Burbage Edge is a place I fell for as soon as I saw it. the Edge curves in a wide bowl around the Burbage Brook that flows through it. It is a place which seems wide open, unoccupied; yet in fact it is an intensively inhabited and humanised landscape.
The plantation in the centre of the valley was deliberately planned to look like a map of Britain from the air, and is now being slowly felled and replaced with a more sustainable mix of trees. Around and about there are stones with bullet-marks from army training during World War Two. Until the middle of the Twentieth Century the stones on the cliff were quarried by the craftsmen who made the millstones that have become an icon of the Peaks. The heather moorland is a remnant of the aristocratic abuse of the land for grouse shooting that this vampiric class are so fond of.
The most striking remnant of our more distant past, the hill fort of Carl Wark, dominates the valley, despite being in the shadow of the natural Higger Tor. Surrounding the fort are dozens of tumuli and grave mounds, and from them comes that sense of the unknown that is transmitted from a ruin; the knowledge that we are witnessing a limit to our ability to know. We will never be able to say what those who lived and used this land two thousand years and more ago saw when they looked from the ramparts.
In these images I've tried to give a sense of the way this place has captured my imagination; and in all of them I have tried to find in stone and moor, people.
