My name is Meryl Clark. I’m a flower farmer.

When I was a child, we lived on the outskirts of Leeds. There were fields, not too far away, and we were near the rhubarb triangle. So, we used to play in amongst the rhubarb and get chased off by the farmer. We used to pull them out, we used them as parasols, and umbrellas.  We used to play a lot in the fields and then we used to blackberry pick and mum and dad had a big corner plot garden. Dad really liked doing the hard landscaping, making rockeries and flagging and Mum, she’s still at 83, is gardening every single day. So, I got it from there, I suppose. They gave me a corner of the garden that I could use as a child. 

As I got to my teenage years, herbs really interested me and I used to grow those and dry them and make teas and things out of them. 

I went to horticultural college from school and then started work after that straight away for the local authority, for the Parks Department, and then left because I ended up being drowned in paperwork and not actually gardening and working with the flowers which I loved.  So, I set up a specialist garden maintenance business.  

Janet was an artist, both her and her husband were really famous trompe l’oeil artists who worked all over the world and bought a house just up the road and wanted to set a beautiful garden up for painting and for inspiration for the work. I had a neighbour and she knew Janet and Paul and she heard from them that they were looking for somebody who knew what they were doing. So, she mentioned it to me, took me up and it was just one of those, you know, where you meet somebody and instantly you know you love them. 

She was an artist; she wasn’t a florist. but she was able to just pick the flowers and make the most beautiful bunches for gifts for friends and I used to sit watching her thinking, how has she done that? And it was because of the colour.  She put them together beautifully. That made me want to start arranging. That eventually sent me off to college to learn a bit more about it. Yeah, so she did have a massive impact on me. 

I loved watching her paint and she knew she could rely on me to see to her garden, which meant the world to her.  Yeah, that was really, really important time for me that year.  She had a terminal illness. 

I lost my favourite auntie and two grandmothers and my dad and I’d got a small child and it was just too much pressure and it resulted in an autoimmune condition, rheumatoid arthritis.  The specialist did say, we will have you gardening again and we will have you dancing – because I used to do salsa.  And he was right. It took quite a while but now I have a drip every four weeks and it sort of controls it, knocks it back a bit. 

I was always determined to get back, being outside and the gardening is such a love of mine that there was no way I was ever going to give that up.  I went back to forestry college to learn about the flowers and started growing flowers for cutting and just got areal bug and eventually  I got offered a little piece of land here and oh  started doing it on a larger scale. 

Do I have a favourite season?  Yeah, definitely spring. No, summer.  Autumn? Definitely not winter.  All of them. I think they’ve all got their own beauty, apart from winter.  Because I don’t like being cold and wet. They’re all important in their own way, aren’t they? They’re all beautiful.  Autumn saddens me slightly because I know winter’s coming. Spring’s full of hope. But in summer, ah the warmth. the sun on your face, the abundance of flowers, probably summer. 

Being outside is everything to me really. If I couldn’t be outside I wouldn’t really have any point to me. 

I’m Kemmi Gill, also known as KG. I am a youth worker and musician born and bred in Bradford. 

I used to live in Holmewood and before Holmewood, West Bolling, very urban and busy. I moved from a council estate to kind of a rural little village. I was 14 and we’d lived in Wilsden for about four or five months at this point and, it was a phone call home from the teachers at school to my mum and my mum was pretty angry so I came out for a walk. And I think I sat here until it started to get dark, it must have been what felt like two, three hours but it probably was only an hour and a half.  And for me it was just calming and you hear people talking about the effect that nature can have and the effect that your surroundings can have but I didn’t really believe it until I found this spot. For me this is a very freeing space and this route it leads down to a waterfall. 

I feel calm. I feel like I am exactly where I’m meant to be when I’m here. Yeah, it transports the way I feel. You know, I could be coming up feeling stressed or sad or angry and I sit down and just take it in and you know in half an hour, an hour I’m feeling calm and well grounded. 

I think somebody in the village told me, oh if you go a little bit further down there’s a waterfall. and wow! So when I seen that, it was like, I can’t believe this is in Bradford, you know, I can’t believe it’s less than a half an hour walk from my house. To have something like that on your doorstep, not only does it make you feel a certain type of way, it makes you appreciate what you’ve got.  I think there’s something majestic about water flowing as well and the sound of it. I think that also transports you to another place where you can be yourself and be free, it’s very freeing. 

