Welcome

'..she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flower-beds and the cool fountains.'-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Welcome to the Dartington Estate. High Cross House sits near to Dartington Hall, with its formal gardens, surrounded by acres of parkland, woods and farmland.

Many famous artists have passed through this place to engage in the entanglement of  creativity that happened at Dartington Hall during the last century. Robert Rauschenberg, Benjamin Brittain, John Cage and Bernard Leach, are only a few of the names in this illustrious pantheon: the Dartington Hall of Fame. You can read about the history of Dartington, and its development as a centre of sustainable living, social justice and the arts by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhurst here, because you won't find another word about it on this site. 

From here you can access a different account of Dartington; a subtler and more intimate account. From here you can find out about walking with no intended destination, about trajectory, or follow trajectories 1, 2, 3, 4, or  5; or you can see the rabbit run from the window of my studio, transforming from autumn till midwinter.

Geographically, Dartington is protected to the North and to the East by the curving embrace of the River Dart. The grounds are lush and fertile, with rolling hills and red soil. I mapped the space in a series of walks through the changing seasons, and came to know a different place to the one presented in the visitor centre; a place that had moved on. Though echoes of its illustrious past remain, through forming my own intimate memories of Dartington, a new and more relevant sense of the estate emerged. This Dartington is one of the mundane and the everyday, where the players are rabbits that run through the hedge, the compost heap, strange caterpillars, chestnut trees and pigs living in a tin shack. Mundane yet meaningful, these characters supported and sustained my own story, taking me further, and deeper in, as I walked each day.

Through the Hedge...