Good reasons for visiting Northumberland National Park are many and varied – the views, the wildlife, the fresh air, to name but a few.
But now, along with these timeless attractions, there are poems to be found.
They are the work of Simon Armitage, one of Britain’s finest poets, and a project called Poems in the Air.
It is a beautiful project, a marriage of poetry and 21st Century technology inspired by stunning countryside.
Essentially, it is a digital trail of spoken poems that can be accessed only by mobile phone or tablet at specific locations in the national park.
Simon Armitage popped up to Haughton Castle at Humshaugh, near Hexham, to introduce the project, the latest in a series of commissions that have taken him into the great outdoors.
Born in a West Yorkshire village, he has never been a cloistered, ‘ivory tower’ poet. He walked the Pennine Way, recounted in his book Walking Home, and has given readings on Hadrian’s Wall.
Of his latest undertaking, he said: “It followed on from a project I worked on in the South Pennines called the Stanza Stones. I was commissioned to write a suite of poems to be inscribed onto rocks there. The Northumberland National Park got in touch and were interested in a similar project but I didn’t just want to replicate that.
“I’m very interested in trying to find ways of putting poems in the landscape and bringing people to them but without actual intrusions into the landscape. I had this idea that it might be possible to write a group of poems that could only be activated through technology and brought, via readings, to your phone.
“I think at the time we first started discussing this the technology was at a pretty experimental level. It has been interesting because over the last two years, while we’ve been talking, it has become very do-able.”
It was do-able and has now been done.
By downloading a Poems in the Air mobile app, you can venture forth on a poetry-driven trail of Northumberland National Park. It sounds a bit like a literary version of Pokémon Go fad. If it proves half as popular, it will be deemed a great success.
Simon Armitage, born in 1963, has had to come to terms with digital technology, like so many of us.
“I blow hot and cold with it really,” he said. “I’ve got my fair share of gadgets and I’ve got a 16-year-old daughter who shows me how they all work.
“I’m not someone who’s interested in spending hours in front of screens and when I switch off, I switch off. But I like some of the excitement and freedom it gives you.”
On the spectrum between luddites and geeks, Simon put himself “somewhere in the middle, I suppose”. But he was excited by this latest innovation.
“It works! The basic idea is that you’ll have to navigate yourself to these very specific places in the national park. When you get to within a few yards of these places, that will trigger by GPS (Global Positioning System, a system of navigation by satellite) a recording of me reading a poem.
“You’ll get what I hope will feel like a personal reading of a poem that exists as spoken words.”
Simon said the poems were distributed fairly evenly throughout the national park.
“Maybe what might happen is that people will want to collect or experience all the poems. A certain amount of walking will be involved with each one. They’re not in places where you could just pull up in a carpark. They are places that are not necessarily celebrated or beautiful.
“I asked people who work for the National Park Authority to suggest locations that were special to them and I then went out with various experts and rangers to look them.
“I took a notebook with me and stood in each particular place and made lists of words and phrases. There were some locations that I knew I wanted to write about straight away.”
Some people, he recalled, had suggested his Stanza Stones poems could last for 1,000 years.
And these?
“I really like the idea of them being ephemeral things in the sense that they have no presence as text. But I hope they’ll endure. I suppose they’ll last as long as the technology lasts but I like the idea of them being out there, like airwaves.”
Poems in the Air is part of Northumberland National Park’s developing arts and culture programme supported by Arts Council England and connected to The Sill: National Landscape Discovery Centre at Hadrian’s Wall. The £14.8m facility is due to open next year.
The app, developed by Newcastle creative agency TAC Design, is free and available to download on both IOS and Android platforms. Go to www.poemsintheair.co.uk or www.northumberlandnationalpark.co.uk
FIND POEMS HERE...
1. Weaver’s Cottage, Stonehaugh, is a tumbledown dwelling overlooking the pretty Warks Burn.
2. Shepherd’s Cairn at Ewartly Shank, near Alnham, is a little-known memorial to two shepherds lost in a blizzard.
3. The Proposal Stone at Simonside is a site of poignant local history discovered on Simonside ridge.
4. Old Middleton, near Wooler, is an abandoned medieval village nestled into the landscape.
5. A walk at Greenhaugh involves a tranquil meander past hay meadows and through woodland to Tarset Burn.
6. Dove Crag, Harbottle, is on a rewarding woodland walk leading to a natural amphitheatre and a secret waterfall.
