Wolds Way

Spring Benches for Yorkshire Wolds Way.

Nominated for The TRADA Wood Awards – Best Bespoke Design 2011.

We were commissioned by Visit Hull & East Yorkshire to design and manufacture a series of benches to enhance the experience of using the Yorkshire Wolds Way – an eighty mile long distance footpath and National Trail through the Yorkshire Wolds from Hull to Filey. During research into the area, and many miles walking, inspiration was taken from the streams bubbling up in the flowing shaped but dry valleys. A unique feature of the chalk Downs.

Durable native oak was chosen and allowed to weather to maintenance free silvery grey. The landscape and six years of weathering can be seen in a short piece of footage featuring the bench taken from the BBC’s Yorkshire Wolds Way on Youtube.
All fixings and the galvanised steel supports are designed to echo the largely agricultural landscape.

As part of the project, John Wedgwood Clarke, a Scarborough poet, was commissioned to write poetry inspired by the six bench sites on the trail. These lines of verse have been graphically inscribed onto the benches.

Here are two with their grid references.

1. South Cave – OS 932322
We shed them one by one, by shattered field and barley seas,
until the way is open for echoes of us
made strange by wind, deserted barn, the shifting trade
of shadows on the Humbri, Humbre, Humber,
our mouths to springs that speak in tongues of thirst.

2. Goodmanham – OS 899426
From dark to dark the bird flies through the fire-lit hall,
flies through the axe that strikes the shrine,
through burning that grows once more in stone and coloured light,
through rain as it amazes chalk
and flowers in this latest cup of breath: Goodmanham.

 

The image below was sent to us in April 2018

” Thought you might appreciate this shot of your bench above Millington being enjoyed by a party of Wolds Way walkers taking their lunchbreak.”

We like the dog!