A letter from Stephen Cracknell:

Dear Jeff,

Further to the piece I wrote for Caught by the River in February regarding The Way Of The Hare, I thought your readers would perhaps be interested in this video update by film-maker Pedr Browne aka Unwalked.

This is the fifteenth year of The Memory Band’s existence and in all that time I have avoided commissioning a ‘proper’ video for our music until now, mostly because of the practical difficulties involved in finding a suitable goat. Having been so impressed by Pedr’s previous work and A Fair Field being completed I approached him about making a video for us. Pedr travelled to the area near Brooke in Norfolk which I wrote about in The Way Of The Hare, once the home of Albert Hupton and George Ewart Evans whose conversation in 1977 introduces our track ‘Starlight’. A goat was engaged from the one of the neighbouring villages and filming commenced.

The video takes me back to a landscape with “no dark hills in the distance, all features near, little sense of the beyond.” and the wondrous light I saw as I looked back towards Brooke on the road to Seething and Kirstead where I first spotted two hares in a field last year.

Hope you like it.

Stephen Cracknell

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Each morning, Stephen will open the Caught by the River stage at Port Eliot festival with a unique selection of spoken word and field recordings from the archives of the British Library and beyond.

Stephen Cracknell / Memory Band on Caught by the River / on Twitter