'Ruup' was not designed with Grizedale in mind, yet the piece seems right at home on the Carron Crag walk. Three wooden constructions designed to amplify the sounds of the forest, they were built by Estonian artist Birgit Oigus.

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The name come from the Estonian word 'ruupor', which essentially translates as 'megaphone', and that's where the sculptures were first seen, at Pahni Nature Centre close to the border with Latvia. Says Hannes Praks, of the Estonian Academy of Arts;

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"A year ago, we started a course for our first-years over at the interior architecture department. It was called ‘public forest library’. Right in the beginning, we sent the students into the forest for a few days, accompanied by acclaimed Estonian author and semiotician Valdur Mikita, to look for input and inspiration for a possible concept.

The forest seminar failed utterly, because after half a day of intellectual chatter, a helicopter started to circle the forest and a moment later the woods were filled with police. The reason – a local granny had gone mushroom picking and had got herself lost. Students spent the rest of the seminar helping the police, calling out for the lost old lady. Back at the university, they continued their work on designing the forest library. The group, and to some extent the tutors, felt a bit dubious about taking books to the woods. They couldn’t really figure out how to solve the task from a practical angle – just imagine leaving the volumes in an installation in a humid cold Northern forest for the winter. And at this point Birgit Õigus saved the whole project, figuring out that instead of reading in the forest, you should rather aim to read the forest around you. 

You could also think about it in another way – the megaphones are inspired by the search for the mushroom-gathering granny and symbolise all the calling out in the forest."

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The structures do indeed work as megaphones, which you'll discover if you shout into the smaller end of one of them.