A sequel? A companion piece? Call it what you will, but in 2021, Sally Matthews made a surprise return to Grizedale to make another Wolves sculpture, a little further south on a newly-constructed path cutting across the north side of Bogle Crag. Perched on a rocky outcrop which is deceptively hard to scale, they survey the path menacingly, and would be easily missed by the unwary walker who is heading southwards from Grizedale Tarn.

I like to think of these new Wolves as members of the same original pack; descendants who roam the same fells as their ancestors. It's said that England's last living wolf was hunted down and killed not far south from here in the late 1300s, on the edge of Morecambe Bay, where the estuary meets the land, and turns to mud and silt. Legend has it that the wolf came down from the mountain at Coniston and caused havoc among the flocks of sheep. This was bad enough for the locals, but when it killed a child in Cark, near Haverthwaite, a line had been crossed and the villagers hunted it to the top of the towering rocky outcrop of Humphrey Head, where they skewered it with pikes as it cowered among the limestone, having run finally run out of land. Talk of reintroduction has come and gone over the years, and until it becomes anything more than that, Matthews' Wolves will be the closest we get to an animal which once thrived in our wilds, and not just in our stories and fables.

 

Also by this artist:

Wild Boar Clearing 1987

A Cry In The Wilderness 1990

Wolves 1993