Glenkiln Sculpture Park

Throughout yesterday the winds picked up and it was getting distinctly wavy out on the wet stuff. By the time I closed up the lab for the day it was raining and evening trips to make cups of tea involved much swaying about in the corridors as I endeavoured to remain upright. This morning it's all sorted - the sea is only a little choppy and blue sky dominates with just a little cloud at the edge to set of the sunrise a bit. But I diverse before I've even started. Today's trip is round the sculpture park at Glenkiln in deepest darkest Dumfriesshire. For those of you living under Blighty's skys yesterday, you'll realise these pictures weren't taken yesterday (tis actually a little trip from 2007).

In 1951, Sir William Keswick must have looked in his bank account and had a pleasant surprised for he decided to set up a sculpture park on his land at Glenkiln and promptly popped out and bought a piece Henry Moore had made the previous year of a Standing Figure.

 

From there until 1976 he went on to aquire another 4 pieces which are displayed around a 4 mile walk (we did most of it by car - 4 are right by the roadside). Here they are pretty much in the order you come to them.

Henry Moore's King and Queen

A little further on Auguste Rodin's John the Baptist. Despite suggestions of a resemblance, I wasn't willing to risk hypothermia or indeed arrest to prove it.

I think that in all honesty, I've eaten more cream cakes in my time than old Auguste seems to think John the Baptist has. The following piece is a 1959 Henry Moore reclining figure (keep this in mind for there's some related sculpture from Mr Moore coming up in another blog in a few days time (hopefully)). On the little bit of research I did for this blog, I'm quite dismayed to find out it's made of fibre glass!!!! It seemed quite stony to me when I was there. If nothing else, the base is real stone and weighs 10 tons.

Those were the easy to find pieces but there is another (I can't remember whether we had clues or not about the 5th statue but we found it). It can't be seen from the road and involves a walk through a couple of fields. Hidden in a copse of Scots Pine, if I remember correctly, is the following rather odd woman.

At the time we had no idea what it was about. Why did she have her hands up like that - perhaps she used to have a stick that she was leaning on? Turns out she was made by a chap called Jacob Epstein in 1926 and is called The Visitation - it portrays Elizabeth (John the baptist's Mum) popping round to tell Mary that she is pregnant too (basically the goings on at Luke 1:39-56) 

Back on more secular ground (Phew) with another shot of the King and Queen overlooking Glenkiln resevoir.