were reserved for the top, all others gradually heaped up as they were collected, the very largest being reserved for the base to form a kerb. The form was not planned and rather than being circular developed into an oval structure with its long axis orientated in the direction of High Peak. The cairn was completed around 20th December 2007 (Fig. 1).

Map coming soon

 

It proved to be highly unstable collapsing numerous times during its construction, a product of the haphazard building method. It survived for only a couple of weeks before collapsing altogether in the second week of January 2008. The acoustics of the collapse were interesting, a dull rumbling sound as pebbles rolled down on top of pebbles creating an avalanche effect. This initial attempt at building a cairn without any skill or real effort demonstrated just how difficult it is to build a pebble cairn. Because pebbles are rounded with no edges it is very difficult to build a cairn entirely out of them without using other material such as turves to provide stability to the structure. The initial outcome was the creation of a slippery structure prone to constant collapse (Fig 2).

Figure 2. The first cairn.

The Second Cairn

The cairn was constructed on a new site 50m away from the stream on Tuesday 25 March 2008. A paved area was chosen in order to prevent grass growing up into the cairn. All the material was moved from the site of the first cairn on Monday 24th March. This took an entire morning.
The first stage was to grade the pebbles according to size. Four classes of pebbles were defined and piled up separately. Class I pebbles were the very largest (Fig. 3).

Figure 3. Class I Pebbles.

These were between 25 and 35cm long and weighed between 5kg and a massive 12kg in the case of the very largest. Only one or two of these could comfortably carried by hand at a time and the work was back breaking. Such very large pebbles are rarely found exposed on the ground surface of the Pebblebed heathlands where they can be seen along trackways. By contrast they are quite numerous in stream beds crossing the heathlands and as redeposited material along these same streams beyond the heathland areas where they cut across the surrounding Otter sandstone as they flow towards the river Otter. The bottom and sides of these streams are full of pebbles of different sizes from the very largest to the very smallest. It is almost certainly the case that most of the largest pebbles used to construct the Bronze Age cairns on the Pebblebeds were also derived from the streams. These cairns were constructed in dry high areas from pebbles that were either quarried by digging pits in valley sides or collected from bare exposures or stream beds. It is therefore possible to determine where the likely source of the largest pebbles came from if we assume that the source was the nearest stream bed. These very large pebbles are most commonly elongated in size and are up to 15 to 20cm wide. They are smooth as an egg to touch and being, like all the other pebbles, composed of quartzite, extremely hard. Sometimes they occur split in half which provides a useful and welcome edge in the process of cairn building allowing them to be erected upright. Otherwise they must be lain flat along their long axis and this provides a vertical edge, or side, to the pebble of between c, 10-14 cm. Less frequent are pebbles which are more or less spherical in form, making them fairly useless for use as part of a kerb and pebbles which are much more irregular in form. Although these pebbles are extremely hard and resistant to hammer blows they can be quite easily fire cracked. These large pebbles are not usually all that colourful. Shades of white and yellow, reddish brown are most common. A few are black, others acquire a black patina in the stream beds that gradually fades as they are exposed to rain and sunlight.
Class II pebbles are between 18 and 25 cm long weighing between 2.5 and 5kg and again most commonly found along stream beds (Fig. 4). Between two and four of these can be carried by hand. They are identical in shape and colour to the largest pebbles. Class III pebbles are between 10 and 18cm and weigh between 0.5 and 2.5kg. (Fig. 5) Class IV pebbles are anything between 0.1 and 10cm in size and may weigh between a gram or less and 0.5kg (Fig. 6). 

Figure 4. Class II Pebbles.

Figure 5. Class III Pebbles.

Figure 6. Class IV Pebbles.

Small baskets of these, and Class III pebbles, can be transported by a single person relatively easily. These, the smallest of the pebbles, are by far the most colourful and have a much greater colour range and variation than the much larger Class I – III pebbles. The largest pebbles are uniquely differentiated in terms of dimensions, shape and surface form, the smaller ones far less so. While many of these are fairly uniform in shape and size they are, by contrast far more individuated in terms of their colours. Eight different colour categories of pebbles were defined and sorted prior to constructing the cairn as follows:
1 white
2 black
3 yellow
4 reddish brown
5 pinky white (pure quartz)
6 grey
7 grey/pink with a darker red mottled surface
8 multicoloured pebbles of different colours with white quartz bands and veins and/or a multicoloured surface of yellow, red and white or brown (Fig. 7).

Figure 7. Pebbles sorted according to colour.

