Ley of the Land

An art and walking project in The Cotswolds produced in partnership with Hannah Earl (filmmaker), Little Buckland Gallery, Heaps Morris, Evesham Rambling Club, The Rollright Trust and Walking the Land.

Ley of the Land engages with the Cotswolds as a place that’s always been changing, both because of natural forces and due to thousands of years of human endeavour. It will continue to change in the future. 

The dramatic landscape which we experience today is a consequence of geology, specifically the Jurassic oolitic limestone bedrock. This golden ‘Cotswold Stone’, used ubiquitously for buildings and drystone walls, creates the distinctive, quintessential ‘rural England’ character of the area. Lying beneath and beside these features are numerous tumuli, iron-age hill forts, early settlements, field patterns, ancient trackways, routes and so much more. Ley of the Land set out to unearth and reimagine various elements of this fascinating land; of its geological and human stories, myths and legends, and to understand something of who now lives, and has lived, with this place.

‘Ley of the Land’ has created a new body of earth-pigment paintings arising from a series of walks undertaken in an ancient Cotswolds Land Circle. 

During a residency, generously hosted by Little Buckland Gallery in March 2026, Sara led a series of ‘Nomadic-Sporadic’ social walks, with the help of Evesham Rambling Club. The walks included foraging for wild earth pigments, unearthing the ancient and modern stories held within the land, and participating in Morris dancing at The Rollright Stones.  ‘Ley of the Land’ condenses and imagines future, past and present relationships with this rural part of the country. 

Hiking and dancing participants collaborated in capturing traces of their activity, using ‘walking’ or ‘dancing-painting-jars’, containing samples of earth pigment paints collected during each walk. The resulting paintings were assembled together to create collective alternative maps of the walks.

Filmmaker Hannah Earl has created an accompanying film which interprets and articulates the experience of the walks, creative processes and conversations with the paints and human collaborators.

Paintings have been created from the collected earth pigments, which hold traces of every occupation and event which has ever happened in each location.  The paintings become ‘Deep Maps’ of the Cotswolds, presented in exhibitions, beginning at Little Buckland Gallery in September / October 2026. 

The paintings are joyful celebrations of The Cotswolds themselves and of past, present and future environmental uncertainties. 

Sara describes her studio practice as being in an extended conversation with the foraged paints, people and places she has encountered during her walks. As the paintings evolve, she is highly attuned to the differences in the characters of each of the paints; their colour, opacity, texture and other properties. Each paint is labelled with the details of the place it was collected, date and by whom the sample was taken, enabling these memories of people and place flow into the paintings themselves. During a visit to the Corinium Museum, she encountered a series of Mother Goddess stone statues, found on archaeological sites in the Cotswolds. Their enigmatic presence is a reminder of the historic reverence of women, here emerging as figures from within the earth paints themselves. The Earth Goddesses have been liberated from the earth, as figureheads for every person to have inhabited this land.

The walks which were led through the heartlands of the north Cotswolds National Landscape culminated at The Rollright Stones, signalling myth, memory, heritage, cultural traditions and speculation. 

‘Ley of the Land’ asks how walking and dancing together, along ancient tracks and making paintings help us understand and express this place and how we live with it. 

Follow the link to view: Essay on Ley of the Land by Dr Iain Biggs RWA 

Follow the link to download: The Ley of the Land Exhibition catalogue

Ley of the Land Exhibitions / Publications / Events

‘Ley of the `Land’, Little Buckland Gallery September / October 2026

‘In Conversation’ with archaeographer Liz Poraj-Wilczynska September 2026

‘Oxfordshire Otherwise’, Fusion Arts, Oxford, November 2026

Northern Earth, December 2026 Edition

The Rollright Trust 2026