A project in deep mapping

Esgair Fraith (speckled ridge, in Welsh) is the name of an abandoned farmstead in the forest near Lampeter in west Wales.

Originally part of the occupation of the uplands of this part of Wales in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, the farm was abandoned in the 1940s and became part of the conifer forest plantations managed by the state Forestry Commission from the 1950s. These involved wholesale purchase, some compulsory, of farmland across the UK, and the relocation of many families and communities. In Wales this afforestation was also associated with the depopulation and drowning of several valleys as reservoirs for the cities of the English industrial west midlands.

By the 1990s the plantation around Esgair Fraith was due for harvest and the old farms turned up again as an issue: what should Forest Enterprise do with them, as the relics of an old community, and given its newer political brief not just to exploit the land but also to make it physically and culturally accessible.

By the 1990s Esgair Fraith had turned into a picturesque ruin, its sycamore hedges grown out into an oasis of a deciduous canopy among the evergreen pines, the damp shelter growing a thick covering of lichens and mosses over everything.

The interests of landscape archaeologists at Lampeter, notably David Austin, drew attention to the place. Not particularly old, but something of a beauty spot; not at all unique, but attesting to a politically charged issue of community, the state, ownership, economic priorities and what remains - the ruins, traces, the official record and the memories.

From 1993 Mike Pearson and I began working with the place - a project that became an exercise in deep mapping. The series of works was expanded to include works on the case of Linette White in Cardiff and on Augustus Brackenbury in Trefenter, Wales (Pearson/Brookes). Brith Gof produced a major site specific work - Tri Bywyd - here in 1995.

Our book - Theatre/Archaeology - presents many of these projects on Esgair Fraith.