There are, of course, many colour variations and shades in relation to each category often making decisions difficult as to whether the pebble might be grouped, for example, with yellow pebbles or reddish brown pebbles. Expanding the number of colour categories would seem to make such decisions even more difficult to the point of being arbitrary.There is a striking colour difference between all the classes of pebbles according to whether they are wet or dry, especially the class IV pebbles.  When dry the surface colour is much duller and it is often difficult to distinguish between them many appearing greyish in colour. After rain, or when they are washed by the waves along the beach the colour contrasts become quite vivid and they are much easier to sort. Just how colourful these pebbles must have appeared to prehistoric people is now difficult to appreciate from a contemporary perspective since our lives are bombarded by bright colours in the form of media images: books, magazines, TV, billboards on the streets, bright fabrics with artifical dies, paint on building exteriors and exteriors, brightly coloured consumer goods such as cars and the packaging on foods. In prehistoric times the world was far less colourful and the brightest and most brilliant colours encountered in the landscape would usually be temporary in the form of the colours of flowers. These brightly coloured pebbles were permanent parts of the landscape and apart from the pebbles on the beach lapped by the waves of the sea, they would appear most permanently and brilliantly along the stream courses meandering across the landscape like rainbow serpents. The cairn took a day to construct and the work was undertaken in a number of stages. First a circle was chalked on the ground using a string with a diameter of 1.8 m. Then the very largest of the Class I pebbles were used to form a kerb around the base of the cairn (Fig. 8).

Figure 8. Stage I of constructing the cairn.

Colour contrasts between these pebbles were exploited when possible putting red, white and brown pebbles next to each other. The use of these pebbles at the bottom of the cairn was most appropriate since they were derived from the ‘bottom’ of the landscape i.e. the stream beds. Some of the pebbles in this ring were supported on the inside by smaller class II and III pebbles to provide added stability (Fig 8). Next the ring was gradually built up laying pebble on pebble using a corbelling technique still using the class I pebbles with the support of class II and III pebbles. This required carefully choosing pebbles of different form and slotting them together like a giant three dimensional jig-saw puzzle (Fig. 9).

Figure 9. Stage II of constructing the cairn.

Next the empty space in the middle of the ring was infilled and a flat top created. Overall the cairn is 0.6 m high, about the same height of some of the smaller cairns on the heathlands.
Previous experience with the first cairn had demonstrated the instability of a dome shaped top. A flat top is far more stable and the pebbles do not roll down it. In this respect it is interesting to note that many of the prehistoric cairns are quite low with flat tops like that on the summit of Aylesbeare Common. Next the pebbles that had been sorted by colour categories were used to decorate the top of the cairn. In the very centre the quartzite pebbles were placed, around these a ring of white pebbles, and around the white pebbles a ring of red pebbles. Around these three rings six small pebble cairns were built of black, grey, yellow, striped and multicoloured and mottled pebbles (Fig. 10).

Figure 10. The completed cairn.

Finally in the centre of the quartzite ring a distinctive ball-shaped grey pebble with white bands was placed. The choice of these pebbles to decorate the top of the cairn also relates in an important way to where they occur and are seen most frequently in the landscape: along every path or track crossing up and down and over the tops of the Pebblebed heathlands: pebbles of the high places used on the top of the cairn.
The inspiration for the geometric patterning on the top of the cairn (the circles) and the small cairns of pebbles of different colours on its surface had come from the excavations of George Carter who claimed to have found small subsurface pebble cairns underneath mounds and geometric arrangements of pebbles such as zig-zag lines during the 1930s. Interestingly Carter rarely mentions or records colour other than recording rare ‘blue stone’ pebbles which like the blue stones of Stonehenge are not really blue but a bluish grey in colour.
Making this cairn taught us a tremendous amount about pebbles: the difficulty of constructing anything with them, differences in their sizes, shapes and colours, where they are found in the landscape, and how they are dramatically altered by water and rain. It has also led us to think about art (or images) as part of the Pebblebeds project. We could experiment with making patterns pr other images out of the differently coloured pebbles

Heathland Path

The second project, unlike the pebble cairn, was only a temporary installation that was photographed and then removed during the second year of the project. Pebbles were collected over a two week period and the path was constructed and photographed on the 16th May 2009. It consists of collections of the largest pebbles from the Pebblebed heathlands arranged to form a pebble path. In all 70 pebbles were collected from the following seven places: top soil scraped exposures on Venn Ottery Hill and Aylesbeare Common, the stream beds at Hawkerland and Stowford, a ploughed field in the vicinity of Black Hill, a top-soil scraped area on Withycombe Raleigh Common and from below the cliffs at Budleigh Salterton (see map). These locations were deliberately chosen so that the pebbles used to construct the path would come from across different parts of the heathland. The Pebblebed ridge runs across the landscape of East Devon from the north to the south for a distance of 14km and the pebbles collected from the seven different locations were arranged in a north-south series of ten or more pebbles from each locality. Thus the path signifies the ridge itself and its north-south orientation in miniature and the manner in which it is cut across by pebble streams and ends at the beach in the south (Fig. 11).

