Briefly

Massingham Heath, Norfolk

May 2025

In May this year the SWLA launched its Massingham Heath project.

Over five years ago, Norfolk landowner Oliver Birkbeck embarked on an exciting re-wilding project on land that he inherited around the village of Great Massingham in West Norfolk.  Dating back to the Bronze Age the land was essentially lowland heath that during the Second World War mostly went under the plough and was lost as a unique wildlife habitat. Oliver increasingly recognised that the arable land created had poor yields but high input demands and in the late 2010’s a programme of re-wilding (not abandonment) began which has seen the restoration of large areas of flower rich grassland, heath and scrub. Half of the land at the 2,500-acre estate (1,000 hectares) is being rewilded to benefit nature, while half is used for conventional agriculture.

Grazing animals such as Konik ponies, Bagot goats and Tamworth pigs now play an important part in a massive increase in biodiversity all over the estate. Massingham Heath is once again alive with a wide variety of vertebrate and invertebrate wildlife including birds, mammals, insects, reptiles and amphibians alongside a rich and diverse flora. Many of these plants and animals are scarce or threatened on a national scale.

Tim Baldwin, naturalist and SWLA friends coordinator, has watched the restored habitat thrive over the seven years that he has lived in the village of Great Massingham.  His observations have provided great insight into a range of heathland species and the changing landscape, and he has met frequently with owner Olly Birkbeck to compare notes. Together with SWLA President Harriet Mead and others the idea of a collaborative project began to emerge, a project that might capture the heath’s restoration in words and pictures inspiring people locally as well as nationally and internationally.

Using their expertise in a variety of artistic mediums groups of SWLA artists would create inspiring images of the heath that reflected the heath’s rich biodiversity showing how conservation is best achieved by working co-operatively with nature rather than exploitatively.  Naturalist, author and Norfolk Wildlife Trust Ambassador, Nick Acheson, would be commissioned to write the text for the project book, and his encyclopaedic knowledge would be invaluable when meeting with the artists and spending time on the heath.

Briefly

I was commissioned a year ago to provide the jacket artwork for a forthcoming book about an extinct bird - the Great Auk.

I’d researched the Great Auk a decade ago when asked to create something for the Ghosts of Gone Birds project.  It was a major multimedia art exhibition in London aiming to throw light on the increasing loss of bird species across the world. More than 80 contemporary artists, sculptors, musicians, writers, and poets were each asked to produce a new piece of art inspired by an extinct bird and celebrating its life.  The species allocated to me was the Great Auk Pinguinis impennis.

Both projects required a lot of research.  This time I needed to understand more about  its bill structure, gape colour, plumage detail, especially the bold white mark on the head around the lores.  I came across an image of the only known drawing of a living bird, which is by an artist living in the Faroe Islands who captured the bird in 1655 and kept it as a pet.  The drawing shows the posture and some of the summer plumage detail, but it is difficult to see characteristics of the Great Auk’s wing which I particulalrly needed to see. Is it vestigial or like a fully formed wing - only smaller? 

I’ve seen flightless Steamer Ducks in the Falklands with a wing which looks exactly like a wing for flight, but stubby and not powerful enough to lift a hefty looking barrel-bodied Steamer Duck into the air!  I’ve handled many hundreds of Gentoo and Macaroni penguins and felt the painful powerful swipe of a tapered, flattened flipper that is more like a fin than a wing! 

Looking at film of Razorbills underwater it is possible to see how the Great Auk’s nearest living relative ‘fly’ through the water column turning and diving with extreme agility without any instantly obvious extra twist of the wing shape or push of the rudder-like legs trailing behind – again, swimming just like penguins do!

For my various re-imaginings I wanted to breathe a little life back into the magnificent and extinct Great Auk.  I could draw a great deal from my research material and remember my own experiences handling penguins in a sub-Antarctic penguin colony 50 years ago and seeing them underwater.  I also had contemporary knowledge from dozens of sketching expeditions to see auks on UK cliffs, and from sailings across North Atlantic waters and visits to St. Kilda and Greenland, I had gained an understanding of the remote and stormy marine environment where Great Auks once lived.  I could imagine them in a ‘feeding frenzy’ slicing through huge ‘bait balls’ of cod, herring, or capelin.  Perhaps thousands of them forming huge rafts, surfacing for an instant then descending again beneath a rolling North Atlantic swell to feed again.

Pulling all these threads together to create my own image of the Great Auk I’ve made a sequence of drawings as if I was actually at sea, sketching them from life; it must have been like this!

Jacket artwork for new book