Richard Skelton has spent nearly half a decade living in a small valley, high in the Furness hills of Cumbria, in northern England. When not writing or composing music, most of his days are spent beating the valley's bounds, exploring its network of paths, streams and walls.
Beyond the Fell Wall is a distillation of his thoughts and observations on this particular patch of land. It is a poetic enquiry into the inanimate life of a landscape – its unheard melodies and unseen movements. It considers both vast geological epochs and brief moments of intimacy, and in turn it asks us to consider sentience in all things – animal, vegetable and mineral.
Richard Skelton is a musician and an artist from Lancashire, northern England. Over the past decade he has produced a diverse and acclaimed body of work, including films, exhibitions, pamphlets, books, and albums of music that have been compared to both Arvö Part and Brian Eno. All his work is informed by landscape, evolving from sustained immersion in specific environmentsand wide-ranging research incorporating toponymy and language, ecology and geology, folklore and myth. His books include Landings (2009), a personal study of the West Pennine Moors, Moor Glisk (2012), a poetic exploration of the effects of the Industrial Revolution on rural Lancashire, and Limnology (2012), a long typographical essay on the mythology of rivers, including a glossaryof over 1,000 'water-words'.