Truro
05:16
UTC +1

civil twilight
05:17
sunrise
05:53

UTC

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REVEIL 2020 STREAMS




Fenten Ras, Illogan, Redruth, Cornwall, U.K.

Andy Hughes, Dominica Williamson

Latitude: +50.2477072°
Longitude: -5.2665104°

A rooftop stream from a Cornish miner's 1840's cottage.
The road below the photograph is one of the oldest roads in our area, which is Cornwall. Fenten Ras translates into something like Holy Well Lane (depending on the age-old Cornish language you decide to use when translating).

The location we are streaming from was a major artery in the heart of Cornwall's 1800-1900s tin mining history; at the time a place of immense wealth, industrial noise and dirt. Prior to that it was largely an area of agriculture and tin streaming. Since the 1950s mining has declined almost completely, affecting the fortunes of the area. 

At the front of the photograph are quite a few Cornish residents that have lived in the area for generations. They (and others) have renovated or retained the original features of their tin mining-linked homes but in this photograph you can just see an old coach house (inside you can see where horses would have stood), an apple tree, a pear tree and beyond that an old orchard that needs to be rescued. On the horizon, there are fields where key workers have just planted courgettes (plastic sheeting covers them).

At the side of our house (to the right as you look at the photograph) we have just lost our last open space to development, after three years of fighting to save it. We, with a huge percentage of the community, wanted to keep it as a community asset. The community wanted to enhance the existing woodland beside it, which is old gentry estate land, with a wild flower meadow, allotments, an adult gym, a children's playground and some extra burial ground for our elders and a kind of village green that could link to the woodland (which was saved in the past). With lockdown, the loss of this open space bears heavier on the community. They are building in there as we type. You will hear a few key workers drive on the road between us and this space. 

We have several pairs of tawny owls, rooks, doves, robins, jays, blackbirds and many other species of bird and bat life living near to us. How will they be affected by the loss of this space? One robin wakes us most mornings. He sits adjacent to us on the telegraph wire which you can see. This is because we sleep in century old rafters by a skylight. This is where we will stream from and where we are learning our 'natural' sounds better due to Covid and this platform. 

This is our first stream but will not be our last. We can't access mics due to Covid but are excited to connect our ecosystem to the rest of the world with an iphone. We are interdisciplinary artists www.andyhughes.net and www.ecogeographer.com 

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