Crawia are a form of fence typical to the slate quarrying areas of North-west Wales. Made from waste slate (‘craw’), they stand with their feet buried in the earth, each slate linked to the next with fencing wire that wends its way before and behind them as a weft does to a warp. The very fabric of hills, of fields and villages, they stitch field to moor, house to road, the land to the sea.

I have long been drawn to crawia. Vernacular, they are a product of place and of necessity: a local sense of make-do, when local was how people lived. As peculiar to North-west Wales as knapped-flint houses are to the chalk downs of England, you know where in the world you are when you see crawia. They attract me too in that, like mist breaking in mountains or rising off the sea, they allow a glimpse of what lies beyond. The otherworld.

The road I live on is lined with crawia, and a mile or so west of the village is a short section that separates grazing land from the cockle-strewn shore of the sea. Crouching down, the slates parse what the greedy eye sees.

My ‘Crawia’ wood engraving is based on a series of sketches I made of this section of fence. Doodles at first — what I remembered of the fence — and then sketches made sitting and standing in the grass on a hot summer day and wondering how to compose a piece: landscape or portrait? how high the slate? where the horizon? how high the grass? As always, what remains in the piece is only a fraction of what was seen.