So, for me it kind of acted as a turning point, and I know that’s a very big thing to say because it’s nature, but coming from one type of life to a different type of life and surroundings, it acted as my comforter. If I had any issues or if I argued or like I was saying if I felt sad or any type of way I just walk to the water and yeah it just acted as like, my safe place, somewhere where you know nobody’s judging, I can just be me. 

I’ve never been bored to sat up here.  There’s something magical about looking out and not seeing no chaos going on.  And for me, it’s just, it’s freeing. It’s like, basically the universe telling me that you’ve got an opportunity. This is your opportunity, you know?  And yeah, just being one, being one with nature and just being still.

‘Every full moon I get together with a group of women, and we’re called the Au Naturel Swimmers. So, we’re au naturel because we go in the water without a swimming costume. We don’t wear wet suits. We wear bobble hats, little boots and swimming gloves. We all go together, usually in the dark, to a moonlit reservoir or river or lake, and immerse ourselves in water naked, and then we generally have a little bit of food and perhaps a fire, and we sing. And it’s just a complete contrast to modern life. 

I think the age range would be early 30s to around maybe late 70s. Yeah, so, yeah, it’s quite a stretch, really, actually, isn’t it? But we’re all women, and we all enjoy swimming, and we’re all prepared to go on a little adventure every full moon. The swimming makes you feel alive, but also, there’s something about floating in water in the dark with only the moon and perhaps someone who’s got a head torch on. It’s it’s kind of desensitizing, but at the same time, you are fully in your senses, so you’re not seeing, but you’re feeling, and the water is silky and it embraces you, and it kind of supports you, and you just feel loved. And the group has got that feel about it as well. So you’re cold, but warm, you know, incredibly happy. So you just feel completely at peace and at one with each other, the water, the fire, the song.’ 

Song

“when the Green Man comes a walking, then we’ll know, then we’ll know. High on the hillside crouch by the stone wall, the shepherd is a sheltering away from the squalls. He curses the weather, and loudly, he calls, oh, when will this winter be over? When will this winter be done? When the Green Man walks the forest, then we’ll know springs begun. When the Green Man comes a walking, then we’ll know. Then we’ll know. When the Green Man stalks the forest, then we’ll know, then we’ll know.” 

My name is Aina J. Khan. I am a journalist and writer. Because I’m a journalist and I cover the news, international news, it’s really fast-paced. The things I’m reading and consuming, it can be overwhelming. So walking’s a real sort of respite for me in a way that I can just breathe and just calm down after a really busy day of work. 

I walk a lot. I do. And I love to walk. It’s my form of therapy. It’s my form of prayer. It’s my form of meditation. Whatever label you want to put on it, it really is my form of self-care. And I think a lot of people might be surprised because I’m a woman and I’m also a visibly Muslim woman, but I really, really love to walk alone.  

I have walked in South Africa. I’ve walked in Lesotho. I’ve walked in Oman. I’ve walked in Jamaica. I’ve walked in Jordan. I’ve walked in a few countries that I’ve been traveling to recently. 

We’re in Harden Grange Folly. The first thing that you notice is a woodland area of pine trees. And basically when you look upwards, they’re all towering above you, but not in a way that’s ominous or intimidating. It’s in a really kind of, at least for me, it was in a really comforting way. If you walk maybe some 10 to 15 minutes uphill, you’ll find ruins in the middle of nowhere, sat on a cliff top. 

When I got here for the first time, I felt free. I felt safe and I felt like I was in a sanctuary actually as well. On a windy day, you can hear the pine trees just rustling and they’re quite tall. I think they’re about maybe 50 to 70 feet tall. So, you know, they make a little bit of noise, but the sound that they make is so soothing. 

It sounds like water or some kind of stream that’s trickling through, but it’s not. It’s actually the trees just kind of waving with the wind. And then when you stand on the rock face where the ruins are, there’s a real sense of kind of rootedness.  

I feel really calm. My heart rate slows down. I’m actually breathing. I’m always seeking nature because I feel that it gives me peace. I think whether you’re a person of faith or not, and I am a person of faith, there’s a real sense of divinity in spaces like these as well. And I feel so much more connected to a higher power, whether it’s God or somebody else. But for me, coming from a monotheistic faith, which is Islam, when I’m in spaces like these, I do feel more connected to God. 

