Lovely film from @finnvarney882 celebrating a collaboration between Yorkshire Peat Partnership and @keighleycreative - Pledges to the Landscape.
The project aim was to give primary school-age children the opportunity to get hands-on with bogs, helping them develop their understanding of environmental science whilst improving their creative skills. Its goal was to create a symbolic and collaborative artwork embedded in the landscape that would also help to restore peatlands on Denton Reserve above Ilkley.
Local school children from Year 5 at Eastwood, Victoria, Riddlesden St. Mary’s, Worth Valley, Holycroft and Merlin Top primaries in Keighley, were invited to join in the project, and classes were given their own “micro-peatbogs” to look after. The idea was to deepen the children’s understanding of the special bogs and landscapes around them without travelling to them.
The project held a series of interactive workshops in the six schools. These allowed the children to get creative in the classroom whilst learning about the environment around them and the importance of Yorkshire’s peatlands, their plants and wildlife.
The children’s drawings were burned onto wooden planks using pyrography and the planks were used to construct a leaky dam as part of the peatland restoration on Denton Reserve. A team of pupils and teacher representatives from all six schools, and volunteers, ventured up to the bog to install the dam, where it has now started to slow the flow of water off the moor. The dam will, over time, be engulfed by peat as the bog grows around it, preserving the children’s art for centuries to come.
Pledges to the Landscape received funding from the West Yorkshire Combined Authority’s Community Climate Grants program and @bradfordmdcvideo
#Peatlands #GreatNorthBog #Yorkshire
