Ways into hinchingbrooke country park

by Deb Wilenski with Caroline Wendling

with a foreword by Robert Macfarlane

Fantastical Guides for the w ildly curious

Ways into Hinchingbrooke Country Park

Young children are inexhaustible and profound explorers of the wild, yet the dominant voices that explain our landscapes are adult. This book is the first in a series of guides that seek to reposition children’s voices in our public interpretations of place. It documents the real and fantastical journeys, the stories, secrets and speculations, of a class of four and five year olds in the woods and fields of Hinchingbrooke Country Park.

The place is different because they were there. The map has shifted.

© Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without prior written authorization.

ISBN 978-0-9926259-0-0 Published by Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination

Ways into Hinchingbrooke Country Park

by Deb Wilenski in collaboration with Caroline Wendling with the voices of all the children in Ruby Class at Cromwell Park Primary School: FareedĂĄ, Caitlin, Jasmine, Thomas, Honey, Melissa, Cody, Asad, Kian, Arnav, Filip, Charlie, Laney-May, Joseph, Mikaela, Edward, Crystal, Marie, Ashlene, Eve, Kyle, Arwyn, Krystal, Georgia, Kerensa, Bryony, Harvey, Jacob, Adam, Anita, Layla

Layla’s jungle and castle

and their teacher Ben Wilson

FOREWORD

As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream wrote the traveller Stephen Graham in 1927, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens. Such visionary moments came rarely to Graham – as they come rarely to all adults – though he sought them throughout his life, walking across America, Russia and Britain in the hope of glimpsing the great door open.

To children, however, as this remarkable book shows us, the natural world is full of doors – is nothing but doors, in fact – and they swing open at every step. So it is that, seen through the eyes of these four- and five-year-olds, Hinchingbrooke Country Park ceases to be 170 acres of meadow, woodland and marsh, lying 2 km west of Huntingdon and bounded on one side by the A14. It is instead a limitless universe, changeable in its textures, and endlessly replenished in its originality. It is a wild compound of dream, spell and substance. No map of it could ever be complete, for new stories seethe up each second from its soil, and its surfaces might collapse or meld at any moment. The hollows of its trees are portals to distant planets, its subterrane flows with streams of silver, its woods are threaded through with invisible filaments of magical force. Within it you can fly or time-travel; shape-shift into bird, leaf or water.

The speech of young children is mysterious and encrypted: a language of its own (Childish, we might call it) that is almost impossible for adults to understand. Deb Wilenski and Caroline Wendling have watched and listened – patiently, perceptively – over months to these children, and what they have learnt from them is astonishing.

To read this book is to see innocently again, and to renew your sense of words as being able to forge and conjure. It brims with the power of make-believe.

Bryony's secret forest

‘Landscape’, here, is no longer (as adults often regard it) a static backdrop, a sort of wallpaper-to-the-world. And a place is somewhere you are always in, never on. After finishing the book, I recalled the story of the T’ang Dynasty painter, Wu Tao-Tzu, who is said one day to have gathered his friends to show them his most recent painting. It was of a landscape with a footpath that led along the bank of a stream, and then through a grove of trees to a little cottage. When the friends turned to congratulate Wu Tao-Tzu, he had vanished. Then they saw that he had stepped into the landscape of the painting, and was walking along the path and through the grove. He reached the cottage, turned, smiled at his friends, and then stepped through the open door.

Robert Macfarlane (author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places and The Old Ways)

BEGINNING

In this ten week project Deb Wilenski and Caroline Wendling from Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination worked with a class of four and five year olds and their educators from Cromwell Park Primary School. We spent each Monday morning in Hinchingbrooke Country Park and in the afternoon returned to school to continue our explorations.

We went to the park to meet the forest. It was winter. We dressed warmly, took cameras and notebooks but little else. Our explorations were free within a large area and led by the children. We found a centre – the Living Room – where we could begin and end our time in the woods. It was a place for important conversations, where the children made plans for the morning and shared them with the adults and with each other.

We explored out into the woods, encouraging children to leave paths and discover their own ways and places; to return, go further, take time. We journeyed physically and imaginatively through the woods and in later weeks reached the field and lakes. For each morning in the woods we spent an afternoon in school, offering ways to re-visit the real and fantastical place that the park was becoming. We mapped the land and what happened in it with drawing, projection and sculpture, through stories, searches, and deepening explanations. It was cold when we began in January, and it was still cold when we ended in April. What was remarkable was that nobody seemed to mind.