And ironically, I also feel connected to myself as well. I feel like I have conversations with myself that I can’t have when things are just going so fast and there’s so much white noise that it’s just the silence of being in nature. That’s the other reason I seek it. The silence is really soothing and it gives me clarity.  

I think my life would be very miserable if I wasn’t connected to the outdoors. I would feel imprisoned. I genuinely feel like my soul yearns to be outside. And it’s why literally every time I’m outdoors, I’m just like this kid that’s just been unleashed into the world. So I can’t imagine life without it, basically.

My name is Ann. At the moment, we are sat on Cononley Lead Mine.  

I was born in Nelson, Lancashire, and I was the youngest of –  there were three sisters. I was quite a rebellious one I think. I can remember, I loved frogs and frogs spawn, so I used to collect loads of frogs. We all used to meet on the street, a big gang of us. I can remember, I used to knock on people’s door and ask if I could take the babies for a walk in the pram. Well, you did in them days, didn’t you? And then we used to go up the fields and play in the fields.  

School was like something I had to get through. I didn’t like school at all, but I had no idea what I wanted to do – I didn’t want to work in the mills. Andy, yes, that’s my husband – w met in a nightclub, like people used to do then, and he took me home, and I knew funny, I knew instantly I were going to marry him. So I was 17 then, and he was coming up 21. I think we went out together for about three years before his brother said to him, ‘in’t it about time, you and Anne got married?’  So we did. 

Andy had decided that he was giving up work and going to qualify as a architect. So we had two children, and lived off a grant, and we bought this farmhouse that was in a wreck. The girls also helped with the farm house working. And then we got a couple of horses on loan. Then we got some sheep and a goat and pig, a pig, yeah. 

Because I didn’t know anybody in Skipton, I thought, What should I do to get to know people? So I joined the Girl Guide Association, and I ran guides at the parish church at Skipton. I then started walking the Dalesway, and then from there, I became the county outdoor activity advisor. So I decided I wanted to get some qualifications. Eventually, I got my mountain leadership, which gave me confidence to do other things.  

I got asked if I would work for the youth service in Skipton. I spent quite a lot of years working down there and doing expedition training for the Duke of Edinburgh award. Then I realized (how old were I?) In my 50s. That’s what I wanted to do all my life. 

Everybody says when I take them out,’ where are you taking me? Why? Why do we have to go this way. Why can’t we stay on the footpath?’.  And I’m looking for things that are around the corner, that are off the footpath, or what’s over there, just over the next horizon, yeah, and to be up here at my age, my knees are a lot better than they were when I were 35  – Yeah, and it’s all because I’ve carried on doing it. 

I can hear nothing now. Oh yes, I heard a bit then. But that nothing is wonderful, isn’t it? A little bleat of a sheep, the mournful bleat orf a lamb, yeah. In a way, it makes you feel sad, but then happy. It’s all different feelings. This landscape makes me feel part of it, wild and rugged, and yeah, I can tackle anything. Definitely just makes me feel wonderful, really, and so free. 

I’m Rachel Coates and I’m a dairy farmer. 

I was born in Skipton. We lived in the middle of a wood. Being the only girl with lots of boys, I was quite a tomboy, so we used to play in the woods quite a lot and be almost a bit feral. In the spring there was lots of garlic, wild garlic in the woods and we used to make garlic slides where we used to slide down the hills and we just used to come home smelling to high heaven of garlic but it was such great fun and we used to be green and muddy but clearly very happy.  

My father was a livestock auctioneer actually so I was used to livestock and farmers but not farming. I went to agricultural college and I wanted to be involved in the farming industry. I went to live in London and I hadn’t realised until I was there just how much I missed the countryside. I did literally feel like a fish out of water.  

I happened to marry a farmer. We don’t really call ourselves farmer’s wives these days because we are doing the farming, we’re not just at home baking bread. We’re actually physically farming as well. I do most jobs apart from milking. I don’t milk. Before I got married, I can’t remember who told me now but someone told me that I shouldn’t learn to milk because I’d be too useful and then my husband who played cricket at the time, he’d be off playing cricket all the time and I’d be milking and that’d be it. So I never learnt to milk.  

It’s always a different view every day. We do have quite a lot of different weather and the moor changes colour all the time. The thing about the barn is that it makes you realise that you’re only custodians of the farm or the land even though we don’t own the farm, we’re tenants. You realise that the barn’s got history so it’s been there longer than you even though my husband’s family have been here for nearly 50 years. So it centres that, puts a pin in, in time and it makes you seem smaller.

