Last December I was on a lane below the forest looking across to a massive oak standing alone in the fields. Its broad, bulging trunk spoke of age and history. As I stood, a flash of white caught the edge of my vision and a barn owl cut low and silent across the fields, hunting. I wrote and recorded a song, ‘Oak and Owl’ capturing my thoughts of that moment, and adopted the title as that of this exhibition. I took a theme from the song, a repeated chant ‘oak and owl’ as the basis of the soundtrack playing in here.

Oak

The oak standing in the fields fascinated me, but soon after that encounter, in January, Storm Éowyn swept across and brought down another oak onto Steve’s field next to where we live. It was a shock as those trees speak of longevity but in a moment they can fall  . . . or be felled. You can even see it in the photo ‘Shadows and Light’, taken a year before it fell. He chain-sawed it into segments and slices and kindly let me show a slice of its trunk in this exhibition. From counting the rings, one for each year of its life, I reckon it dates back to Queen Victorian times. If you get to the show count them for yourself and see what you think. The big old oak in the fields still stands, so no chance to count its rings; but it’s girth has been recorded and from that it seems it is about 360 years old, so born in the English Civil War. Compared with the life of those trees we are just passing flashes of light, like that owl . . .

Owl

I’d seen the owl regularly hunting across the fields up the lane from us. After I wrote the song I wanted to photograph it. Not easy without high powered digital kit, as film needs quite a lot of light to work without blurring. But a bigger problem was as soon as I went looking it for it to photograph it disappeared. People said they hadn’t seen it since the depths of winter. A local ornithologist said there were no barn owls locally any more. I put out a message on the village facebook page. Still no luck. Then someone who lives up next to those fields said she’d heard it. I prepared to spend dusk-times trying to spot it, but then we saw the white bird flying low right behind our house. My camera was in another room, needed a film loading and a lens fitting and by the time I went out to the field’s edge it seemed to be gone, but then, in the last dusk light, it flew low back past us and I froze a fragile image on film. I recorded its screeching call, too, and you might hear that on the soundtrack, alongside a tawny owl calling at the same time

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