ARTIST Hester Cox has collaborated with the Dales Countryside Museum to portray the abundant but ‘ephemeral and fragile’ life of traditionally-managed upland hay meadows.

A special exhibition brings together eight years’ worth of her work, including a series of new, Marie Hartley-inspired linocuts depicting the flowers, insects and birds of three meadows near her home in Horton-in-Ribblesdale.

The joy of swallows’ flight as they gobble insects over tall flowers and grasses is captured in the linocut for May, while in July a curlew watches her chicks among rows of hay.

The exhibition, to run until 17 September, is called ‘Within These Walls’. It is the title given to a stunning, large scale work first installed in a field barn in 2017 and which is now being shown for the first time at the museum in Hawes.