Kathryn Tickell in tune with landscapes

Aug 28 2008 by Tony Henderson, The Journal

GIFTED musician Kathryn Tickell is very much in tune with the spirit of the varied landscapes of her beloved Northumberland.

She is perfectly placed to be so. The Northumbrian pipes and fiddle player lives close to where the River Rede meets the North Tyne, near Bellingham.

Her family roots are also deeply anchored in the remote parts of rural Northumberland, with both sets of grandparents coming from farming and shepherding backgrounds in the Warksburn area.

The haunting sound of the Northumbrian pipes also, for many people, conjure up the essence of the fells and the county’s wild places.

Small wonder, then, that the special qualities of Northumberland’s landscapes underpin much of Kathryn’s own music and the traditional tunes she also plays. The depth of that influence will be felt at a performance next month when Kathryn brings the sounds and senses of Northumberland and the Borders to The Sage in Gateshead.

The show, Kathryn Tickell’s Northumbria, is billed as a personal interpretation of the landscape, culture, people, and traditions of one of the most beautiful of counties. It will be partly based on the reminiscences of Kathryn’s mother, Kathleen, about growing up in what was a very different world at Willow Bog Farm in Warksburn. An evocation of that rural Northumbrian childhood will come from the performance by Kathryn and Scots musician Corrina Hewat of the work Favourite Place.

Traditional folk music is, says Kathryn, very specific to certain places and areas. She became aware of the power of place when, as a child, her family moved to Lincolnshire for a few years.

“My parents were always talking about getting back to Northumberland and I was always told that Northumberland was home,” says Kathryn.

The young Kathryn also became familiar with place names from her father Mike’s books of Northumbrian and Border ballads.

Songs like Show Me the Way to Wallington are typically full of such names.

En route to the family’s return to Northumberland, Kathryn was a pupil at Priory School in Tynemouth, Spring Gardens Junior School and Linskill High School in North Shields, and Gosforth High School in Newcastle. But there were regular visits to grandparents in Warksburn. “I was up there a lot. I think it meant more to me than if I had lived there all the time,” says Kathryn.

“I went to quite a lot of different schools, but I had known the people at Warksburn all my life. They were all very much connected to the land. What the weather did was of the utmost importance to them.”

Even then Warksburn was something of a time capsule.

“I was lucky to have seen a little bit of that myself and to have tapped into the memories.”

These remote rural parts were where much of the traditional music was to be found.

“I can remember visiting family members and there would be the fiddle hanging on the wall,” says Kathryn.

From that background grew an appreciation of the diversity of landscape and mood to be found in Northumberland.

For around 10 years, Kathryn lived in Thropton in Coquetdale.

“It is a fantastic area, but very different to the North Tyne,” she says.

“Out of the window of my home at Thropton I could see the Simonside Hills, which have a very strong presence. We could be having a band rehearsal in the kitchen and at the start it would be sunny and by the finish the mist would be rolling in and the surroundings outside would be changed completely.”

Northumbrian places permeate Kathryn’s recordings. Her first album, at the age of 16, was called On Kielderside. She remembers visiting, with her father, the empty farmhouses which would soon be swallowed up by the Kielder reservoir.

“Those farms had all this history behind them, and all that would soon vanish under the water. It was the end of an era,” she says. Among subsequent albums were Borderlands, Back to the Hills and Lordenshaws. Located just below the Simonside Hills, Lordenshaws is one of the most captivating landscapes in Northumberland, with its Iron Age hill fort, prehistoric rock art carvings and panoramic views over the Coquet Valley.

Kathryn says: “Lordenshaws has more of an atmosphere than most places. It is quite peaceful but there is an awareness of deeper things going on. There is definitely some sort of resonance there. I would go up to Lordenshaws and sit there, and when I came down I had a better idea of what to do.” Place also came into Kathryn’s composition Confluence, which was performed last month at the London Proms, involving the London Sinfonietta, Hungarian band Muzsikas and the North East’s young folk ensemble Folkstra. Confluence, says Kathryn, refers to the coming together of the Thames, Danube and the River Rede.

The pervasive feel of the landscape is distilled into the Northumbrian pipes on which Kathryn excels.

“Unlike the Scottish pipes, the Northumbrian pipes are an indoor instrument but they suggest the outdoors,” she says. “Theirs is a clean and floating sound, and feels like the fells when there is nobody there. Landscapes influence me a lot. Many traditional tunes are named after places and were written by people about where they lived,” she says. “Part of the appeal of Northumbrian landscapes is the sense of space and history.

“Some landscapes in Northumberland can be quite bleak, as if they reflect the hard history of the areas.

“There are so many layers of meaning in the Northumbrian landscape, and there is far more to it than you can find in chocolate box scenery.”