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About Me

I am Cathy Turner, a researcher and walking artist.

I am a Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter, and one of four artist-researchers in Wrights & Sites, an artists’ organization based in South West England.

My research into the connections between theatre and architecture as ways of re-imagining city space led to my book, Dramaturgy and Architecture: Theatre, Utopia and the Built Environment, Palgrave, 2015.

My current interests are in Indian performance and ritual in its engagement with public space,* gardens for/as/in performance, and open air performance more widely. This research, in various forms, has been supported by a range of grants, currently from Leverhulme (Research Grant), and previously from AHRC, GCRF, BA and the National Trust. When researching open air performance, Evelyn O’Malley is a close collaborator and we are currently co-writing a book for Bloomsbury, following two funded projects. For more on this collaboration see our joint site.

Previous research has included a collaboration with Synne Behrndt in researching contemporary dramaturgy as profession and concept, with a focus on the UK. Our book, Dramaturgy and Performance, came out in a revised edition with Palgrave in 2016.

Wrights & Sites‘ work includes a series of ‘Mis-Guides’, which propose ways of walking** that make places strange to us. Our most recent publication is The Architect-Walker: A Mis-Guide (2018). Again, mainly documented on the joint site.

The ‘Sometimes Walking’ Research Blog is where I update my individual research sporadically, and for now, under the sub-category, ‘Performing Gardens’.

*We can argue about whether there is such a thing, of course.
**’Walking’ is here understood to include other ways of getting about, including wheelchairs, pushchairs, crawling, or whatever is accessible.

On the heels of Thomas Bushell

Some years back, I began to research Thomas Bushell, the creator of the Italianate waterworks, the ‘Enstone Marvels’. You can read here about the way that Bushell used these gardens to gain the ear of King Charles I, in August 1636 and to petition for the rights to take over the lease of the Mines Royal in Wales (granted January 1637). Although there is a lot of fun to be had with the eccentric Bushell, we should probably take him more seriously than I did at first. He certainly had some impact on the Welsh landscape, and he poured its riches into the Royalist cause during the Civil War.

I wanted to know more about what happened in Wales, so I went to explore Tal-y-bont, the centre of his mining operations. There are still old workings there, spoil tips and an adit known as ‘Bushell’s level’, though it doesn’t tally quite with Bushell’s own description.

Following up local information led me to Bushell’s place of residence in Wales, Park Bodvage (now Lodge Park), and to a rumour that he murdered his wife Isobel while living there. This rumour is preserved in Lives of the Engineers Vol 1, which comments on ‘Bushell’s Well, where he is said to have killed and thrown in his wife, and the people still believe that her headless corpse haunts the woods round the well’ (cited in The Cambrian News and Merionethshire Standard, 11th June 1880, ‘Queries’ p.3).

I think it unlikely. Ffynon Bushell is a shallow well, 18 inches deep. It is cut square into the rock, like the entrance to a mine or a cave. It is certainly the sort of structure one would expect from Bushell, with his liking for both grottoes and mines, but it would not be a good place to hide a body, and if he had wished to dispose of his wife, live or dead, he had access to multiple deep and flooded mine shafts.

In fact, Bushell and his wife seem to have been separated long before this, by Bushell’s own account in 1628. John Jordan notes that back at Enstone, church registers are completely missing between 1626 and 1654, due to the Civil War, so records of her death were likely lost (she must have died during this period, as Bushell was remarried in 1642). Bushell’s prompt departure from Wales seems to have been in order to support the King.

Between Tal-y-bont and the deer park at Tre’r-ddol, Taliesin’s grave is another questionable site (it’s a bronze age barrow). I was happy to see a small harp under it, though. I sang him ‘Now the day is over’, with apologies for doing it in the English language.