Alan Silvester

The CROW (Countryside and Rights of Way) Act, or "Right to Roam" Act, excludes the right of access to land known as ‘excepted land’ even if it appears as open access land on maps. These restrictions vary from military bylaws to land covered by structures like electricity substations, wind turbines or telephone masts.

The advent of online mapping accentuates unseen, restricted landscapes by their absence. Where mapping vehicles haven’t been able to pass, the map is less detailed, pixelated or simply doesn’t provide any data. Excepted Land connects disparate systems via a complex relationship to land, access and transparency.

The Trawsfynydd nuclear power station is scheduled to be returned to a pre-nuclear state by 2083, 124 years after construction began. The site ceased electricity generation in 1991 (during a routine outage; permanent shutdown was subsequently announced in 1993) after 26 years of operation. In 2020, a new decommissioning plan was proposed to deconstruct the concrete towers and switch from a safe enclosure, or deferred dismantling, to dry cask storage using an underground geological storage facility. To date, an underground geological storage facility location is still to be established by the UK government. The image taken at two hours past sunset captures fifteen minutes in the lifespan of this process. The indeterminate future of this landscape emphasises the permanence of nuclear energy. The structures have the potential to reside on the Welsh landscape for 124 years, outlasting the generation that conceived them.

Great Dun Fell Radar Station is at the end of a mountain pass elevation of 850m above sea level. The private 5 mile single track leading to the station is Britain’s highest road. The station is managed by the National Air Traffic Services (NATS) and is part of a network of radar systems that provide air traffic information across the United Kingdom. Great Dun Fell provides a 250 mile radius signal coverage and connects with other radar stations across the UK. The sub-arctic conditions make accessing the radar station challenging. The image taken at sunrise is captured within a cloud, with extremely low visibility.

Royal Air Force Menwith Hill is a Royal Air Force station providing communications intercept and missile warning information to the United Kingdom and United States. It has been described as the largest electronic monitoring station in the world. In 1954, the British War Office purchased land at Nessfield Farm, near Harrogate, North Yorkshire, with the intention of building a surveillance station in collaboration with the United States Department of Defence. The site was considered by the US as suitable for gathering signals intelligence because of the low level background radio noise provided by The Yorkshire Dales. The subsequent years have seen numerous regulatory changes leading to a myriad of claims regarding the true nature of its role in global strategic defence. The image taken at two hours past sunset is a fifteen minute exposure shot at one and a half miles from the base.

Excepted Land reflects our deep-rooted fascination with hidden systems that regulate our lives and the complex relationship we have with partisan systems of control. Shot using long-exposure analogue photography, Excepted Land is a study of the unseen mechanisms that facilitate our existence.