My name is Alice Parsons. I’m a freelance producer and curator, and I run my own CIC called Castles In The Sky. I live in Bradford in Undercliffe, in BD2.  

I grew up in a place called Walton in Liverpool. I’m an only child. We weren’t really an outdoorsy family particularly. As a child, I would read quite voraciously. That was the thing that I became kind of known for. We had a library really nearby to our house. Most days after school, I would go there with my mum, who would pick me up, and I remember every single time, trying to take out more books than was the allowance.  

So I would sit a lot in the house mainly, in just in my room, reading. And as I got older, than older, again, I would spend a lot of time in libraries on my own when I was kind of allowed to go places. I remember really thinking a book was the only place that you could see another world or another way of life.  

I moved to Bradford nearly nine years ago now. So I had left Liverpool when I was 18 and gone to London for university, did my course there, my undergraduate degree, and as soon as that finished, moved back to the north, moved to Leeds actually. Had a job there, enjoyed the job, wasn’t so set on Leeds and decided to try Bradford, really, on a whim. I saw that it had good transport links to Leeds, genuinely took it on that basis, a six month contract, and within that six months, knew that I’d found somewhere really special, and wanted to see if I could make that place my home.  

We are just slightly outside Grassington on the Moors, on the Dalesway path. If I would have asked myself, or told myself kind of 10 years ago that I would enjoy and seek out landscapes as I do now, I’d have been quite confused, because it really wasn’t ever part of my life, part of my interests. And that changed since living in Bradford,  

I was out walking with my partner, Harriet, and we were talking about the kind of epic walks that people do. And I said, Is there a version of, you know, like coast to coast, but where you actually see the coast for most of the walk? And I discovered the Wales coastal path, which is almost 1000 miles, if you add Offa’s dyke, which I will be doing. And so I just said, I’m going to do that I think. In 2026 I’ll do that, and I’m quite an all or nothing person. People who know me, I will just say quite big statements, but then I will do them. I back it up with the action. 

I do think walking has changed my life. It told me that I can do something that I never thought I can do when I’m walking, particularly in a landscape like this one, where audibly, it’s very quiet, it makes me feel tired, but in a in a very soothing way, I feel very soothed by these walks. I remember the first time I went, I took my headphones with me and then just didn’t use them at all the whole 80 miles.  

It’s one of the only times in my life that I feel a true kind of clarity and quiet comes over my head. It’s also made me feel a lot more connected to where I live, even though I’m in Bradford BD2. There’s a beautiful horizon view of kind of rolling hills that, in the past acted as just a bit of a nice backdrop, but now feel really like part of my locale, part of the geography of where I am in the world and how I can engage with that. I think what I love the most about it is that you can do it literally anywhere as well, because I’m sure if 

I lived in another city, there are walks just leading off from anywhere you go, it’s there, ready and waiting.  

Thinking of all those books I read as a child, wanting to escape into all of these worlds, I don’t think I’d ever thought of these landscapes as those interesting worlds, but obviously they are. They’re so complex, and they’re full of stories and full of people and creatures and memories and the millions of people who’ve walked these paths before us and built these amazing rock walls that we’ve seen today, I think it’s a lovely reminder that we’re connected to stories all through history when we’re in these spaces. 

My name is Alice Nutter. I’m a script writer, screenwriter, really. Before that, I was in a gang that were a pop group, Chumbawamba for 20 years. Before that, I was born in Burnley, working class kid. Now Burnley’s an industrial mill town, and it’s in the shadow of Pendle Hill. But the Burnley I knew, was two up, two down streets. The street we lived on, Cairo Street was attached to Cairo mill. 

You didn’t really go out into nature. My mum was quite an independent woman. She became a nurse and learned to drive. I mean, they were things that women didn’t do. And we used to go out to countryside, but we never got out the car. We’d all, well, my mum and dad would have fags, and we’d all sit in the back looking out in the car park, and then we’d come home again. That was it. Really with nature. I didn’t have a connection to it.  

So first time I went camping with a load of punks, I took a suitcase. I just just wasn’t used to being in nature, and it did me ‘ead in a bit. I used to sort of think –  there’s no chemist, there’s no newsagent, there’s no shops. I felt comfortable in brick and grime. 

