In March 2020, when England went into lockdown due to Covid-19, spring was beginning to change the landscape around my home in the West Yorkshire Pennines. I would have been out most days running across the moors and through the valleys in any case, but now this time outdoors became more precious. I decided to document the changing landscape using a small 360° camera that would fit into my running backpack and which I could take out and set up in a minute or two.

On the one hand, the countryside was just as it always was at this time of year; leaves, then blossom, appeared on the hawthorn, bluebells flowered, sheep lambed, streams began to dry, the bilberries flourished and the moor gradually turned from brown to green. Yet the world also looked and felt quite different, and I felt that the final images needed to reflect the strange, off-kilter nature that the landscape had taken on this spring.

I took footage of streams, crags, walls, a plane crash, trig points, rock carvings, reservoir workings, bridges… anything and everything. There was always more to film. However, I confined filming to the area surrounding the Wessenden Valley in Marsden. It seemed right to give the project a geographical home, or limit. All in all, I created fifty short videos, ending on the day that lockdown measures began to be eased and England started to get to grips with the new normal.

Most of the videos can be found in this showcase, here: