[T]he National Trusts Wordsworth’s house, Cockermouth is currently the location for an exhibition revealing links between Nature, Cumbria and the soldiers who fell during the Great War.
The exhibition “where poppies blow”, looks at the intimate link and joy many soldiers found in the close contact with nature that managed to survive the bombardment of the trenches. Whether it be growing celery, watching skylarks on the wing between shelling, or the humble mole emerging from a battle scarred landscape, going about it’s timeless business regardless of the carnage around it.
But it is the vivid connection for some soldiers, between the natural world around them and the memory of the English countryside of the Lake District that they left behind them and what they were fighting to protect, that so passionately comes across at the exhibition, reading directly from the page the words of Edward Thomas’s Addlestropp adds a new dimension in understanding that poem.
Using beautiful film of the lakes as a reminder of what we are holding onto now, it has been cleverly overlayed with Pathe newsreel footage from the Great War that stirs all who see it. The point is also made that not only did we loose so many in the slaughter, but it was the English countryside that also paid the price as mechanisation of farming began to make up for the lost workers who would not return to till there native soil.
But above all, nature healed, and, despite the bullets and blood, it inspired men to endure. Where Poppies Blow is a unique story of how nature gave the British soldiers of the Great War a reason to fight, and the will to go on, and how that battle continues to have effects today. The exhibition also draws attention to the importance of the Great Gift, the donation to the National Trust of Scafell Pike and many of the central fells to be a permanent national war memorial and not just another tick as another three peaks.
Congratulations to the National Trust team for bringing this thoughtful and enjoyable exhibition to Cockermouth, if you haven’t planned to see it – change your mind and go!
The exhibition runs until the 28th October.
