On The Cloth Trail

The Cloth Road is a marketing wheeze to promote an art trail linking a handful of towns and villages on the Somerset/Wiltshire border that historically had connections to the textile trade - Bradford-On-Avon, Trowbridge, Corsham etc. The Cloth Road may not be the Silk Road, but it has its bucolic charms. Mrs W and I sallied forth amidst Bank Holiday rain to sample some of them. Veterans of arts trails, we know that sometimes the venues are more interesting than the work And to see inside some ancient Norton St. Philip homes was a rare treat. The village has joined the trail for the first time this year and all power to its collective and creative elbow, but here the architecture triumphed over the art.

The real treats were to be found in Bradford (we got no further after a late start). We'd never visited the wonderful collection of buildings that was once Barton Farm before and what a surprise... Centred around a 14th century tithe barn, there are shops and a tea room and as part of the trail the tough, yet paradoxically elegant work of blacksmith Brian Greaves was on show. Brian, surprisingly, works on a narrowboat moored on the Kennet & Avon Canal just behind the barn.  I guess one advantage is that there's plenty of water about if the forge ever gets out of control...

So were we...

Then to Melissa Wishart exhibiting mostly coastal scenes in her beach hut-like summerhouse. We were moved to put our hands in our pocket and invest in a small and very reasonably priced moody Scottish seascape.

Finally to the Artemis Gallery where we chatted to the delightful Frome painter, Caroline Walsh-Waring, about the challenges of marketing art and encountered for the first time the remarkable work of Cath Bloomfield: intense and dense collographs of flora, fauna and females (with stitching). Fascinating.

The Cloth Road Arts Week continues until the 13th May.


www.clothroadartists.com


PS Down in Vallis Vale the wild garlic is in full flower and aroma. Well worth a wander.