Field Notes - Pannett Art Gallery

Photography by George Hutton

Words by Cameron Hill

People think of Yorkshire and think of green fields, gruff voices, dry stone walls. Picture postcard stuff, a neat vignette to turn into a TV show or drive by on your holidays. But Yorkshire covers over 10% of England’s landmass, a sprawling landscape threaded through with networks of work, culture, and everyday life, woven into these dales and moors over generations.

This exhibition draws on a year spent reporting across the rural corners of the county. Each month, we spent time with lobster fishers, Moors Rangers, farmers, fossil hunters and other groups chosen to show the rich variety of life here. Through photography and prose, the series builds a fragmentary portrait of the people, places, and practices that shape where we live. 

It has been an opportunity to pay attention to what is around us, to look at the unnoticed work and effort that brings a place to life. Everywhere, pockets of culture and craft bring colour to the countryside. They show a landscape that is not idyllic or untouched, but constantly being changed and worked, a meeting ground for heritage and change, industry and nature, community and isolation. These threads of work, interest, and tradition form the textures in the prose and images that have been selected here. 

There are no clear answers. Over the series, we kept turning to the idea of things being well-worn, warm, familiar: hand-pulled pints, clay-covered quoit, inherited routines, weather-carved stone. Maybe this is some idea of what today’s rural Yorkshire is, not something slick and modern, but lived-in, weathered, something that lasts.