Miniature mountain sculptures are being left to be discovered across the Lake District.
Map Sculpture, owned by Dan Jesse, 36, of Carlisle and Ben Fisher, 28, of Horbank Gate, has started a new competition for walkers to get their hands on a free miniature sculpture of a Lake District mountain.
Taking place once a month, one of the wooden sculptures will be left on its mountain counterpart for a lucky walker to stumble across or find.
Dan said: “The intention of the competition was to get people out and about, rather than just something where you enter via email. We wanted to do something a little bit different so that you have to go out and earn it, just to get people out into the Lakes.
“But we like the idea of people stumbling upon it as a nice pleasant surprise for someone that’s just out and about anyway and they get to find the note with it saying they can keep it. We’re just going slowly with it because we’re now releasing smaller versions of the maps, which we’ve not done before.”
The duo bought the business in February 2020 after deciding to combine their talents of engineering and 3D modelling, but plans for a full launch of the business were put on hold due to the impact of the pandemic, until now.
Kicking off the competition this month, Ben and Dan hid a miniature sculpture of Great Gable at the mountain’s summit, which was left for a lucky winner to find.
Dan added: “Someone claimed it within a couple of hours, which was awesome. The gentleman that found it isn’t into technology but he emailed me and said he wasn’t on social media and sent a photo of himself with the map at the top, so it was really nice that he managed to get it without being on social media.”
To create the sculptures the duo combine precision technology with woodwork to create detailed and scale accurate landscapes in wood, metal and stone.
Dan said: “You can get data from different places and we take some of the really accurate data and then we spend a while transforming that from OS maps and through to a 3D model.
“Everything is precision based and then hand finished, If you imagine a piece of wood after it’s been drilled out it’s all really rough so we have to hand sand them down, which can take up to two months depending on the size of the model.”
While the general response to the competition was overwhelmingly positive, some people were concerned about the duo leaving the sculptures in beauty spots across the Lake District.
Dan said: “We don’t want it to be seen as littering or ruining the views for people but because it’s an organic wood product we thought it was more like a stick at the end of the day and we can always retrieve it if it isn’t found.
“We will be doing it every month, but we’ll spend some time figuring out how to best do it going ahead so people are happy with it, whether it’s like geocaching where we hide it a bit more or something like that.”
Those interested in purchasing their own miniature mountain sculpture can use the code cumbriacrack when checking out to receive £20 off their order.
