Exciting news! The Ciderhouse Rebellion has just been awarded an Arts Council Grant for a new project – Ironstone Tales. For this we will be joining forces with Adam’s daughter the poet Jessie Summerhayes as ‘Words Of A Fiddler’s Daughter.’

The project explores the echoes of a vanished industrial world and will be filmed and recorded at multiple sites telling the story of Rosedale & the Ironstone Mines. Rosedale is on the North York Moors, and is a harsh yet beautiful landscape bearing scars from the ravages of the Industrial Revolution. The town’s population exploded as iron mining took off from 548 in 1851 to 2,839 in 1887. The resulting extensive industrial landscape contains 1000s of people’s stories buried in the earth: tales of hardship, death, community.

We will be combining aerial drone footage, historical photographs, newly written folk story poems, context-giving narration and historical stories, and music improvised in the landscape to produce a series of videos.

Adam and Jessie have a particularly close relationship to the area: Adam’s mother’s house is located in the spot where the horses for the East Mine operations were stabled, a house that Jessie has known her entire life. Adam was introduced to the area by his Grandfather and the project is, in his own words, “an expression of the landscape I grew up in.”

The project has the support of the Nork Yorks Moor Park Authority.

This is part of our wider ‘Genius Loci Project’, where we use music and film to explore the ancient concept of ‘spirit of place’. They allow the sense and feel of a landscape to flow through the subconscious, creating entirely spontaneous improvised music in and of the landscape itself.

Here is a preview excerpt of music improved in the Old Kilns.

If you are interested in finding out more about this project, or booking the duo/trio for a gig/festival, please contact katie@fromthewhitehouse.com