In 2018 I had a stroke, and it was quite a major stroke, and it left me really debilitated. I had the stroke in May, and just as I were thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I’m, you know, I’m on my way back’ in January, 2019 a routine, you know, test, I was diagnosed with cancer, and they just said you’ve got to have your breast off. But because I’d had a stroke, they’d want to give me a general anesthetic in case I had another stroke, and so I had to wait a year before the mastectomy. 

So 2019 I didn’t feel ill, but I was sort of living under the shadow of something, and my daughter had done a lot of nursing me back, really, and then they went back to college when I started to get well again, and had a major breakdown. And it was the time covid hit, so they came back. Their mental health was in a really bad way. 

I felt really vulnerable after the mastectomy, because I didn’t want people to see me weak. So, in some ways, covid suited me, because I couldn’t stand how debilitated I were, and we started to come here every day, just me and May. But because of May’s mental health, it wasn’t a simple thing. May couldn’t face anything. And so just getting in the car to get here was a trial in itself, because there’d be a lot of anger and and then when we got here, May would be furious, and I’d walk in front I said, ‘Look, I don’t care how you feel about me, we just have to get here. We’ll feel a bit better at the end of this 20 minute loop.’ And we did this walk every day for a year, and gradually we were both healing. You know, the anger subsided with me. 

I thought I’d never recover after that mastectomy. I thought I’d never feel strong again. But somehow, coming here every single day this woods worked some sort of magic. And I didn’t really know anything about nature. I didn’t know the names of trees or birds or anything, but got an app, and we started to learn the names of trees, and we, you know, we’d see the Heron, and we’d have magical moments in the lights, and we had bits that would stop off. And gradually, over that year, it went from a torturous journey up here to joy at getting at the car. And we saw, we saw everything change. 

If you come every day to the same place, do the same loop, you just pay close attention. You see it all change. This wood’s really special to me, because when I get here, I try to pay attention, because that’s what we did during that year – that were our mission really, I feel like whatever anxiety or stress I’ve got going on, I’m able to see what’s around me and hear what’s around me and appreciate it. 

It’s had a really healing effect on me this place. I’d say it’s wrong to say it soothes me, it makes me feel what I’m part of and forget myself. What I feel is life. When I come here, I just feel grateful. We both moved from difficult times to sort of joy because of this place. 

My name is Nabeela Ahmed. I live in Bradford. I’m a writer and a poet and a spoken word artist.  

So I was born on a little farm on top of a hill in Mirpur in Kashmir, Pakistan, and I was brought to England when I was two years old. My earliest memories are from age three in Bradford, starting going to nursery and my dad having an ice cream van. And then when I was nine years old, I moved back to Kashmir and stayed there for seven years and completed my middle and secondary school in Kashmir and came back to England when I was 16, and I’m now 49 and I’ve spent most of my life in Bradford. 

I’ve been creating stories since I was a child. I didn’t think that I might be a writer, so I came to age 40, and I was having a midlife crisis, and couldn’t understand how life is going to carry on for another 40 – 50, years when I was done with it. So at that point, I had to make a decision, and thought, if I’m going to carry on living, I better start living. 

I used to go on these long drives with my baby sister, and I would tell her the new story that I’d made up, and she would park the car and laugh and cry, and eventually she said to me, you do know you’re a writer.  

In November 2017, I sat down and typed my first story, I sent her, emailed it to her, and she came over after work and took me out for a meal, and she said, ‘I’m glad you finally accepted who you are.’. And in that year, I woke up at five o’clock every morning and wrote for two hours before I started my work. And I wrote the first drafts of a couple of novels, a short story collection and a saga and about 50 poems. 

I have brought you to the estate next to St Ives, because it’s a place where it’s quieter, you don’t bump into as many people or traffic. And I come here for many reasons. I feel a sense of being healed and nourished and connected to the universe and God and nature, and not just in the fast paced, urban way – I find that depletes me during the week. So a walk in nature and being here, I just feel like I’m put back together again.  

I think hills, streams and trees kind of mean home to me, because both of the countries that I belong to, the areas I’m from, are hilly, surrounded by trees, nature and streams. I’m an introverted entertainer, and I find I can entertain on any stage, in any platform, and whichever or however number of people, but I feel it exhausts me at a very deep level, and I enjoy that part, but I need time alone, and I need time just with one person to talk and be open and honest and just be free. And I need to be in nature, because just the sound of running water and birds and touching moss and feeling trees and seeing a horse and seeing deer and pheasants and the hope of seeing a rabbit, all of that just makes me happy, and I feel well. 

