Fantastical Cambridgeshire: Mapping Eynesbury and St Neots

Fantastical Cambridgeshire is a long-term CCI project about this county. bringing together creative adventures around cartography, culture and connections. Myself and Sally Todd began the first school residency at Eynesbury Church of England Primary school.  We worked with the Year One and Year Five children, with their teachers and TA’s.

Mapping: walking, dreaming, noticing, drawing, thinking, listening, sharing.

Over six days, we worked together to explore what artists do, how adventures might look, and to think about and embark on how to create our very own map, mad from real and imaginary elements.  We were inspired by maps from different cultures and across the ages.  We read up about St. Neots, and Eynesbury, which we found out was a village within a town.  Led by the children we discovered areas close to the school, the St. Neots market square, and green areas beyond school.  We found out about legendary characters, and family characters. We documented in our sketch books, we created poems, we imagined unseen landscapes, we devised and performed plays inspired by what stories dreamt into  local landscapes  And on the final day, we all worked together to make our map of Eneyenesbury and St. Neots.

An ambitious, exciting, rich and tremendous project.

To read more about the wider aspirations of this project on the CCI website, as well as blog posts by myself and Sally Todd, capturing and documenting what the children observed and communicated, click here.