In this book you will hear how the children meet snow and mud, water and magic, how they explore the land through their bodies and senses, with imagination and with daring. There will be many maps to follow – visible and invisible traces through the forest, lines drawn on paper, words that connect one place to another.

We invite you into the park as a place of possibility, we encourage you to day-dream and remember while you are there and ďŹ nd time to explore in equal measure the ordinary and the fantastic.

This guide is for the thirty children who led our explorations, their families, friends and educators. It is for the 280,000 people who visit the park each year and love spending time there, and for other visitors who haven't been yet. It is for armchair travellers of the world looking for new destinations and fantastic ways of travelling. It is for everybody and anybody to discover the park as it has never been seen before.

Snow Mud Invisible doors Secret water Looking for magic Leaping over the forest All the ways we go The big city The map of maps Everything and everything

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SNOW shifts the world

There is a new land in the whiteness. Bryony and

Harvey walk deep into it. Paths have disappeared, and a place they have been many times before has shifted.

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Harvey: We’re in the secret forest. This is someone’s house.

It’s someone creature’s house. Someone’s going to come in here and say ‘get out of my house!’

Bryony: Hide!

Harvey: We’re really in a wood aren’t we?

Bryony: We’re lost!

Harvey: Yeah we are a little bit aren’t we?

Bryony: They’re trying to find us. Hide!

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Filip in the snow explores with his senses wide open. He walks sometimes alone and meets the shapes in the land with his whole body. We have been losing ourselves in whiteness, but Filip sees colours. Caroline watches and listens:

He pointed to the yellow he could see. I could not see yellow only the dark against the white. He insisted, I looked to my right and saw the yellow bark of the trees on the edge of the path –‘and green, I can see green, I can see green at the very top of the trees’. We looked at the green. The white expanse became a field of vivid colours.

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Adam’s polar bears in the forest

Real and fantastical forests appear later in the children’s large scale drawings – along with the snow and the cold.

Their stories begin to meet.

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Crystal cuts out her little foxes and they visit the big fox in Fareedá and Caitlin’s forest.

When I ask Crystal if she wants to go in too she is unsure saying: I be so scared. But intrigued, she draws herself and comes in too.

Crystal: They say a naughty word – that’s what foxes do. Now they are a mum and kids. They say kind words - fun - and that he loves them. He loves even the snow.

It was windy and cold – her couldn’t find her way. And I have to run back home.

And the mum’s all on her own and the foxes were so cold, and the foxes don’t know where to stay with. I said ‘follow me little foxes’.

Through the drawings of the forest at night time, and through coming in and out of stories of the cold, Crystal who was tentative in the woods becomes brave. She makes a dad fox and Thomas’s pink forest becomes the place to encounter danger.

Fareedá also draws herself and comes in to rescue Crystal and her mum. When asked what her mum would do in the forest Crystal laughs and says:

No, no way! my mum would cry.

MUD

As the snow melts, a mixing of two elements – earth and water – leaves a world of newly made mud.

Deep ruts are carved into the pathways by the snow and ice, soft slippery ground waits in the woods, great sink holes of mud catch our boots and suck them down to who knows where. Our meetings with mud are unpredictable, fantastic and dramatically physical. Although some children do their best to avoid it, other children relish the encounter.

And just as the snow brought us into the secret forest so the mud makes a new land with its own dangers and pathways. It even has royalty. Fareedá tells us one morning: I’m going to find a mud princess. Mud, like clay, can be made into anything, and this story of the mud princess draws many different children in.

Fareedá: The princess went up there, in the tree. Let’s go and find the Mud Princess over there. We won’t scare you, we just want to say hello.

Georgia: There can’t be anything inside that tree.

Fareedá: Let’s find some trails for the little princess. Look for light green and pink!

Mud Princess has white at the top, white at the bottom, light green and pink in the middle.

Georgia points to a tree and says: Look at her arms! The tree is like a person stretching both arms up to the sky.

But Fareedá doesn’t want to find the princess yet, and says with certainty: She can’t be in there, and continues looking for clues. Look, a feather! We have found a clue, let’s follow it. She meets Joseph, who has more proof: I have seen her. Go over there and turn – you will see her. Arnav joins as they enter a den. Joseph and Arnav, often armed with swords, have been looking for a classic adventure for a long time. Fareedá wants to search for someone beautiful and unusual. Amazingly their different stories meet and mesh together.

