What had driven them, in the latter stages of the Oil Age, to create the largest replica of the human body ever seen on Earth — a reclining female figure a quarter of a mile long and weighing 1.5 million tons.
In fact, she turns out to be a collaboration between, an international landscape artist, an unusual aristocrat and a mining firm.
When this earth sculpture, Northumberlandia, opens to the public in 2013, she will be so big that the best place to take in her gargantuan proportions will be from a plane. Drivers on the A1 will get a good view of her head, and rail passengers on the London-to-Edinburgh line will have a generous eyeful of her rear.
To her designer, Charles Jencks, she is a ‘gateway’ and an ‘abstraction’, while her progenitor, the Honourable Matthew Ridley — journalist squire of Blagdon Hall and 10,000 acres hereabouts — calls her ‘a new green public open space’.
The mysterious lady is already, variously, known as Slag Alice, Fat Slag (after a character in the Geordie comic Viz), Big Bird and the Goddess Of The North. There will be many more.
But as I stand, more than 100ft up on what will be Northumberlandia’s face, staring at the North Sea, wild hills and Tyneside, she seems an ingenious addition to the landscape.
This entire region is defined by colossal man-made projects — Hadrian’s Wall, baronial castles, coal mines, shipyards and, latterly, the Angel Of The North.
So, why not have a grass-covered human Sphinx made from the detritus of a mine? And she is a lot prettier than the average slag heap.
‘Some people think it’s wrong to have a female figure, and others think she’s some sort of pagan symbol, even though Mother Earth is part of cultures all over the world. But people moaned about the Angel of the North in the early days, too.’
Jencks points out that she is not modelled on any real person but is a collection of metaphors. And he is certainly not bothered by a spot of irreverence.
‘It’s a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm,’ says the author of The Universe In The Landscape. ‘If it didn’t stir the horses, it wouldn’t be iconic.’
I suspect the locals will soon be as proprietorial about Northumberlandia as they have become about Antony Gormley’s steel angel.
The idea was born in 2004 when the Blagdon Estate and the Banks Group were applying for permission to dig for coal and fire clay (for bricks) on farmland near the new town of Cramlington. Arthur Scargill may be in his dotage, but the coal industry still employs 6,000 people in Britain and generates a third of our electricity. The local council received 2,500 objections and the consortium had to show how it planned to restore the land afterwards.
Ridley invited Jencks to get involved. It was when he saw the mining operation that he had the idea of a landform on a similar scale. Northumberlandia was born.
I begin my visit down at the coalface. And it is unlike any coal mine I have seen. There are no shafts or colliery wheels, just a hole the size of several Wembley Stadiums.
It’s a surface mine, with Britain’s biggest digger spitting 70-ton mouthfuls into Britain’s largest dumper trucks, each the size of a Tesco Metro on wheels. Jencks calls it ‘a ballet of machinery’.
With this sort of surface mine, the topsoil and rocks are all put into piles. The coal and fire clay are then extracted down below, in an operation due to last another seven years. Come 2018, all the soil and rocks must be back in the ground as if nothing had happened and the land will be farmed once again.
Except that you always end up taking out more than you can put back due to a phenomenon known as ‘bulkage’ (take a lot of rocks out of the ground and you will find they never go back in as neatly before).
And, in this case, a million cubic yards of surplus has been hauled over to a neighbouring part of the estate to form Northumberlandia.
‘It would have been cheaper to leave it where it was,’ says Mark Dowdall of the Banks Group. ‘But that would not have enhanced the landscape.’
The Eden Project, of course, soon achieved global fame when it was used as the location for a James Bond film. Northumberlandia could do the same. She’d make the perfect hideout for a female villain, complete with missile silos in her embonpoint.
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