NONE OF US ARE OUTSIDE OF IT

The Town Moor is an area of grassland in the centre of Newcastle upon Tyne. There’s the big moor, which has two hills on it – I think, made from motorway spoil – and paths across with streetlights, and there are also smaller moors. Collectively, that land is known as the Town Moor. It’s over 800 acres – twice the size of Hyde Park.

Cattle are grazed there between April and October. In 1925, an Act was passed that gave the public the right to access the land for air and exercise.

Photograph of walkers in front of the two hills on the Town Moor in Newcastle upon Tyne

It’s a special place because it’s very open so you see a lot of sky.

It’s a space surrounded by housing and all kinds of different communities use it. It can look like a pastoral piece of land that could be from the eighteenth century. On the hills, you get this incredible view of the city.

What attracted me to the Town Moor was thinking about it as a rural space that’s had a continuous use for farming for a very long time. For at least 1000 years, I’d say.

A lot of people who use the Town Moor have relationships with the cows one way or another.

It is a farming space but not typical, it’s a place that people have the right to use.

This is somewhere people encounter farm animals in a way that’s incidental. They’re living alongside each other, it’s different from a rural farming space where the land is privately owned.

One of the things that interests me is the idea that if you live in the countryside you know about farms, and if you live in a city maybe you don’t. I grew up on the edge of Nottingham and my family lived in houses that backed onto fields. It was mainly arable farming, corn or wheat or oilseed rape. I remember painting those fields.

I didn’t automatically associate myself with farming, I think I felt outside of it. None of us are outside of it, we’re all reliant on it. I thought it would be interesting to look at farming from the lay people’s point of view.

A photograph taken at dusk depicting a silhouette of the landscape and a block of flats at the edge of the Town Moor against a dramatic sky

Phtograph of two cows grazing on the Town Moor

I’ve also been looking at the Westwood in Beverley.

Beverley is a market town in East Yorkshire. The Westwood has similarities to the Town Moor, there are people running and exercising there and walking dogs and going for picnics, and a lot of skylarks as well.

It feels wilder. It’s covered in buttercups, and it has old industrial workings, pits that woodland has grown up around, so it’s got this bumpy, lumpy kind of shape to it.

The Beverly cows moo a lot more than the ones in Newcastle, and I don’t know why. It might be because of the terrain and they’re calling because they can’t see each other. But I’ve seen them in open parts, walking across, mooing a lot.

I see cows now more as individuals, they’re a lot more intelligent than I’d thought.

It was something I realised quite quickly; when I was looking at them in October, I suddenly had the feeling there’s a lot more going on in their heads. They’re aware of you and they notice that you’ve got a camera or that you’re watching them.

They’re interested in objects. When I was filming, I got quite close to them because I was trying to capture them grazing and the sound of them chewing and cudding. This very big curly one came over, so I took the camera off the tripod and went, ‘Do you want to have a look at the tripod?’. Then three of them all got round the tripod and started licking it and rubbing their heads on it and investigating it.

That felt like when my son was little, before he could talk, where you’re looking at them and they’re trying to tell you something, as though the language isn’t there yet so you’re trying to read them and they’re reading you. I guess it’s similar with all animals, but with a really big animal maybe I pay more attention to it because they are potentially quite scary things.

Image of black tower on the Westood at Beverley

Photograph of three cows inquisitively exploring a camera tripod

Archival image of a farmer and a bull at an agricultural show

Archival image of agricultural show entrance

Archival image of a white sheep with distinctive black markings around its eye

Archival image of boy holding reins to a highland cow

I’ve also been working with the archive at MERL - Museum of English Rural Life.

I found wonderful silent footage of an agricultural show on the Town Moor in 1962 and discovered more images in MERL's collections. The show often came to Newcastle and the last one was in 1962.

A lot of archive images present what I think of as the ‘wide-sided animal’, where the animal’s physical prowess is shown off. It directly relates to showing off their cuts of meat – this idea of livestock – which I find slightly disturbing.

It’s common for photography and image-making to look at the spectacle of the animal at country shows. We see the rosettes – the ritual around it all.

How would a cow want to be photographed?

I cropped archive images, to capture a moment of interaction between humans and animals. I was looking at the faces of the animals a bit more. That felt quite weird because you know they’re really old photos, so obviously the animal’s dead. But the next thought is, they would have been dead a lot sooner than that because that’s what they’re being bred for, they’re not going to live out into old age.

Images – in advertising and popular culture, in painting and all kinds of art – are important because they give us ideas, often quite subconsciously, about nature and environment and farming and landscape.

Archival image cropped close to a cow's face showing a bridal and numbr tag around its neck

I’m interested in how farming and farming spaces are represented and in finding ways to present them differently.

When I go to the supermarket, on the side of the trolley shelters there are photos of a farmer walking along, holding baskets of hens’ eggs with hens around his feet, and there are images of a farmer by a tractor. They’re very consciously constructed images to give you certain messages.

We see the jolly butchers and the happy chickens as images in the supermarket but I think most of us know that those eggs have probably not come from that kind of setting?

These images are familiar to us but we might ask, ‘Are they true? Where does our food come from?’ The sense that we’re somehow disconnected – this idea of connection and disconnection – has been quite strong for me.

I’m motivated by shared experiences – it’s not just about producing an object for people to admire. I want to ask questions about human-animal relationships and our attitudes to animal welfare and whether that affects what we buy in the shops.

Photograph of supermarket advertising a new butchers department

black and white image of moorland and trees with cows near trees and lying down in the distance

Moor with path at night and streetlight, silhouette of trees and building in distance

Town moor daylight, clouds, tower block in late sunshine, runner with headphones on

Close up image of leaves and plants with small white flowers

black and white image of a fence on moorland with trees and house in background

1960s colour photograph offence framed by trees to left and right, cows on moorland, Newcastle City Centre in the distance

It’s a popular opinion, that we used to have a better relationship with nature? Well, there’s truth in that. But what point in history are we talking about? What do we really know about it?

Michele Allen was interviewed by Sue Bradley, Research Associate in Oral History at Newcastle University in May 2021.

Michele Allen is an artist working with photography, sound and video based in North East England. Her work often deals with environment and sense of place with projects developing over long periods of time often in connection to specific locations or working with community groups.

Her photographic publication Ruminations produced for FIELD is available direct from the artist.

michele-allen.co.uk

As part of the FIELDS film programme her films Westwood and Ruminations will be screened at Beverley Guildhall 10 September and Hexham Forum Cinema 28 September, Star & Shadow Cinema 21 October and Everyman Cinema Lincoln 18 November 2021.