Contemporary Markmakers collaborating with the Moor Poets on some super visits to our lovely Dartmoor and a search for the history locked unseen beneath the rocks. Our poets have worked their magic, we have made some marks. And some of us have crossed the species barrier, with poets daubing wonderfully and a few of us scratching words on our artwork on the journey home. It’s usually me in the back of the car, trying to fix the evening into a pencil memory.

Spectacular fairy ring of rabbit pooh and tender heather

Rusty heifers with mismatched horns, the young ones skittering and
scampering in playful uncertainty

Pale yellow slender grasses growing strangely brighter, glowing even, as
sun fades at the close of making marks

Gorse scratching, gouging, mark making our thighs

Hastily tucking trouser legs into socks for fear of ticks, spiders,
lizards and adders

The magic of fading sun and clouds on dark water pond, that stares back
at us as we stand and look, and stand and look, and then get bitten

Still scratching at imaginary ants in pants, must investigate that later

The path is there, we see it easily on the back track, the light now
faded, but the path still glowing sandy bright, laughing smug at us who
missed it hours before and scrabbled long through thick and thin, rough
and tougher, sticky and prickly, tender lichens pale and magic, heathers
new and shouting colour, embryonic spruce trees fledging their tiny
beginnings

We saw it all

We saw and sought to make our marks

And marks escaped us, but we found one or two and caged them in our
notebooks.