I’m Nora. I grew up in Bradford, I now live in Queensbury, on the outskirts of Bradford. I love being back in my hometown. I was born in 1948, I grew up in Heaton Manningham. I was born into a Catholic family who were part of a Catholic community. We had a lot of freedom as children, to roam and to explore and to play out. We were outside all the time. The streets were our playground. We disappeared for whole days. 

I did French a level and Latin a level. And I also got to take Russian a level, which I didn’t pass, but I did get a place at university in Norwich to study European Studies and Russian. After university, I just slipped into teaching because you could in those days. I picked up a copy of The Times newspaper. Really don’t know why, because I never read it. And there was a very small advert about an overland trip to India. ‘I’m going to do this. It costs 100 pounds.’ That was late 60s, early 70s, yeah. And we travelled overland through Europe, through what was Yugoslavia, through Greece, into Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, over to India, then down to what was Ceylon at the time, Sri Lanka. 

A bunch of us decided to go up to Nepal and spent some time up in Kathmandu, in the in the foothills, really, the Himalayas, which were amazing, amazing, yeah. But then we yeah, we worked our way back through Europe and back to back to Britain. 

One of the drivers of the Land Rovers was Barney, and we weren’t together on the trip at all, but we met up in London, and that’s how we got together.  I started working part time teaching. We decided again that we wanted something out of the busyness of the south of England. A job that I spotted was in Bradford College – work with bilingual children, which I was, you know, really wanting to follow up. 

I’ve always been an outdoor type person. Just really love being out and about, the Moors, especially. I really feel as though I belong in them. My son, Tom, gave me a book when I turned 60, and it was called ‘Running made easy’. I never thought of myself as a runner, and I read this book and I thought, This doesn’t sound easy at all, and it wasn’t. At that time I was working as a tutor with students at the University in Bradford, and I was sitting most of the day, so yeah, so I started to run, and I found I quite liked it, but I’m a slow runner. I don’t run all the time. I run, walk, run, walk, and I don’t like running on tarmac. So I began to find ways onto the Moors and onto the network of paths around Queensbury, and in that year, in my 60th year, I aimed to do a 10k which was the Leeds Abbey Dash 10k , and I was quite pleased with myself. I actually did it. It was a challenge. And then, as times gone by, 10k is really not very much at all. It’s great, you know, just to go out and do 20k or a bit more than that. 

I’ve done since, two marathons, but very slowly, one doing the Scarfell Pike Marathon, which was the only one I wanted to do, really. And then fairly recently, just last year, we did the Snowdonia Marathon. And now the goal is to do an ultra-run.  

I do like running by myself, as I love the way that you can get your shoes on, tie your laces. The weather might or might not be looking great. It doesn’t matter, really, because you know that once you get going, you’re going to be fine. And quite often, I’ll set out for a run, and I don’t really know where I’m going, so head out, come up here onto the Thornton Moor, and time just disappears really. I just feel pleased to be part of the landscape.  

When you get older, it’s interesting, really, how people view you. And I think I’ve probably got quite an old face, but I’m lucky enough to be physically fit. Every now and then you get people who say, ‘Oh, you’re sprightly so and so’ –  I say, ‘shut up.’ It makes me picture a scrawny little bird or something clinging on to life. I don’t feel like that at all. I think I love the word Hardy. I think it’s great, it really says a lot.  

I just live, you know, a short way from here, I can come up here every day if I want to. You know, you can laugh out loud when you’re out on the Moors. I sing to myself on the Moors, I’m very happy, very fortunate.

My name is Melanie Kalay. Some people call me Mela. I am a somatics movement teacher and coach, and my kind of thing, really, I would say, is around movement and music, and embodiment and finding ways to move which is freeing and natural to the individual. 

I was born in Birkenshaw, and I lived there until I was 13, and then moved to Bierley, BD4, where I lived up until kind of late teens, early 20s, and then I moved all the way to Leeds, and then I went traveling around the world. Like 25.  I spent two years in India when I was studying yoga, and then after that, I went and lived in the South –  Brighton and London, for like 15 years and returned a year and a half ago. I lost my dad a few years ago, and just made me think about a few things, about being far away from my mum and I also lost my grandma. Yeah, it just made me think like just to be a bit closer to my mum.  

