We broke our long journey to Orkney by calling in on the Lady of the North. She promised so much, a naked, voluptuous goddess sprawling erotically across the Northumbrian landscape. You don’t see one of those every day, do you? But, if I’m honest, there’s much less to the Lady than meets the eye.

The Lady, who is also known as Northumberlandia after the county in which she resides, is the work of American landscape designer Charles Jencks (1939 -2019). He created this effigy of a recumbent naked woman, 400 metres long with grassy breasts 34 metres high, between 2010 and 2012.

To achieve his goal Jencks used spoil from a nearby opencast coal mine – some 1.5 million tonnes of rock, clay and soil – shaping it carefully into the improbable form we see today. Most spoil heaps are an ugly blot on the landscape, so it was good to come across an example of one being put to creative use.

The Lady is the centrepiece of a freely accessible Community Park. Criss-crossed by around 6km of paths, the park is good as a place for a countryside stroll, somewhere to listen to birdsong, to walk the dog or to let the kids run wild. It’s clearly an asset to local people, but for me is doesn’t quite work as a piece of public art.

The problem with Northumberlandia is that it’s just too big to appreciate from ground level. From the right angle the Lady’s head, which sports a prominent nose, is unmistakeable. Her breasts are also stand-out features, but would you know what they’re supposed to be if you hadn’t seen the site plan? And as for the rest of the body – the arms, the torso and the legs – Mrs P and I strode happily over them, but to be honest we could have been anywhere.

Site Plan credit: Data: The OpenStreetMap communityMap: Smurrayinchester, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Northumberlandia is an ambitious project, but really needs to be viewed from the air to be fully appreciated. If only we’d had access to a helicopter for an hour or two. Or better still wouldn’t it be great to be able to grow some wings and fly, and so enjoy a birds-eye view of the lovely Lady!