Ford of the Sorrel. Over a ten year period Lucy photographed the lives and landscapes of Ampleforth, whose Anglo Saxon name translates as Ford of the Sorrel. This is the village she has called home for the last twenty years and her photographs document ordinary, universal, everyday interwoven lives within the deeply rural, ancient North Yorkshire settlement exploring themes of community and belonging.

“These wonderful photographs are poems and short stories; they are miniatures and epics; they are tiny movements at the edge of the folding map and huge gestures at the vortex of the turning world. Lucy Saggers has concentrated her sympathetic and empathetic lens on the village and surroundings of Ampleforth in North Yorkshire, a place that, as WB Yeats said about somewhere else, is ‘far from the centre of things’ except that in Lucy’s images it isn’t. It is a place that reverberates like a struck gong, sending messages to us all about how we might live if only we could stop and look and pay attention. These photographs, once seen, cannot be unseen.

Lucy Saggers’ images have the timelessness of cave paintings but, somehow, the modernity of Instagram. Here is a man following a flock of geese; here is someone standing by an empty bier. Here is a woman baking, and we know that the recipe is not in a book but in her head in the voice of her grandma. Here they are: they are us. We share their humanity and they amplify ours.

Here is the universal in the local, the idea that, if you gaze out of the same window (or across the same field) for long enough, the whole world will pass by. Lucy’s Ampleforth is like the poets George Mackay Brown’s Orkney Islands or Norman Nicholson’s corner of Cumbria; small stages on which almost operatic action can take place. In these photographs Ampleforth is a prism though which we can view so many truths, so many possibilities. Lucy has captured a place that moves to ancient and unspoken rhythms of sunrise and sunset, of birth and death and the unending dance of the seasons.” Ian McMillan

If you would like to buy a copy of Ford of the Sorrel (Bluecoat Press, 2021) please visit Lucy’s online shop https://lucysaggers.bigcartel.com/