Joseph: Guys, we are creeping.

Arnav: She is there.

Joseph: We’ve found her!

Fareedá: I don’t think it’s the real one. She is the baddy. We are looking for the nice princess.

Joseph: Guys, don’t worry I have my sword.

Arnav: That is a lion!

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Jasmine and Eve carrying the Mud Princess’s belt by Jasmine

There are voices. Ben and a large group of children have been trying to find Fareedá for a long time all over the wood. They have found the Mud Princess’s belt. Caroline describes the extraordinary moment:

Jasmine and Eve hold the large leather belt between them; they present it to Fareedá like a trophy. The children hug each other. There is a sense of victory.

Extreme joy fills the forest, it is really exceptional – every child wants to touch and carry the belt, they all want a bit of the princess.

The snow and the mud make worlds in the woods that are richly physical with sounds, smells and textures to explore. But the imagination also delights in physicality.

Fareedá’s colour clues for the mud princess - white, light green and pink – seem extraordinary in the sea of brown mud that fills the forest. But the white feather and the leather belt Fareedá holds in her hands prove beyond doubt that the princess was there.

INVISIBLE DOORS

Kian, Edward and Bryony are travelling through the woods

looking for signs of a snow leopard. The search brings them into close contact with the trees, where they discover scratches and bits of fur. Where a frame is made from two trees meeting, or a tree that is still growing has split and separated, Edward begins to find doors. The travelling reaches a new dramatic level. Edward goes through the doors and the others follow. This is yellow zone, he says. It means we’re not in red zone and we’re not on fire. That’s a good spot Bryony. Be careful of that door. Get through this door.

Edward’s doors

Through Edward’s doors we enter other forests in other times. There have always been magic doorways in woods, in fairy and folk tales, and children’s classics, where a portal in the ordinary world opens into mysterious, dangerous, beautiful realms of adventure.

The children I am with also know computer games about breaking through from one level to another, negotiating doorways, gaining powers as you go. And there’s a reason why an ordinary wood in Hinchingbrooke Country Park can hold all these stories; it is never just one wood.

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In the snow the first week, when Harvey says: we’re in the secret forest, he voices a kind of fantastic travelling in which worlds slip easily around each other, where there are soft boundaries between what is real and what is remembered, and each place in front of us is somewhere else too. The children’s fascination with doorways and magical travelling continues out of the woods. Working with light and shadow, mirrors and drawing, more doors appear.

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Crystal’s tree with a mouse-hole

With projection Crystal’s mouse-hole becomes big enough to get into, and later re-appears with a door that can be opened and closed. Kerensa’s house seems to have no door, but this is an illusion: There’s a little secret door, but when you close it, it looks just like a house. This house is part of every house, there’s not anything next to it. Edward paints and projects the door I went through to yellow zone. Thomas and Charlie work out that the mirror can be a doorway to the ceiling. Caroline and Kian have built a large doorway outside with branches from the woods, and more children are transforming it with swirling paint. They call it the Rock’n’Roll Door – you can sing and dance inside.

Kerensa’s house with the disappearing door

This door, like the doors in the woods, is open and easy to get through. It makes me realise that none of the doors the children have found or made are closed. No door has a lock. The door to Kerensa’s house might disappear behind her but it still lets her through. These doors are about freedom and excitement and adventure. Through one boy’s doors in the woods we have entered a much bigger exploration: of magical doorways, thresholds, and journeys, of real and fantastical travelling.

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SECRET WATER

Cody loves water. He seems to be able to summon

it from nowhere – finding it within minutes of returning to the woods, like an unerring arrow hitting home. He turned round once, in his search for secret water, when he spotted the massive lake, and said Deb, we just love water.

What better way than this to map a new world – with beautiful lines of compulsion, searches that find ways through the landscape, ways that appear later in maps for remembering.

Cody finds water all over the woods. He splashes his way through enormous puddles, discovers a flowing waterway with tunnels and doorways, and of all the hundreds of rabbit holes in the woods finds the one that is flooded.

Looking up the slope Cody explains how the water got there, where it came from, and where it will go to next.

