Artist, Tim Baynes, visited the Vale of Pewsey and has become completely smitten! Here, in this article, he describes how important the Vale is in our ancient and modern history and why it is so remarkable.
Yellow train from Alton Priors
Alton Priors
Pewsey Hill to Devil's Grave
Love life? Love the Vale of Pewsey!
Only weeks ago we discovered a valley, bounded north and south by two escarpments. Both are laced with tracks and ways.
Long before Screwfix existed, tools were made here - ten hundred thousand years ago. Tools to hunt and fish, their discovery heralded other ages. Around 4,000 BC the Neolithic peoples grew wheat and barley and were making pots.
Long barrows like Adam’s Grave are found on the northern escarpment. More adventurous building followed - ring banks and ditch monuments and stone circles; Avebury and Stonehenge are just down the road.
There is so much that has gone on here! The Early Bronze age 2300-1500 BC heralded the arrival of more extensive metal work and pottery, daggers and jewellery. And soon after this, they added fields and houses and hill forts for protection. Then came the modern age. It was 800 BC and so came the advent of iron, bronze’s harder sibling - several Iron Age hill forts overlook the Vale.
The boys from Rome marched in 43 AD and stayed for 400 years - a long way from Lazio. Then followed a period of back and forth with Germanic invaders from the North Sea. Eventually Anglo-Saxons settled here. Well until 1066 and all that. Now you’re caught up 😉
A river, the Avon, runs through this valley. In the 1700s and later, engineers ‘remodelled’ this into a canal. Then came the Age of the Train[1] - the canal was neglected and fell into ruin. Now restored, pleasure seekers traffic these waters and it is also a great cycling route, I’ve done it twice.[2]
The Vale of Pewsey is a Wiltshire wonder. Farmed, roamed, walked; strewn with treasure, flints the size of cricket balls and other bits and bobs from who knows when. You might get answers at the Pewsey Vale museum, sorry, Pewsey Heritage Centre[3].
This land drowses, woken occasionally by the train service. Yes, you can whizz up to London Paddington, or pack your beach things and whizz west to Penzance. And farmers every day are about their important business makes an impression on the landscape. Road traffic? Get up high enough and their isn’t any.
Several of Wiltshire’s white horses[4] graze on these hills of Pewsey Vale. Most were crowd-funded by eminent Victorians.
Go up to Pewsey Hill - there the magic Vale is laid out like a model landscape.
There is so little not to enjoy.
And the best place to start is by visiting the Visit Pewsey Vale website - so you are in the right place!
[1] Famous ad-land slogan: Do you remember "The Age of the Train" the television advertising campaign for British Rail in the late 1970s to promote its InterCity rail travel service?
[2] And extract from one cycling trip https://timbaynesart.blogspot.com/2014/06/kennet-and-avon-2.html
[3] Pewsey Heritage Centre https://pewsey-heritage-centre.org.uk
[4] White Horses link https://www.wiltshire.gov.uk/article/1622/White-horses#:~:text=Of%20the%20thirteen%20white%20horses,and%20are%20no%20longer%20visible
Down Pewsey Hill
Alton Priors & The Vale
Stanton St Bernard
About Tim Baynes
Tim Baynes = Art + Excitement
Exciting for Tim is a grey Essex marsh, an impossibly green Carmarthenshire hillside and now the Wiltshire Downs drifting into Oxfordshire. The downs are only thirty minutes from his front door.
For many years his work took him to cities across the world. These were drawn in Moleskine notebooks and ‘transcribed’ into monoprint in 2009 through 2011[1].
He is always scavenging across experience and material, spurred on by examining the work of other painters: Gillian Ayers (colour) Richard Diebenkorn (scale and heat) Peter Lanyon (flight and coast) John Piper (place) Graham Sutherland (surprise/form) Ivon Hitchens (constancy/push).
Drawing or photography is the starting point when something excites him. Back in his studio in Cricklade more drawings or paint/oil pastel studies are made. Tim’s painting then takes these and pulls an idea together in pigment.
Tim hopes his work is a footprint on a Wiltshire landscape, so that he and others can look out across the work and find meaning. More about Tim including a gallery of work on www.timbaynesart.co.uk
Tim Baynes studied fine art at Carmarthen School of Art with additional studies at Central St Martins School of art and The Slade.