As she sits overlooking the beach near her home, Fay Godwin’s eyes sadden. The 73-year old photographer is not in the best of health these days, and while mentally she’s still as sharp as the photographs that made her famous, her ailing heart leaves her with little energy for taking photographs. the Angles. For centuries it was considered a more or less uninhabitable wilderness, a notorious refuge for textiles, and the upper Calder became "the hardest-worked river in England". Throughout my lifetime, since One of my earliest jobs was to photograph Ted Hughes, in 1971. I photographed him for a publisher and it all started from there. He suggested I photograph a specific area in the Calder valley, which I did for the next seven years, without seeing him again. He then asked me if I was ready to go ahead as co-author for our book of poems and photographs, Remains of Elmet.

Hughes’ poems in Remains of Elmet chronicle this process of reclamation, but he also attempted a re–creation of his own; and the shaping influence which he brought to bear in structuring the sequence makes this work Hughes’ own very personal account of an apocalyptic vision of the kind which Blake presented in Jerusalem. In an obituary for The Guardian, art critic Ian Jeffrey called her 1985 book Land, the "book for which she will be most remembered", and described it: Once analysis of the finds has taken place, it is hoped the lead coffin can be displayed in an upcoming exhibition at Leeds City Museum . I had been working in colour for ten years or so and looked at digital and liked the possibilities it gave me. So I went out and bought this little 5-MegaPixel camera that I like because I don’t have to carry any heavy bags around.landscape that both creates and is inured to its people, whose moors 'Are a stage for the performance of heaven. The area to the western Calder Valley side of Elmet is the subject of a 1979 book combining photography and poetry, the Remains of Elmet by Ted Hughes and Fay Godwin. [16] [17] The book was republished by Faber and Faber in 1994 as Elmet, with a third of the book being new poems and photographs. [ citation needed]

Godwin is a straight talker, refreshingly so. She reminds me of my friend Don McCullin; his face is creased by life’s injustices and Godwin has a similar look, only her issues are closer to hand. She can be outspoken at times, particularly on subjects that are dear to her: like man’s intolerable exploitation of the land, for instance. More on that later… Major retrospective at the Barbican Centre in London , with accompanying publication, Landmarks, published by Dewi Lewis. a b c Smith, A.H. (1961). The Place-names of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Vol.4. Cambridge University Press. pp.1–3.The major work which closely followed Cave Birds and Gaudete in publication was Remains of Elmet. It was the third long sequence of Hughes’ poems to be published by Faber and Faber between 1977 and 1979 and although Hughes first suggested the Elmet project to Fay Godwin in 1970 and she took some photographs of the area, it was not until 1976 that the book was seriously discussed ( Letters 378–80). Only in 1977 did the first of the Elmet poems began to appear in print 1. It seems likely, therefore, that the whole Elmet sequence was written within this short three year period and subsequent to Cave Birds and Gaudete. I have watched the mills of the region and their attendant chapels die. Within the last fifteen years the end Godwin’s eye for detail is typical of all great landscapers. She has the patience of a saint when out in the field, so to speak, and never once settles for second best when recording the subtleties of land and light. Her finest hour came in 1985, when the first of her Land trilogies was published. Regarded by many as the finest study of British landscape ever published, it set new standards in British landscape photography and made Godwin a darling of the Arts Council. But it came with problems. Critical reaction to Remains of Elmet when it was published was muted in comparison with the excesses to which some reviewers had been prompted by Hughes’ earlier work. Some who were habitually roused to aggression by Hughes’ poetry accused him, yet again, of violence and “ primal drum–thumping” 2, but the tone of the Elmet sequence was sufficiently different to cause even Hughes’ most determined critics to change their complaints. Instead of violence, they accused him of writing poems “ neither dynamic nor absolute” but “ melodramatic” 3; and of being “ perverse and inverted to a point of indulgent nastiness” whilst, at the same time, repelling the critic by his “ extreme ordinariness of language” 4. There were also times when I thought Hughes' writing was genuinely just bad. When I read the title of the poem Emily Brontë, I felt like I had just taken a huge run up and was about to launch into a fantastic poem about one of my heroes, from Yorkshire, in a collection about Yorkshire, by a renowned Yorkshire-born poet. And then the fir

