The Hill represents a space from my childhood where the combination of unmanaged forest and partly deserted quarry led to a landscape that fuelled our young imaginations and became a place to learn about ourselves as much as about the landscape. Today the space shows the results of a landscape that has seen heavy industry followed by decades of falling into abandonment.

For many like me, the rural Britain we grew up in was a far cry from the chocolate box image of Thatched houses and sleepy villages. The Britain we saw was the result of centuries of land reform through, amongst other factors, the enclosures act, the industrial revolution and the 20th century post war mantra of replanting forests. This forestry activity began as a means to increase timber supply in the event of another war to supply industry with the vital timber needed for uses such as pit props in mines. Only later, with the rise of the environmental movement, did the use of forests for recreation factor into national planning strategies.

Running from Weston-Super-Mare to Frome, the Mendip hills pass south of the cities of Bristol and Bath. As long ago as the Stone Age the area has been the site of numerous efforts to mine the carboniferous limestone and numerous minerals they contain. In 1972 the Western half was annexed off and designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Many of the smaller quarries in the AONB were later closed to allow the expansion of the Whatley and Torr Works quarries in the East, two of the Britain’s so-called super quarries and amongst the biggest in Europe.

On this particular site there are the remains of bell pits dating back to pre-Roman Britain used for ochre mining, a multitude of 19th century mineshafts up to 200 ft deep and the large limestone quarry that was active from the mid 19th century until the late 20th century. Alongside this there is also a small cultivated forest of conifer trees which is now old enough that no one can remember who planted it for the wood crop, and the rest of the space is largely a tangled web of smaller hazel, lime and similar trees mixed with the grasslands native to this part of the country.

The images presented in this series are my efforts to explore this space in which I grew up within the context of the industrial history which have formed the British landscape.