Bah. I was up that way earlier today as it happens. Opencast in Northumberland is ghastly. Opencast is ghastly. Full stop.
It was fairly obvious from the start that this project was an attempted sweetener to alleviate some local objections to the original application for extraction at the site. The Ridley*s are nothing if not smart thinkers. It's since been used as both a carrot and a stick. The stick part being rumours that the sculpture was not going to go ahead for financial reasons. I suspect that in actuality this was more connected to it being the time when Banks were in pre-application discussions with the council about enlarging the extraction site. I.e. "Let us expand the opencast, else we'll not make enough profit to justify spending all that money on fancy landscaping." The extension has now been approved, so apparently the project is back on again. Evidence of this (with pictures) can be seen here:
http://www.northumberland.gov.uk/idoc.ashx?docid=2f1d88ba-3443-4411-8cd6-dd514e2e9a77&version=-1
and the most recent is here:
http://www.northumberland.gov.uk/idoc.ashx?docid=76af88a3-c783-4085-9eb0-d1d9de4c683e&version=-1
These being the two most recent of Northumberland Council's site monitoring reports.
There seems to be some problem with the contouring of part of the sculpture. In other words, if the council don't keep a very close eye on the proceedings, it'll potentially end up looking nothing like those nice crispy computer generated images in the promotional blurb.
And that's my concern. Apart from the fact that I'd much rather that She Who's Name Shall Not Be Spoken had not destroyed the mining industry in the 80's and hence opencast wasn't an option, I reckon the whole thing might end up looking like neither nowt nor summat.
This part of the world has many heaps. I used to live right next to one when I was a kid and it was a great pile of flame spouting shale, coal and methane, surrounded by farmland. Now it is a nice oasis of greenery, with owls, bats, the ocasional deer, all surrounded by housing and the metal sheds of run down industrial estates. But it still changes shape. The houses below it split apart when they were first built, as the shifting millions of tons mucked about with the water table and nudged the topsoil, and compacted the subsoil. There was a football pitch that over a few years turned into replica ridge and furrow. I recall this clearly, as I lived in one of those houses and, at risk of sounding Pythonesque, we thought ourselves lucky that we just had a 2 inch crack below a window and a very leaky roof. And it wasn't just shoddy builders, as (and this is Pythonesque), the houses down the street sank into a swamp before they were finished. So they built another set of foundations, and they sank into the swamp. But the third ones stayed aboveground, as they were placed on a massive concrete raft.
I'm digressing I know, but the point I'm getting at is that the merits of the Northumberlandia (stupid name...) project are solely based on the thing actually looking like a recumbent figure. But without a fairly hefty does of structural integrity, it'll look vaguely like the plans for a few years, but then eventually, the shale and soil will do what the shale and soil want to do, and the whole thing will be a mess. I reckon one of the main reasons these places end up with the water features isn't just that it's cheaper, it's also to give a margin of fuck-up to water tables and ground surfaces.
So yeah, it's a nice idea in theory, but the bottom line for me is: "Don't arse about with the landscape please. It knows what it's doing. Humans don't."
*A surname associated with families of notorious sheep-stealing squatters during the middle ages.
