Meadows of Farnham is a moving image project exploring the intersection of people and nature in rural Surrey, England. It places early maps in conversation with drone visualisations to follow the course of the river Wey and its adjacent water meadows near the small town of Farnham.
The project pivots on a small instance of the most significant historical changes underpinning the agricultural management of the countryside - the process of enclosure or consolidation of multi-owned strip fields fields to single ownership.
A cache of Estate Maps was donated to the Farnham Museum in early 2021. They show the meadows strung along the banks of the river Wey in the town. The Hay, Hole, Hale, Belly, Mill and North Meadow maps are animated here.
As an experiment, the project superimposes some of the estate maps onto the drone footage following the river Wey. This shows these former meadows as a palimpsest of land ownership and cultivation practices. Whereas the shape of the lives of the landowners and tenants who worked the meadows may be lost to time, the representation offers a vision of the relations of production of agriculture then onto the very diffierence land uses of today. Many of the maps could not be revealled to the drone as they are private dwellings and gardens today
The drone visualisation in Meadows of Farnham is a contentious means of visual productions in academia. Critics point to the use of drone by western militaries for the projection of power and control. Counter examples are available - discussed by Choi-Fitzpatrick - this work adopts this technology to tell a community narrative.