Finding water in unexpected places brings an invisible map to mind, of water flowing underground, and Cody reads it beautifully.

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The following week Cody tells us: I’m going to find some secret water. He sets off with Filip, Bryony, Krystal, and Honey to the edge of the woods. Filip and Bryony spot a gap in the trees and shout: A door, a door, can we go through? When we come through the door into the field we arrive in an unfamiliar land. We have spent a long time amongst tall trees, with their strong vertical lines, and the expanse of the field seems huge and surprisingly wide. Filip makes us stop to look at the plants, and as the grass underfoot changes to yellow moss, and again to a soft spongy kind of ground Filip lies down. He meets the new place like he met the land in the snow – with his whole body.

And it is suddenly, through the ground, that we find water that is indeed secret.

It seeps up into hidden pools, runs in unexpected channels through the grasses. It shines blue in some places, in others is silty and strange.

Exploring, discovering and mapping a land is a fascinating process. We might think of maps as constructed, drawn, or laid over the land. But with these children it’s as if they seep up like water through the ground. When Cody said he was going to find secret water did we really believe him? Did we think it existed beyond his imagination? And yet here it is making itself visible – making us realise that the land we are exploring and narrating sits on top of a whole other land, subterranean, that shares with ours a single, continuous, touchable surface.

LOOKING FOR MAGIC

There are many ways to explore the visible world of the park, but it is striking

how often the children want to follow or find things they can’t see. Crystal, Kerensa, Anita and Layla are walking deep into the woods, treading a fine line between fear and excitement. They are looking for magic.

Crystal: Look at my magic rock! If I take it back to school, it’s going to make trees in the school. I am not scared.

Anita: I am not scared Kerensa: I am definitely not scared Crystal: I saw the magic rat. We need to find the house where he lives.

Caroline notices that the searching is quiet, almost choreographed. The children listen for magic in the quiet woods. They find more magic stones and a magic sponge and carry them along, until they enter a long narrow space with a tall tree in the middle. Caroline remembers clearly what happens next.

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The children put down the stones and sponge at the foot of the tall tree as if they are performing a magic trick.

Crystal says they need to see the magic and the girls move from one side of the space to the other, busy searching, a little like dancers on a stage. Suddenly Crystal announces ‘We saw some witch in that bush. We don’t need the stones any more’. The children cover the magic stones and sponge with leaves, leaving the space and their objects behind. It was not only a discovery of magic; I witnessed how together they created a story. Children became actors in the woods, they looked and listened for magic. Each new space was the décor for an act. Each child had her role. They were accomplices in a story.

Asad’s repetitions

There are more ways into magic beyond the woods. At the small still lake the world is mirrored in the water.

Asad suddenly realises his friends are in two places at once and shouts: You are in the water! A week later as the sun comes out Asad watches the shadows, and is drawn again to the point of connection between two versions of himself and his friends – the body running and the shadow, connected at the feet, running too: We can’t walk away from the shadows, we can’t run away from the shadows. They are always there. The drawing he makes for the big map later seems to carry his fascination with duplicated images.

And even on the walk back to school there is magic. Kerensa picks up a stone shaped like a half moon. She holds it up to the sky – that’s where it goes in the night – tracing an arc from her hand into space. She picks up a second stone: When they go together they make the sun, and this one makes the moon on its own. She finds numbers on the walk, on doors and signs, and counts: 1 . . . 2 . . . Filip who loves numbers asks: where is 3 and 4? Kerensa answers with a story for the places that are not there:

It’s all because of the moon – it made a potion that made all of the places go.

Maybe they are all together somewhere else.

Maybe they are a family together.

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LEAPING OVER THE FOREST

I’m going on the big hill.

I’m going with Jake and Jake’s mum to find little mice and rabbits.

I’m going to find the snow house.

I’m going to find a mud princess.

I want to find a secret tree, and an invisible door.

I want to jump over the woods.

I’m going to find some secret water.

I’m going to find Disneyland!

The familiar and the fantastic play right through the children’s plans. They don’t always do what they say they are going to do, but that isn’t really the point – it is a chance for them to share their sense of coming alive in the woods, and it allows us to hear what they wish for as well as what they can do already. The Living Room offers familiarity and safety, but it is also a place for the children to generate daring. The morning conversations become more and more adventurous. It isn’t entirely surprising when we hear Kian say:

My name is Kian and I’m going to jump over the whole world.

