Making Routes

Days before the lockdown began, we made it back to Bamff Estate in Perthshire - the site of Scotland's first reintroduced beavers. Moving on from our usual walking methods, we donned neoprene and attempted some creative swimming experiments. While our usual writing and research is curtailed, here are some images and a couple of short texts from Lewis Hetherington. 

Also see Laura Bissell's 'Landscaping with beavers' just published in…

We gathered in Bamff in March to continue our wild experiments in the company of beavers and their terraqueous (or land and water) landscapes. Our primary aim was to develop a creative swimming methodology to address the following questions:

• How do beavers sense and inhabit their watery environment?
• How can wild swimming…

Figure 1:  A beaver on display at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, Glasgow, Scotland. 

Gift giving may be the most basic form of exchange, though hardly simple. In our hearts, we like to imagine that gifts are given with “no strings attached.” Of course, this is rarely the case. Instead, gift…

Arriving

“The more beavery the landscape is, the harder it is to find them.” This is what Laura Ogden, an environmental anthropologist from the US told us on our first evening in Bamff in Perthshire as we took an evening walk around the land to try to spot some beavers. An interdisciplinary group of ten researchers including artists, cultural geographers, and anthropologists visited the estate for four days to explore “landscaping with beavers”, and the possibility of…