Figure 11. Heathland Path left to right Venn Ottery Hill to Budleigh Salterton.

The idea of the path relates to the manner in which people both in the past and the present walk on pebbles and follow pebble paths across the heathlands. These paths in an important way relate to the biographies of persons and the manner in which they move between and relate to different places in the Pebblebed landscape.
Priscilla Trenchard joined the Pebblebed Project to work specifically as an artist in residence during the summer of 2009. The following is her account of the artworks she produced and her motivations and inspiration:       
“My childhood was spent within earshot of the sound of the sea on pebbles, sometimes the soothing waves rolling on the stones and then that reluctant sound of the pebbles being dragged back out by the tide, and at other times the cacophony of a gale. Pebbles, their endless variety of shapes and colours, have always been of significance to me, a symbol of place, and collected wherever I visit. On returning to England, having lived abroad for many years, I decided to live in East Devon the landscape of my childhood with its familiarity and pebble beaches. As an artist I had been considering embarking on a project that would involve making a cairn on Budleigh Satlerton beach, and monitoring the connection people would have with the cairn, their interest and attraction to the colourful pebbles and the journeys they had undertaken in order to get to the beach. So it was with great interest I heard about the four-year Pebblebeds Project. One day in the spring of 2009 I met Chris at his home and he talked about the project, and other digs, and his interest in trying to express archaeological investigation through visual interpretation. A past experience of working with artists had not altogether matched his expectations, with the artists often ignoring the process of excavation work, and becoming caught up with the tools of the trade and thus avoiding immersing themselves in the process itself. Having established that I had never undertaken any art-in-the-landscape before, he still invited me to join the dig, and that I should be armed with kneepads and a proper archaeological trowel!
I had heard it rumoured that archaeologists often resent artists being on site, and so it was with a little apprehension that I set out to join the dig in August. For the first week or so I was involved with the daily activities of excavation work and being on my knees and bent over from 9 to 5, six days a week was gruelling for a studio based artist! Agony aside, this is certainly a good way to get to know people! 
Chris had the idea to create a memorial to George Carter, an amateur archaeologist and geologist, who had excavated the pebble mounds on Woodbury and Aylesbeare Common during the 1920-1960’s. His work was not valued at the time, but his ideas are significant to the investigations of the Pebblebeds Project, for example; the spiritual power of pebbles, and also that colour symbolism was important.

The Dartford Warbler

The East Devon Heathlands are a nationally important area for breeding populations for a number of endangered birds, and it was decided to use the Dartford Warbler as the icon for the memorial to Carter, which would be constructed out of pebbles taken from one of the prehistoric pebble cairns excavated in 2009. During one of his excavations in the 1930s Carter found what he suggested to be a bird image constructed out of pebbles in one of the cairns that he excavated on Woodbury Common (see Background to the Project pages).  In order to scale up the image I assembled a grid on the ground using lengths of straw  and then, with reference to a painted image with a grid overlay, I outlined the image using flour (Fig. 12).

Figure 12. Marking out the Dartford Warbler with straws and flour.

Chris did the manual work, carrying stones up from Tor Barrow to another nearby small prehistoric cairn on top of which the memorial was to be assembled. Black, brown and white pebbles were selected and used to ‘colour in’ the areas (Figs. 13-14).

Figure 13. Constructing the Dartford Warbler.

Figure 14. The completed bird.

The size of the pebbles meant that detail was difficult to achieve so the images became a stylized interpretation. There was a shortage of black pebbles and it was decided that as more were unearthed during the dig they would replace the substituted brown ones (Fig. 15).

Figure 15. The reconstructed bird.

I found it hard to break away from the activities of the dig and start really concentrating on what I wanted to create. Somehow I felt guilty, as though creativity is not work!  Time was moving on and I felt a sense of urgency. There were two sites to be excavated, with the main dig taking place on Colaton Raleigh Common, my preferred site. This place is special. It is a place suspended between the earth and sky, separate from the real world. Safe. A secret place. We are our own community or tribe without the hindrance of the high tech world we usually live in. This is Avalon looking down on a sea of luscious green, cultivated landscape. A powerful place of lost knowledge and spirituality. I love it! 

