In 2023, Cherry Truluck was Artist in Residence for the Chase and Chalke Landscape Partnership in the Cranborne Chase National Landscape, delivering her project Edible Ebble.

“I grew up beside the River Ebble, eating peppery watercress and earthy river trout, foraging wild garlic and water mint. I brought my infant son back to its banks in 2020 and watched him wading in the luke warm shallows through that strange hot summer, whilst the world around us seemed to be collapsing. This ancient ecosystem has shaped (and been shaped by) our ways of living, eating, communicating, traversing and surviving in the Chalke Valley through its long history. Edible Ebble is both an homage to and call to action for the entangled collaboration of human and more than human neighbours with the Ebble’s history-making flow.”

Edible Ebble centred on a series of interactive food experiences along the River Ebble which connected people to the chalk stream landscape, ecology and seasonality through their own appetite and metabolism. Each ‘workshop’ focused on a different key ingredient associated with the story of the Ebble, from diminished supplies of wild river trout and watercress, to the ghosts of heritage cereal crops once processed at the rivers 11 mills. Participants came together at a local community Hub to gather ideas and ingredients and then joined Cherry by the riverside at a purpose-built mobile kitchen to create dishes which further entangled their own experiences, culture and heritage with the story of the river. 

This publication is a collection of the recipes that were collectively invented by participants during the workshops, based on their food memories and dreams and realised on the riverbank using ingredients from the very spot on which we stood

Connecting the workshops was the route of the no. 29 bus (Salisbury – Shaftesbury), which itself follows the route of the river along the valley roads, first carved out by intrepid “common carriers” like the famed widow Maria Ridout and her donkey-drawn cart, the “Coombe Express”. These common carriers connected and sustained the communities of the valley, which for much of its past was impassable on foot. They brought provisions and news from Salisbury or Shaftesbury and took produce back from the villages to sell on route or in the towns. Could the 29 bus fulfill this role and revive hyperlocal connections along the river?

The project culminated in an exhibition and community celebration at the Young Gallery in Salisbury.