Name: Bowland Lecture
Start: 2025-10-07T19:30:00+01:00
End: 2025-10-07T21:00:00+01:00
Location: Browsholme Hall & The Tithe Barn

In this year's Bowland Lecture, "Are You Lost? The past, present and future of Bowland", Dr Rob St John explores a series of historical moments over the last 150 years to narrate a story of the invention of contemporary Bowland, including, significantly, the designation of the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 1964.
It is sometimes said that Bowland is a landscape of ‘living memory’, where millennia of human and non-human stories have shaped a place enclosed from the pace of modernity.
Drawing on his Bowland roots and a year of working with people across the landscape – farmers, urban children, estate workers, archaeologists, fell runners, historians, poets, environmentalists, policy makers and more – in the Are You Lost? project, Rob will explore the relationship between landscape memory and imagination in Bowland to ask: what does the future hold for this special place?
Rob is an artist, researcher and writer based in rural Lancashire. His work has been shown and heard at Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, The Barbican, The British Museum, Tramway Glasgow, The Royal Geographical Society, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, amongst others, and profiled on BBC Radio 3, 4 and 6 Music. He has worked on European environmental restoration and policy for more than a decade, and lectured on art and the environment at University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford and Edinburgh College of Art.
Admission proceeds will be donated to local charities, Slaidburn Archive and Champion Bowland.
Thanks to the kind generosity of the Parker family, the lecture will take place once again at the Tithe Barn, Browsholme Hall. It will be hosted by Champion Bowland.
(Are You Lost? has been commissioned by the Forest of Bowland National Landscape and is produced by Lancaster Arts. It is part of the national programme called Nature Calling, with executive producers Activate Performing Arts and the National Landscapes Association and is funded by Arts Council England and Defra.)
Booking required, via link. COST: £5