But it is fantastic. It is playful and true, impossible and completely authentic.

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The leaping starts small. At first Mikaela uses a narrow structure to cross the water-way. Georgia is the first to try jumping – and she makes it with her long legs and quiet determination. A couple more children join – Kian, and later Kerensa. They jump over and over again refining their skill, Kian eventually like a fast bird in flight, Kerensa making leaps as small and quick as a mouse, miraculously landing on the bank and not slipping backwards.

In the afternoon Kerensa makes a puppet of herself, the two banks, and the water with its bubbles in-between: That’s my knees starting to bend and getting ready…..it makes me leap really fast. She leaps herself over the water again and again and says: I’d rather jump all day.

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Edward’s journey up and down the hill

The children’s commitment to physical adventuring runs right alongside their imaginative journeying – the two in fact are inseparable. Caroline is struck by the determination and seriousness with which children set themselves tasks, at times impossible tasks, to do in the woods, and we notice how often their explorations are physically strenuous. In their drawings, clay work, and projections, there are many hills. On most of these a child stands, right at the top.

ALL THE WAYS WE GO

There are many ways out of the Living Room, and still more ways to return.

Mikaela wants to find Harvey’s secret forest – re-naming it the secret woods. She discovers a river you have to jump over and decides this is the right way. Jake is also searching and says they will be in the secret woods when Caroline and Kerensa, who are nearby, can’t see them. Bryony and Arwyn hold proof at the end of the morning of their own journey: half-burnt tickets found in the woods that take you on a train to the secret forest.

Of all the ways we go many are through language. As the children travel in different directions to places that share the same name, a fantastical map is being drawn that weaves words and ways together. A path of sound and association runs through the secret forest, the secret woods, the magic doorway, the invisible mountain. Another takes us from mario land to snap land, den land, spiky land, under-tunnel land and finally, to Kian’s delight : All the way to the A14. It was Kian who told us: I am going to jump over the whole world and he is definitely satisfied.

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And then, for all the travelling, there are places defined by stillness. Some of the ways we go take us to places we can stop. When Cody goes through the doorway to look for secret water his is a fast, exhilarating search, but the same door opens onto another world. Mikaela calls: That way, where Filip showed us, through the magic door and passes through into the field. She finds her own names for the soft seed heads of plants – honeyfurs – and adds them to the rabbit fur she is already carrying. A collection of softness begins, and a different world is revealed – slower, quieter, with more time to stop. At the lake we watch two swans, perfect and smooth in their movements.

Mikaela’s mum finds a fantastic white feather, and it joins the soft collection. The water offers soft boundaries too – between surface and depth, obvious things and those which are hidden.

Mikaela: I think I heard a dolphin. It was in my imagination. When Cody was swoshing and swishing the water I just heard one. It’s doing it again. It’s doing it more.

Caitlin: When I went to Godmanchester swimming yesterday I saw a seal. Mummy didn’t take a photograph of it. She didn’t see it, only I did – it’s a secret.

Later Caitlin makes a picture of herself and her friends half in and half out of shining water.

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Feeding the swans by Fareedá

Across the lake Caroline is with Asad, Eve, Krystal, and Fareedá, and Caitlin goes to join them. They too are fascinated by the swans. They are standing on the side of the water throwing in grasses.

I forget if the children express their wishes for the swans to eat the grasses, but they do eat them. It is when the children realise that they are feeding the swans that they talk of swan language. A language they cannot understand, they can only imagine – a silent language that they can watch, the language of the swans’ bodies.

When Fareedá tells this story again her words carry the beautiful stillness and slow repetition of the swans in the lake: We went to a great big lake, swans were eating some grasses in the water. We threw gently grasses into the water. Some of the ways we go are these ways, many are this beautiful.

THE BIG CITY

Fareedá moves her arms in a wide circle, smiling, and tells us she is going to find the big city.

We have never heard of the city before, but other children pick up the idea instantly. Of course there is a hidden city in the woods, just like there are doors and other worlds. Just like there are things that are visible, and things that are invisible.

Mikaela, Georgia and Fareedá begin the search, negotiating who will lead the way. As we travel through the woods, which are slick with wet mud, I imagine the city rising out of it. Clay from mud, bricks from clay, palaces, walls, streets, houses. A generic word, the city is probably different for each of us. But still we search together, seeming to know what we are looking for, entering from our different worlds into the city’s story.

