The Forest Grew a Huntress

An archer appeared among the trees

At the old sawmill entrance to Skipton Castle Woods, a nine-foot figure leans into a drawn bow. She has no face and no pedestal. Her dress falls into the ground in hundreds of willow rods, making her look less installed than grown.

Her name is Spirit of the Medieval Huntress. Yorkshire artist Anna Cross, who works as Anna & The Willow, created the original sculpture for the Woodland Trust in 2018. The location is part of the story: the woods were once used by Skipton Castle as a hunting ground and larder.

🏹 Spirit of the Medieval Huntress — By Anna & The Willow in Skipton, England 🇬🇧

The pose carries the whole expression. One arm reaches forward, the other draws back, and the bow points along the woodland path. The long skirt spreads into the leaves and soil, so there is no hard line between the figure and the place around her.

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A steel drawing before it became a body

Anna begins her large sculptures with sketches and a purpose-built steel frame. Even at this early stage, the important lines are already there: the tilted torso, the pulled-back arm and the wide base that will carry the figure’s weight.

The artist uses English-grown willow. She values it for its flexibility, its feel and its long connection to British craft. Her background in zoology also feeds into a practice shaped by animals, movement and the countryside around North Yorkshire.

The dress was woven as movement

The rods do not form one smooth shell. They run in overlapping lines, tight around the shoulders and body, then longer and looser toward the floor. That change in density gives the still figure a sense of speed, as though the dress is following a turn that happened a second ago.

Closer look: The willow is doing two jobs at once. It covers the hidden armature, but its visible direction also works like pencil strokes, showing the viewer how the body twists.

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Installing a nine-foot figure

The installation photograph makes the scale clear. The woven archer rises above the people positioning her, while the lower body is still wrapped for transport. Once the covering is removed, the skirt rests directly beside the path rather than on a visible stone or concrete plinth.

In a later interview, Anna called installing the Huntress her proudest moment. She felt the figure belonged in the woodland and was moved by the response it received far beyond Skipton.

The path completes the pose

From the side, the bow and arrow follow the direction of the trail. Walkers do not approach the sculpture as an isolated object in a gallery. They enter the same space she appears to be watching, and the bend in the path keeps the imagined target out of sight.

No separate stage

In spring, new leaves and ground cover surround the brown willow. In winter, the same silhouette answers the bare branches overhead. The sculpture stays in one place, but its background, light and colour are never fixed.

The woods themselves have a long working history. Hunting came first; later, Eller Beck powered mills downstream. The Huntress turns one part of that history into a figure people can meet on an ordinary walk.

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The weather entered the artwork

Willow outdoors does not remain untouched. Rain, wind and time darkened the rods and gradually weakened the original weaving. By 2024, the woodland figures needed more than a light repair.

Sylvan Skills rebuilt the frames and rewove the sculptures. The new Huntress was not simply a copy: an inner layer was woven in spirals and curves for greater strength, the figure became slightly fuller, and the replacement bow was shaped more like a traditional yew bow.

The oldest photographs show Anna Cross’s original 2018 sculpture. The figure now standing in the woods carries her design forward through the 2024 reconstruction—an artwork renewed in the same material that made change inevitable.

Sources: Anna & The Willow, artist commission archive, Woodland Trust, Sylvan Skills and Folksy.

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