Arden Lost & Found (Text)

Arden is the name given to ancient English forest, probably thousands of years old, historically associated with Warwickshire.

Arden is as much a flight of the imagination as it is, or ever was, a real place. Shakespeare portrayed the forest in As You Like It as a pastoral refuge from courtly corruption, a haven offering retreat and social freedom denied within the bounds of ordinary life. Shakespeare’s Arden was a thinking space, a place where people became more themselves by getting lost. It probably also felt as a homeland for the bard, who grew up in Warwickshire and whose mother bore the Arden name.

Arden was unlikely an unbroken forest, even when retreating into the time before the Romans. The name likely derives from a Celtic word root arduo- or ardu-, meaning "high land" or "elevated", so its name relates to its high position and not its trees. Although clearly highly forested, Arden was much more likely the name of land which was a patchwork of scattered woodland, wooded pasture and heathland, rather than the name of one, continuous forest. It was not quite the wildwood of Celtic myth, nor a realm of heroic legend as Sherwood was, but a middle-land: the Arcadia of the Midlands.

If Arden was a place that was forested and not the name of a single forest, like Feckenham Forest or Sherwood, then it survives – or at least if we still speak its name. And so, through recording the Arden of the twenty-first century, I speak Arden back into being.

I follow the idea of Arden. The nooks where old ways survive: the lore of the forest; the ancient ecosystems; the pockets of regrowth between the infrastructure; the lost meaning of placenames; and the rivers and routes which wove through. All these persist despite continuing fragmentation. Places are preserved through protecting them, but they are also preserved by attention, through naming, walking, and listening – all acts of quiet resistance.

Arden has always been a threshold, as in Shakespeare’s rendering of it, but it was also likely a borderland between Celtic tribes. Modern Arden is also a realm of thresholds – the pockets, the betweens, the unders, and the besides; the reclaimed and the forgotten. On my travels, my aim is not to find Arden; I am recognising the moments when it surfaces.

~ Photographs ~

This is an ongoing project over the last several years, more to come....