A film by Bevis Bowden. Bevis writes:

I thought I could almost see myself in the hare’s eye, it was that close.

Featuring two Welsh voices of the landscape: the musician John Cale, who reads Seamus Heaney’s translation of The Names of the Hare, and the artist Paul Emmanuel, who describes an encounter he had with a hare from horseback, the film looks at the entanglement between a hare, a farmer and the livestock that coexist within a field.

The Names of the Hare (written in the late thirteenth century) is attributed to a Shropshire family on the Welsh borders. It describes itself as the 77 names you should say to a hare to avoid bad luck if you happen to come across one.

My observations of hares are often fleeting. I would be lucky to say only one of the 77 names before it bounded away through the grass and ringed the hill.

Filmed in mid Wales, between June and September 2017.

The music is from the album Land Cycle by Olan Mill. Available on iTunes.

See Bevis Bowden’s film Lapwings at Catcott, previously featured on Caught by the River, here.