Raymond Whittaker

“Uxelodunum, which means ‘high place’, was the largest fort on Hadrian’s Wall and home to the only thousand-strong cavalry unit in Great Britain, the Petriana. As its name implies it commands a view across where Carlisle now stands towards the northern Pennines, the Eden Valley and the Lake District fells. Walking the streets of Stanwix you see no evidence of the fort which survives only as a buried feature below 19th and 20th century development. But my eye was drawn to a high sandstone wall that stands defensively.

At its corner there is a 1st World War pill box that looks out over the Eden River flood plain – a reflection of the strategic character of the site. The wall surrounds Barn Close, an Arts and Crafts house built at the start of the 20th century. It is set amidst formal terraced gardens commanding the view and yet protected by its defensive wall. It is a house that I have got to know well, recording its interior and helping to catalogue contents for descendants of the Scott-Nicholson family who commissioned its building. As an architect it is a building that I greatly admire. In an early twentieth-century photograph album, kept by the family, there is one image of three workmen, flat capped and waistcoated, leaning on their spades in the garden beside two neatly cut holes – early archaeologists. Their findings are unrecorded but they were clearly aware of the history beneath their feet.

This image was the starting point for my print. Within Barn Close I could see echoes of Uxelodunum, the Roman fort – the high defensive enclosing stone wall with its lookout corner, the formal ‘Italian’ gardens with its terraces and classical statue – a twentieth-century villa.

My interpretation is strongly influenced by my architectural training with flat elevational treatment and strong orthogonal structure overlaid with a love of detail. The print is on Somerset paper with the colour blocks screenprinted and a black linoprint overprint.”