Remains of Elmet, in fact, is far less simple than Hughes’ published statements about it would have us believe. There is a metaphysical aspect to it which has been almost overlooked; and, as in Cave Birds, it has a transforming alchemical purpose. It also displays as many congruencies of thought and belief between Hughes and Blake as were evident in Cave Birds. It is a sequence not only by virtue of the poems’ common geographical location, but also because of a consistent underlying cosmology and because it represents, as reviewer Richard Murphy perceptively realised at the time of its publication, Hughes’ attempt to “ re–sacralise” the world through poetry 8. In addition, whilst evidence that Hermetic myths have directly influenced Hughes’ handling of Remains of Elmet is to be found throughout the sequence, his opening poem, ‘Where The Mothers’ ( ROE.10) provides an early and clear example of this. Using rhythms and sounds which capture the wildness of the elements as they are commonly experienced on the pictured moors, Hughes describes the disembodied souls as they, like the wind and the rain, howl through heaven and Pour down onto earth Elmet is attested mainly in toponymic and archaeological evidence; a reference to one Madog Elfed in the medieval Welsh poem The Gododdin and to a Gwallog also operating somewhere in the region in one of the putatively early poems in the Book of Taliesin; and historical sources such as the Historia Brittonum and Bede. [4] One source, the Anglo-Saxon Historia Brittonum states that Elmet was a kingdom, although it is the only source that says this directly. While Bede does not specifically describe Elmet as a kingdom, but rather as silva Elmete the "forest of Elmet", it is clear from his discussion that it was a distinct polity, with its own monarchs. The name 'Elfed/Elmet' is Brythonic in origin and is also found in Elfed, the name of a cantref in Dyfed, Wales. [3]One further important aspect of Remains of Elmet has yet to be examined, and that is Hughes’ own participation in the sequence. Not only did he create the imaginative rituals of the poetry and manipulate the energies so as to effect healing and re–integration, but he specifically included himself in this process. In so doing, Hughes deliberately subjected himself to the energies and to the ritual of re–integration which he attempted. Figuratively and psychologically he returned to his formative years and re–lived the events and situations to which he was exposed, thus facilitating a healing catharsis. has come. They are now virtually dead, and the population of the valley and the hillsides, so rooted for so long, In Remains of Elmet Hughes’ warnings are repeated most strongly. He uses this poetic and photographic re–creation of the fate of the Calder Valley not only as an example, but also as a powerful imaginative tool with which to stimulate us to awareness. At the same time, by describing for us certain events of his childhood, he, as it were, establishes his credentials for this task. Hughes, however, was not merely a prophet of doom. In adopting the persona of the crocodile, Hughes shared the destructive and creative energies associated with this animal in mythology and folklore where, like its relatives the serpents and dragons, it is a symbol of fecundity and power. The crocodile is linked, too, with Leviathan who is “ king over all the children of pride” ( Job. XL1:34) and, symbolically, with foresight and knowledge. And the old belief that crocodile eggs were magically hatched from the river mud by the power of the sun associates the beast with the natural alchemical power by means of which water, earth and sun are joined in the processes of creation. Godwin has long been associated with clunking medium-format cameras and leggy tripods. She refuses to endorse any particular system (although I know full well she was a fan of a certain Swedish manufacturer). But in conversation she lets it slip that she has recently bought a Minolta DiMage digital compact and has become hooked on her new-found medium. Woolf, Alex (1998). "Romancing the Celts: a segmentary approach to acculturation". In Laurence, Ray; Berry, Joanne (eds.). Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire. London: Routledge.