These are the signs that the city is near: Fareedá: We’ll find a little bit of sticks and a big bit of mud, and then we’ll find a little puddle.

Georgia: If you find a red tree and a green tree, and an orange tree and a yellow tree and pink flowers and a puddle. Some yellow dots and some white dots.

Fareedá: We’ll find a little bit of fire and a house side. Full stop!

There are bolder signs that we are going the right way, but the way also becomes extraordinary, perhaps even impossible. One arrow points straight up a towering tree.

The city Fareedá describes rises to meet it:

The city is like houses and a great big castle and a lot of little houses. And there’s a little boss and a great big boss. Of course there are a hundred and ten people. There’s a hot sun and a cold sun. And there’s a hot moon and a cold moon. There’s hills made of paint. There’s a shop that buys anything and anything, everything and anything.

I think of the most fantastical book of cities I know. I am amazed by the connections between an Italian author nearly fifty years ago wondering about language and the nature of place, and these children exploring the worlds in the woods through their own language of architecture and imagined cities. When more cities appear in the afternoon, cities of bridges, metal, pillars and lines, the connections are astonishingly close. Fareedá’s city high in the tree tops is there and the city Laney, Kian, Adam and Asad make from strings. Crystal’s city made in miniature as she sits in one place reminds me again that fantastic travelling is possible anywhere, even in the school garden.

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After a seven day’s march through woodland, the traveller directed towards Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders.

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses...When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass amongst them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden.

Italo Calvino Invisible Cities (1972)

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Arnav’s den land

THE MAP OF MAPS Through the weeks

the park is being mapped in many ways – by the children’s decisions about which way to go, by their naming and describing of places, by their models, drawings, paintings, stories and shared languages of exploration.

Now we want to make a map of maps. It will bring the children’s journeys and interpretations together, and place them alongside the published maps of the park. It will look like a map in some respects, with recognisable conventions, but it will also call into question the process of mapping, and ask what a map can represent.

After a morning in the woods Ben asks the children to close their eyes. He says: Remember where you were this morning, the places you found and the journeys you went on. Make a picture of them in your mind. He reminds them of Edward’s doors and yellow zone, of the secret forest and the ways of getting there, of the mountain, the dens, mario land, the jungle.

As the children draw their journeys on small pieces of paper, the identity of the park begins to grow in fascinating and fantastical ways: there are pathways to follow and places to find, but the places also repeat themselves. The maps begin to tell stories and record authorship. The children’s names on the back of their maps are sometimes as important as the images they have drawn on the front. Many maps in the adult world look anonymous, un-authored, and yet how can they be? The children almost all put themselves into their journey maps; this is first person mapping, a narrative of

I was there.

When the children draw their journeys they also travel again. As Charlie explains his map he says: This is the mountain, now it’s the wolves’ home. I wanted to fly... I didn’t want to wake the wolves – they just climb up here. It is an astonishing story, heard only now as he moves his pencil across the page and signs his name twice on the back of his land. Perhaps because the pieces of paper are small, the stories in the map are beautifully concentrated.

Charlie’s wolves in the mountain

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Caroline prepares an outline in chalk from an existing map of Hinchingbrooke County Park, but on a huge scale. She invites the children in small groups to come and place their maps onto it. They can draw directly onto its surface.

The classroom is silent just like the woods. I am amazed at how quickly they know what to draw. No child hesitates; each child has a very important story to tell. I ask each child to tell me the story of his or her map, and I explain what is already there; I am often thinking at this point of the place the new map can go, but in the children’s minds this is not to be.

The children often choose to place their maps next to those of their friends. This map of maps is about the land of the park but it also describes how children discover places together. Their sense of location combines the real place in front of them, who they are with, and what it feels like to be there. If the map is about the hills they ask Caroline to place it as high as possible. If it is about the woods they place it in the middle of the paper. In the process of making this huge composite map, Caroline notices there is space for everybody, and that the map spans real and fantastical worlds with authenticity:

No map overlaid another, each child found a place. There is not just one specific place to look for hills or water or doors but a number of places. The reality is blurred but the mind is represented in its truest state. The children’s imaginations galloped through the wild places; this big map is a way to map their minds’ adventures.

