Sure of at least a small surprise

Once I was talking to a colleague whose teenage son had been to a drama camp over the summer. At the end of the week all the students put on a performance for their parents, which my colleague didn't get at all. I commented that like all good art, it makes you ask questions. "Yes," he agreed, "like, why did I spend £200 on that week?"

The Chiltern Sculpture Trail makes you ask similar questions, but it's a nice walk in the woods and you don't actually have to spend anything, so why not? Drive up Watlington Hill to Christmas Common, turn left, drive a couple of miles and stop before you cross the motorway. There's a forestry reserve up there on the right, which is worth a walk in itself. Corridors of trees curve their way across the Chiltern they're growing out of like vast wooden cathedrals-


-and when you come out the other side you get a breathtaking view over a sheep-dotted Chiltern valley, which my phone's camera couldn't really do justice do. And scattered here and there en route are random bits of sculpture.

In some cases, this uses the word loosely.

In others it's more appropriate.


Some just make you think what? And that's when you finally get it. That's why they're here. They might not necessarily mean anything. But take something like "Posts Modern", which I couldn't really photograph because it's ... posts. Seven foot white poles, scattered about the woods. You see two or three, and a fourth behind a bush. You step past the bush to see the fourth, and see a couple more, but now the first couple are obscured ... and so on.

Or this.


What was going through the artist's mind? What is the background? Is this just a wind-up? Questions like that bubble away in a deep molecular level at the back of your mind. You will come to no dazzling insights ... probably. But your mind is set to "receive" and the walk in the woods suddenly acquires a new value.

Gawd, I'm sounding like one myself.

This was probably my favourite.


It's basically a "What the butler saw" machine. You look through the little porthole, turn the wheel to make dozens of still photographs flap past your vision to create animation, and what you see is ... a red kite in flight. Beautiful, awesome birds, iconic of the Chilterns. Yet, as the artist explains in a nearby notice, their presence today is purely due to manmade intervention, reintroducing them after their local extinction a hundred years ago. You think you're seeing something natural in this woodland setting? These woods themselves are a plantation. The machine celebrates the existence of these creatures while its tombstone-like shape laments the loss of nature.

You can pick a dozen holes in this argument in approximately half a second, but that's not playing the game. You have to look at the sculptures and expect to ask questions - like, why have I consistently typed scultpure instead of sculpture throughout this blog (which you wouldn't have known because I have also consistently gone back and corrected it each time, but it bugs me).

Sometimes sculptures are removed, apparently. One such is called "The Beautiful Dress" by Jacqueline Pearce. I'd love to know if this is the Jacqueline Pearce who played Servalan in Blake's 7. As only a certifiable nut could call "The Beautiful Dress" a beautiful dress, it's quite possible.

But still more accessible than Tracey Emin's bed, right?