Miranda Whall

Wet soggy freezing toes – I’ve finished crawling – hooray!

I crawled from the trig point up at Pen Y Garn (611m) to the Pwllpeiran Upland Centre in Cwmystwyth in 8 crawls, from July to November, approx 5 1/2 miles.

Its great to be able to put away the Go -pro’s, the gloves, knee pads, red trainers, red socks, sun glasses, running gear and of course the fleece – until the exhibition at the Oriel Davies Gallery in April 2018.

It was a beautiful last crawl- up the grassy hill to the bench, then down again past weather eroded tree roots, russet red dead bracken, rocky outcrops, rain drop laden grass and soggy leaves. It was fun to crawl along the road, being passed by a logging truck and then down through the forest, through the river and into the car park of the Upland Centre.

What struck me today was that when I was crawling in the landscape I felt empowered and dynamic, defiant and invincible but crawling up the steps and through the car park to meet the Pwllpeiran crew I suddenly felt diminished, disempowered and ridiculous, more like a child than an animal.

The ending to this journey was kind of special, but also anti-climactical and disappointing largely because all of the batteries in my Go – Pro cameras bar one had ran out at least 10 minutes before the end, I was frustrated because I rushed the crawl to make sure the batteries would last, this was the only crawl which had a fixed destination and I knew it would take over the battery time to reach Pwllpeiran, so I was tense, if they ran out too soon it meant I would fail to capture footage of the forest and river, and in amongst the hours and hours of footage of heather, Sphagnum moss, Molinia grass, thistles and grass I have collected along the way, these new features would have been welcome highlights!

But never mind I managed to collect footage from the one surviving camera mounted on my hand, the footage is very strange and interesting – my disembodied black gloved hand flies through each frame like an impending enemy – the glove of doom – a submarine.

So now the crawling is complete the editing begins, I have 4,472 (approx) minutes of footage to crawl through…

Soon I will have the last commissioned music/sound by Toby Hay, Angharad Davies and Sam Christie and so the film can take shape.

It is very exciting..

Thank you Hannah Mann for the last of your photos that so eloquently and surprisingly capture your experience of me and the landscape, thank you for being on the whole journey with me and for the thousands of photos. Thank you Rhys Thwaites- Jones for documenting the last three crawls – I can’t wait to see the documentary film, thank you John Davies, Hannah Vallin and Ben Roberts for meeting me at the centre today and sorry for holding you up!