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EVERYTHING AND EVERYTHING

How many worlds do you find in the woods?

There’s the world you can meet with your body – the snow, mud, water, trees, wide avenues, hills, rabbit holes. There are shifts and slides through time, different zones and lands, ways through memory and day-dream to other woods in other worlds. Some of the lands the children find and name are there in front of your eyes: yellow zone, marked by the yellow signs on trees, the jungle with its dense tangle of plants, the secret forest, which you can reach by being where nobody else can see you. Other lands remain just out of sight – the wolves’ tunnels deep in the mountain, the dolphins’ singing world below the surface of the lake.

Imagining upwards, the world of the woods expands into the sky and beyond. Fareedá’s city holds infinite possibilities in a single unfolding place, expressing in its description her growing conviction that in the woods anything is possible (there’s a hot sun and a cold sun, and there’s a hot moon and a cold moon) and you will know which way to go to find it.

Looking down, into the water and the holes in the ground, another world is alive. Mikaela knows it is there if she listens for it, Cody imagines the ways the water runs through it out of sight, beneath our feet.

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Maps are lines etched into the land. Maps are hidden underground. Maps are made of snow and mud and water.

Maps appear and disappear. You need everything in a map – the visible world and the tracks that go through it, the invisible world and what happens when you are not there. You need one thing for a map, a single thing – water or fur – you make a map from this thing alone, a singular world appears - full of water, full of soft things.

You can fold a map and put it in your pocket, you can make a map so big no room can hold it.

Maps are real. Maps are fantastic.

Maps of everything and everything are waiting to be made.

Harvey’s whole land of county park

How do you map everything? Harvey calls his map: The whole land of country park, adding for good measure you can’t see that guy there because he’s invisible.

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Honey and her Dad at the lake

How we got here: Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination (CCI) has been working in the outdoors for ten years. Cambridgeshire County Council Early Years Service commissioned us to work with Cromwell Park Primary School through the spring of 2013. Deb Wilenski and Caroline Wendling from CCI led the project. More information about their practice and the work of CCI is at: www.cambridgecandi.org.uk www.ccifootprints.org.uk info@cambridgecandi.org.uk

With thanks to: Mary Jane Drummond for her fantastic editing and suggestions, and for naming The map of maps.

Ruth Sapsed for patiently and creatively helping to construct this guide, and for keeping it (nearly) within its word limit.

Karen Lewin and Kelly Smith for supporting the children in their explorations and putting up with the mud (and to Karen for reading our blog and crying because she found it so beautiful!)

The many parents and grandparents who came to the woods, for their wild enthusiasm and willing involvement.

Design by Susanne Jasilek Photographs by Deb Wilenski and Caroline Wendling

This Fantastical Guide has been made possible through support from the Ernest Cook Trust and Cambridgeshire County Council Early Years Service.

Hinchingbrooke Country Park

Directions and visitor information: www.huntingdonshire.gov.uk/hinchingbrookecountrypark Hinchingbrooke Country Park, Brampton Road, Huntingdon, Cambs PE29 6DB Tel 01480 388666 Hinchingbrooke Country Park is owned by Cambridgeshire County Council and managed by: Countryside Services, Directorate of Environmental and Community Services, Huntingdonshire District Council, PathďŹ inder House, St Mary’s Street, Huntingdon PE29 3TN Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination

Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination (CCI) is a social enterprise based in the east of England. Our Footprints programme supports communities to play, learn and work together throughout the year in their local wild spaces. A company limited by guarantee.

Registered in England no.06301716.

Registered Charity no.1126253

Jasmine and Eve carrying the Mud Princess’s belt by Jasmine

This guide is for the thirty children who led our explorations, their families, friends and educators. It is for the 280,000 people who visit the park each year and love spending time there, and for other visitors who haven't been yet. It is for armchair travellers of the world looking for new destinations and fantastic ways of travelling. It is for everybody and anybody to discover the park as it has never been known before.

Seen through the eyes of these four- and five-year-olds, Hinchingbrooke Country Park ceases to be 170 acres of meadow, woodland and marsh, lying 2 km west of Huntingdon and bounded on one side by the A14. It is instead a limitless universe, changeable in its textures, and endlessly replenished in its originality. It is a wild compound of dream, spell and substance.

Robert Macfarlane (author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places and The Old Ways)