Woven Flame

I had become interested in the process of building a cairn. The Bronze Age people would have brought some stones up from the riverbed.  What type of container would have been used? Would this have been a pilgrimage on special occasions such as the Equinox or Solstice? The panoramic landscape aligns itself with sunrise locations. Would it have been a group activity or a personal journey? Built over many years or a single build? My intention was to weave a container, a large structure to contain pebbles. The first attempts to weave a basket with willow were hindered by my lack of knowledge regarding the harvesting of materials and trying to fashion a regular shaped structure. I became frustrated by the whole process and technique of basketry, which seemed to detract from my initial response to the place and materials available.Instead I started to collect gorse and heather and was engrossed for hours stripping the needles off the gorse There was a repetition of walking, collecting, sorting and stripping back, a meditation of sorts. The making of cairns would have required many journeys back and forth with the pebbles.  Creating paths, creating stories and remembering.
Weaving became a metaphor for life on the heathlands. The weaving of narrow paths across the landscape mirrors the structure of plant life. The gorse and heather grow together creating a dense undergrowth. The pebbles may have some weave like order in their placement within the cairn, and as work progressed on the excavation, so stories were woven around its revelations.
The weaving took on a life of its own! The inflexible and random nature of the roots and branches inevitably dictated the form. Not surprisingly the structure related to its surroundings. I felt more frustration again as the wayward nature of the weaving started to collapse under its own weight. It would never become the shape I had in mind; in fact it looked more like a large nest! (Fig. 16).

Figure 16. Woven Flame.

At this point I decided to take the basket to its final resting place on Great Tor Barrow a short distance to the north of the excavation site. Much to my surprise it looked finished. It belonged there. A woven flame (Figs. 17-18).

Figure 17. Woven Flame on top of Great Tor Barrow.

Figure 18. Woven Flame against the sky.

I felt less connection with the Aylesbeare Common excavation site, and others on the dig expressed the same feeling.  Its difficult to pin point what it was about the place that evoked such displeasure. It didn’t have that other-worldness, somehow more earth bound and connected to habitation. It lacked mystery. With a week to go, and the excavating completed on Colaton Raleigh Common, I knew I had to find some way of working with and on this site. 

The Pebble Grid

Categorizing and defining the different colours of the pebbles was a constant task on the dig. When wet, the pebbles disclose an array of colours and patterns, which probably had as much of an attraction in the Bronze Age, as they still do for some of us now. The jewels of the time. 
With this in mind I utilised a metal grid used for recording and planning information on the excavation. The metre square grid, with its twenty-five squares, is placed over the area to be recorded and the information laboriously drawn onto graph paper.
I had to be creative with the definitions in order to fill the grid with different pebble categories, referring to some as ‘body parts’, not because of shape but a combination of colour and texture. Once again the process was one of walking, gathering, selecting and repetition (Fig. 19) The end result, when wet, magically reveals the range of colours and textures of the pebbles (Fig 20).

Figure 19. Constructing the pebble grid.

Figure 20. The completed pebble grid.

Curating Materials

I am interested in the ordinariness of found objects and how, when taken out of context, sometimes become extraordinary or at least draw ones attention to them and viewed in a different way. When on a walk an object will catch my attention and I will store and date it in transparent bags. These findings, when viewed together, create a visual diary of ordinariness. I managed to collect an object most days during the dig and these curated materials are stored for future reference (Figs. 21-22).

Figure 21. Curated heathland materials.

Figure 22. Curated heathland materials.

Impressions and Transformations

As an artist I am like to experiment with the surface of materials through mark making. At the beginning of the dig I left paper and fabric covered with pebbles lying in the landscape (Figs. 23-24).

Figure 23. Pebbles on parchment.

Figure 24. Pebbles on parchment laid out on Tor Barrow.

I was interested to discover how time and the elements would transform the materials. Over the four weeks on Colaton Raleigh Common I was surprised to discover that my paper experiments had changed very little. The heathland terrain drained quickly after a rainfall and the dew dried rapidly in the ever-present wind. There were some traces of dirt around the edges of the pebbles and signs that small animals had nibbled the paper. I removed one piece of paper at the end of the dig leaving three other pieces to endure the elements for the months to come and to see what further development / deterioration may occur (Fig. 25).

Figure 25. The ghosts of pebbles

One experiment, which was unsuccessful in my view, was a splatter painting with muddy water dispensed in an expressionistic way over pebbles lying on a fabric sheet. I was hoping to build up layers with each successive splattering. The mud pigment was not suspended in an insoluble medium, such as oil, and therefore was not real paint. My mud water was just that, muddy water and could not layer itself. The fabric was a splattered mess, but I may still find it has some creative usefulness for a future project.
Throughout the year, I will return regularly to visit both sites and see how the passage of time plays a part on all the art works, which remain there. So the weaving continues. The diary of daily found objects, pebbles, photographs and the shared stories of our lives and the ones recreated from the past will, however subliminally executed, inform the visual work that will evolve during the coming year. It has provided me with a wealth of information and experience that could only have been informed by ‘being there’. Being there was magical.”