RURAL LIFE 2 - Wednesday December 29 1999 article from the Guardian:
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For hill farmers in Britain, daily life is a struggle just to survive. Michael Simmons meets a photographer who has spent the last two years chronicling the lives of Derbyshire die-hards.
Chadwick family kitchen, Ivy House Farm, March 1998
Silence of the lambs
Since 1997, Kate Bellis, who studied photography at Nottingham and then travelled the world before becoming a tenant of the Salisburys, has been watching the two families' lives through the lens of her Leica Rangefinder. She is convinced that she is recording a way of life under threat, and one that will have disappeared within a generation. "I couldn't just sit there and watch it go under," she says.Viv Chadwick and her husband, Andrew, used to love hill farming. It didn't matter too much that they had so few 'real' holidays - two she reckons, in 30 or so years. But now it's all paperwork and incomprehending governments. "The worst thing they've done," Viv says, "is that they've taken the pleasure out of it all."Continued...