I’ve always felt connected to the landscape. One of my first memories as a child was me looking over the garden gate, looking outside, desperately wanting to play out. And then as soon as I was allowed out, I was allowed to, like, the end of the road, and it was just like, ‘When am I going to be let past the road?’ And then when I was I was gone, I was just like, in the fields, down to the woods. That’s where I love to be. 

So we are in Calverley woods, and the reason why I’ve brought you here is because it’s one of the places that I come very often. There’s just something just so calming about being here. And every time I come, I see something different. Yeah, it kind of opens up the imagination, but it also feels very grounding. 

I feel incredibly visible. And I mean, I’m nearly six foot, I’ve got a huge afro and I’m mixed race, and I could try to make myself smaller, but I’ve also been told not to. My dad, bless him, was always like, ‘walk tall, take up space in your body’. And I’ve embodied that. So to find somewhere where I can just – no eyes on me, just just be, is really precious.  

I come here very, very often, three or four times a week. One of my favorite things to do is to come and dance in the woods, especially when the sun’s peeking through, like it was a little bit today, and I’ve got the sun in my face and I’m just like, yeah, it’s just beautiful.  

I have a limited range of movement in my left arm, so I always think of myself as wonky. I’ve got my my right leg is- I’ve had a knee injury there, so that’s a little bit –  can be a bit temperamental as well. And I’ve got a little bit of knock-knees. So I just think of myself as a wonky person. Most people wouldn’t even notice, you know, but I know it. I notice it. And I think just being in the trees and seeing all the wonkiness of the trees, and I just feel really like ‘I’ve come home.’. Yeah, we live in a world where beauty is seen through distorted and also unrealistic lenses. Yeah, I think the beauty is often in the things that aren’t particularly straight. It’s a nice reminder of that, like there’s beauty in the in the wonkiness and the imperfections. 

My name is Furaha. We are at Peel Park, one of my favourite parks. I’m a singer songwriter. Music has been a saving grace for me. I grew up with a family where music has always been our thing. We have a family choir, and it’s a huge part of my culture. We sing in different seasons of grief or joy, whatever’s going on, there’s a song for it. 

I was born in Rwanda. My parents were working there. They are both from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Just before I turned one, we moved back to Congo. I lived in Congo until I was 10. Unfortunately, there was a lot of war and instability in my country. So I grew up in an area of conflict and a lot of trauma. A lot of people being killed, family members disappearing, so not something that a child should be exposed to really. We would have to often leave our home and go and find safety elsewhere and then come back. And that really was pretty disruptive. 

In 2001 my dad got a scholarship to come into a Masters in Peace Studies at Bradford University. He came on his own, and that’s when things kind of deteriorated back home, and my mum took over the organization that my parents actually set up in the early 90s called CRC Conflict Resolution Centre. So that was a reason why we were targeted by the militias, because of the work that they were doing. Yeah, the war broke out again. This time, it was pretty deadly. We were stuck, basically, and we were just constantly hiding in my parents office, and then someone that my dad knew paid for us to leave the country out of kindness. So that’s how we ended up coming to Bradford. 

After he graduated my parents planned to go back to Congo because they thought by that point things would have calmed down but it didn’t, and we were getting phone calls from people back home saying, ‘Please don’t come back. It’s not safe’ after we left. So we know that we had a lucky escape. 

Everything was new, and obviously like the weather and couldn’t speak a word of English, and we just had to go straight into school, and we just were forced to learn the hard way. But thankfully, being young, you know, you pick up the language very quickly.  

This is my local park. It’s about five minutes away from my house, and this is a place where I feel free. I feel safe here. I feel like I can come here at any time, early in the morning, to come for a walk. It’s a place where I connect with others. I also run here once a week, which I really love. And that’s the whole journey for me, discovering just like how important running has been for my well being. Yeah, I think it’s just the freedom of being able to move around this big space and to really appreciate the beauty of nature in the different seasons. 

Being in this park has helped me to to discover the freedom that I have, which is something that I didn’t really have growing up, freedom to move, freedom to go wherever I wanted, because it wasn’t safe, but being here, I just feel like I can go wherever I want to go. There’s something quite like powerful about that, and I think not only just the freedom to move, but also the freedom to play. I’ve come here multiple times with my nieces and nephews and played on the swings and channelled my inner child, and just having that permission to play without feeling like anyone’s gonna look at you in a certain way or you’re gonna be judged, has been like really healing as well.