The Land Remembers (2025)


The Land Remembers is a place-based portrait of High Nature Value (HNV) farming in the uplands. Through seasonal rhythms and everyday practices - light winter grazing, late hay cuts, hand tools such as the scythe - the film presents biodiversity as a living presence: orchids, red campion, globeflower, curlew, nuthatch.
Set within a mosaic of hay meadows, hedgerows, and stone walls, the film honours traditional land management shaped by timing, stewardship windows, and intergenerational knowledge. Ecological care unfolds in pauses for nesting birds, the cut–lie–remove logic of soil health, and peatland re-wetting to retain water and carbon.
Social and cultural life are equally central: kitchen tables, darts nights, women’s often-unseen “domestic ecologies,” and shared workshops that bring long-time farmers and newcomers together.

At a moment of rapid environmental and economic change, the film presents upland farming as a living climate–nature solution - safeguarding habitats, water quality, and carbon - while acknowledging real pressures, from shifting policies to labour shortages and housing demand. By translating policy into lived scenes, The Land Remembers offers a grounded model of resilience rooted in place.

The film was made as part of Creatively Connected, a creative arts programme led by the North Pennines National Landscape team in partnership with the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority through the Tees-Swale: naturally connected programme. It was made possible with funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and supported by Arts Council England. Creatively Connected is produced by Northern Heartlands.