Epona Community Engagement Project: Ongoing
The Epona Community Engagement Project commenced in early January 2024 to engage schools (including the students, their families and teachers) with the heritage of the local native breed of Fell Ponies alongside that of the area they live in. We are currently halfway through the delivery of the workshops with a further 20 workshops to go. The workshop leaders have found the children fascinated by the subject of connecting the Fell Ponies to our human heritage. In addition to the workshops taking place in schools, Marnie the Fell Pony has visited each of the local schools with Libby and David from the Fell Pony Heritage Trust answering questions from the students about the breed and the lives they have in the local landscape.
Alex Jakob-Whitworth's workshop introduces the themes around Epona with an introduction to producing Fell Pony puppets, exploring the animal's unique shape combined with mythic symbols rooted in the places they live (see picture below). Asby Endowed Primary wrote about their experience with both Anja Phoenix and Chloe Brownlee-Chapman in their school event stream exploring myth and language with Anja and the history and heritage of the area with Chloe.
The culmination of this project will be a display in the Rheged Discovery Centre in the prominent Street area of the building. This is on show until July 2024.
You can read the full poem by Anja Phoenix here.
The Epona Community Engagement Project forms part of a wider project with the ambition to create a large-scale piece of land art on the side of Blease Fell in the Tebay Gorge area. You can find more about it here.
Thanks to funding from the former Eden District Council and the ‘Love Your Landscape’ grant from the Westmorland Dales Landscape Partnership.
