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It all started as an idea to preserve some of Flamborough's history from a personal perspective, through local peoples memories. We also wanted to make sculptures out of different materials; we bought these ideas together and came up with the Young Roots Group. We got a grant from the H.L.F (Heritage Lottery Fund), so we could go ahead.
 We got started by trying to get some long time residents of Flamborough to be interviewed so that we could put together a booklet, every household in the village received a free copy, in t he back of the book was a CD with all the old photographs that the people we interviewed let us copy for our book. We had many different workshops; our first was a writer's workshop with Daphne Glazer our author where we learnt how to interview people without making them feel uneasy. We had a meeting every month so we could decide what was going to happen during the course of the project. We had loads of ideas of materials, (concrete, wood, stone, different metals) and what would be made from them and how we would make them, Russ Coleman helped us to sort out what was workable and what was not and we made the sculptures with the help of Mark Powers, Russ Coleman, Saffron Waghorn.
 We went to some sculpture parks to get some ideas for our sculptures; we got the idea for our wavy bench from Grizedale Country Park theirs was made from wood. We thought the caterpillar track would work and it did work. I have learnt loads from this project and I have enjoyed minute of it, the interviewing boosted my confidence a little because I had to talk to strangers. Most of all I absolutely loved doing the physical things and learning new things and skills, I loved the carving, I learnt how to carve wood and stone, I got asked which one I found easier and which one I preferred to carve, but I couldn't choose they are totally different, with wood it's more forgiving than with stone, when you hit stone too hard bits can fall off that you don't want to, whereas, wood if you hit it to hard you just take the chisel out and start again. I love welding, I love being able to do things men think women can't do, I can also mix cement now as well, I also participated in building our stone tower in which are all our stone carvings. We also polished six Glacial Erratic's (large boulders), did some bronze casting.
 We all helped to design the Whale Bridge (Bridging the Gap, Bridge). I think it's fantastic when I saw it before it went in I thought it was going to be much bigger it looked huge in Cambells yard, it looks pretty small now that it's in place compared to what it did look like but, it's still pretty impressive. When all the sculptures were put in place we had a launch and Robert Emmerson opened the trail, he did a brilliant job.
Words and pictures courtesy of:
Eloise Mummery and Flamborough Young Roots Group.
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