Andy Goldsworthy’s Sheepfolds

By Mike Gerrard

‘You dragged me up here for this?’
My new girlfriend is not impressed.
‘This is art? This isn’t art. This is a rock in a field.’

We’re trudging along a green lane near Casterton in Cumbria. To be fair, the rock is actually a drove stone, though I’m not quite sure what a drove stone is yet. And it isn’t in a field. It’s in a sheepfold that’s in a field. But I don’t argue the point as the rain and hail is battering down around us. You don’t get this weather in an indoor art gallery, except perhaps at Tate Modern.

To the internationally-acclaimed British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, a rock is more than a rock and a sheepfold is more than just a roofless house of four stone walls where sheep, unlike us, can find shelter.

‘A stone is a living witness to the place in which it sits,’ he says. ‘Every tree, every rock, has a feeling of the lives that have lived there.’ If I could have remembered that I would have quoted it to my girlfriend, though I’m not sure it would have made much difference just then.

Goldsworthy started work on his Sheepfolds way back in 1996 as a Millennium Project, and in producing 100 Sheepfolds across Cumbria by the year 2000 the aim was to create the largest outdoor art project in the world. There are now over 200 of them, and even when we visited, the sculptor was glimpsed on the pub’s TV working on another new one. He finds sheepfolds that have been crumbling away, no longer much used, and restores them while also placing a sculpture of some kind (made by either God or Goldsworthy) into most of them.

Sheepfolds was to cost £600,000, it was announced at the time, of which £342,000 came from the National Lottery. About half of the total cost went to the dry-stone wallers who worked on the sheepfolds with him, and to the farmers whose land they are on, though not all the farmers were suitably impressed. My girlfriend wasn’t overly enthusiastic either. At least, not at first.

We’d booked into the Pheasant Inn in Casterton, from where there’s a four-mile-round walk that takes in the 16 Sheepfolds that stretch out either side of Fell Foot Road. This is the largest number clustered together in one easily accessible place, and they were among the first Sheepfolds to be completed. They also happen to be in a beautifully rural and overlooked corner of England, on the Lancashire/Cumbria border. It’s north of the Forest of Bowland, west of the Yorkshire Dales, south of the Lake District and only six miles east of the M6. It’s an area of rolling green fields where hundreds of sheep graze, of gentle hills, of woods, of open country and real local pubs, like the Pheasant.

The landlords of the pub at the time were big fans of the Sheepfolds project, and Goldsworthy declared himself a big fan of their bread and butter pudding. The pub’s changed hands since, but there’s still information on the Sheepfolds and a map on the wall. There’s also a Cuttings Book you should ask to take a look at, if only to see the amusing gulf that existed between the artist himself (‘The ephemeral work can be seen as a way of nourishing through which I learn’) and some of the local farmers (‘A waste of brass’).

The Sheepfolds aren’t marked, which to me is one of their charms, and one of Goldsworthy’s intentions. ‘The audience for the Sheepfolds,’ he says, ‘are people who pass and use the place all the time or those who come into the place by accident. I never mark my works on maps. People have to hear about them through word of mouth.’

When the rain came down about halfway round our walk, I could tell that my girlfriend was beginning to wish I’d kept my mouth shut. But I love Goldsworthy’s work. It draws our attention to the landscape and to the qualities of natural and manmade objects, while creating something new and beautiful. In the nearby Grizedale Forest Park, his ‘Taking a wall for a walk’ has a dry-stone wall weaving through a wood like a snake, slithering around trees. It made me laugh, as well as go ‘Wow!’ Elsewhere he’s wrapped a tree in a spiral of ice and built giant pine-cones out of stone.

Here at Casterton, once the rain clears, we walk further along the dead straight Fell Foot Road, with rabbits hopping out of our way, and bright yellow primroses lining the hedgerows like miniature suns. Every so often some footholds in the wall tempt us to climb up and look over, instead of just passing by. In one Sheepfold we startle a sheep, and in another the huge wet rock stares at us like something primeval, or a meteorite dropped from space. The existence of Goldsworthy’s work does make you look twice at the world around you, and think about it a bit more deeply.

When we get back to the pub, though, I can see I’ve still got some persuading to do. But at least we can relax in a lovely big room that shows not all pub accommodation consists of pokey rooms above smoky bars. It’s brightly decorated in blues and yellows, and has two easy chairs and a packet of biscuits to see us through till supper. Which was pork medallions in a creamy peppercorn sauce, with an affordable Aussie chardonnay and a sticky toffee pudding over which we nearly came to blows thanks to the ‘I’ll just have a bite of yours’ syndrome.

At breakfast the next morning, as we polished off the Lancashire black pudding and Cumberland sausages, we asked about the drove stones. A couple at the next table explained they were for the drovers, who took cattle and sheep to market through here, and marked their way with these huge natural stones, turned upright like giant Easter eggs, in the same way that walkers today use piles of stones to show the right route.

My girlfriend started to warm to the project, now knowing that these were historical landmarks and not merely rocks  in a field. After breakfast we drove to the next village, Barbon, where another Sheepfold could apparently be found, on the back road towards Dent. As the woods petered out, we saw it, off to the left of the road, perfectly placed at the foot of Postern Hill, which rose up in shadow behind it. Jack’s Fold, it was called, and it’s one of the few without a sculpture inside it. The work of art is the structure itself, demanding your appreciation of the way it has been put together, and the way it belongs in the landscape.

We see footprints showing that other people have recently visited Jack’s Fold, though part of the attraction is that visitors don’t flock to the Sheepfolds like sheep. The sun had been behind a cloud, and we watched its shadow come rolling down the hill towards us, and moving down over the treetops, till it reached Jack’s Fold and bathed it in sunshine, as if the lights had been turned on in an art gallery. Goldsworthy has made the world his gallery, and admission is free. My girlfriend took a photo of Jack’s Fold. ‘Can we see some more?’ she asked.