King Herla is a new site‑responsive artwork by Jamie Fitzpatrick at Bartonsham Meadows, Hereford.

Developed through Arts&Heritage’s ongoing commissioning partnership with Herefordshire Wildlife Trust, King Herla responds to the regeneration of Bartonsham Meadows — a floodplain landscape currently being restored using traditional land‑management practices to support biodiversity and ecological resilience.

The project comprises two interconnected artworks: a physical sculpture made from the land itself, and an immersive digital experience created in collaboration with local communities.

King Herla launches on Saturday 21 March 2026. The digital trail begins at the Scout’s Corner entrance to Bartonsham Meadows and leads visitors to the temporary sculpture. Visitors are encouraged to follow on‑site signage.

INSTRUCTIONS

You will need a recent smartphone with a mobile signal and some headphones. 

Please note that the experience may not work consistently on all devices.
An iPhone 8 or newer, or a recent Android device with ARCore support, is recommended. 

There are 6 QR codes along the walk. 

To begin, open the camera app on your phone and point it at a QR code. On most devices, a link will appear that you can tap to open.
The first QR code is located here and will provide information about the project. 

When you reach the second QR code, scan it to download the app:
“AR Studio Viewer” by WebAR Studio.
You will need this app to access the digital experience. 

Once you have downloaded the app, each QR code will activate a different part of the experience.

When prompted, gently move your phone around so it can understand the space. You will then be able to place a digital sculpture on the ground by tapping the blue “X”. You will also hear the story of King Herla, narrated by Jamie Fitzpatrick.

You can press the red circle to record your experience. After recording, you may need to restart the app to continue. 

To access the next QR code experience, you may need to close the AR Viewer app and reopen your camera, or clear the cache within the app. 

The trail will lead you to the site of Jamie Fitzpatrick’s sculpture and the final QR code. 

This experience was created voluntarily by Hereford College or Arts students on Digital Content Creation BA(Hons) and Games Design BA(Hons)

Lucius Talbott – 3D Scanning 

Logan Newman-Whitworth – 3D Modelling 

Dave Payne – AR Experience Design 

The project is delivered as part of Arts & Heritage’s Common Lands programme, in partnership with Herefordshire Wildlife Trust, Hereford College of Arts, and CUP Ceramics. King Herla is kindly funded by Herefordshire Council’s UK Shared Prosperity Fund and the Henry Moore Foundation. Herefordshire Wildlife Trust’s restoration of Bartonsham Meadows is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The first artwork takes the form of an augmented reality experience, developed using sculptures made by local communities supported by students from Hereford College of Arts. In this digital work, a ghostly horde of Herla’s knights re‑emerges from the river, combining game design, music and storytelling. The experience has been developed by game design students Lucius Talbott, Logan Newman‑Whitworth and Dave Payne, and is accompanied by original sound and narrative by Jamie Fitzpatrick.

The second artwork is a temporary clay sculpture of the legendary figure King Herla, an ancient king whose band were said to have plunged into the River Wye, only to re‑emerge two centuries later into a changed world. Created using soil excavated from Bartonsham Meadows as part of a new biodiversity “scrape”, the sculpture is embedded with wildflower seeds and designed to slowly dissolve back into the landscape. As rainfall and flooding break down the clay, seeds are released into the meadow, allowing the artwork to actively support the site’s ongoing regeneration.

A key element of the project is the creation of a new “scrape” — a shallow depression or temporary pond designed to attract and support wetland wildlife such as wading birds, amphibians, dragonflies and specialist plants. These low‑cost, small‑scale interventions can significantly increase local biodiversity by mimicking natural, ephemeral wetlands.

There was a huge team of collaborators that helped bring ‘King Herla’ to life. 

• Lucy Blipping Pertra, who worked with Jamie on the experiment of using waste soil from which to build sculptural seed bombs for meadow regeneration.
• Abbie McKelvie, Elysia Hughes, Emily Hedges & Beth Lockett who contributed time and energy to help shift soil and fill the moulds.
• Creative Media course at Hereford College of Arts for taking a verbal idea (‘a digital sculpture garden a bit like Pokemon Go’) and turning that into a tangible, working and absolutely fantastic free digital experience.  Particular thanks to: Lucius Talbott (3D scanning), Logan Newman-Whitworth (3D modelling), and Dave Payne (AR experience design) and Creative Media tutor Nicolas Stevenson.
• Col and all the guys at Cup Ceramics for their time, space and endless delicious cake and coffee.
• The community ceramics artists, young and old, who created the motley band of horsemen that now digitally inhabit the meadows on their eternal roaming – Otto, Keelan, Leo, Amie, Amelia, Leah, Verity, Caroline and Christine.
• And Hereford Wildlife Trust for allowing us to access the site and experiment with the waste soil from the scrapes. We hope that the remains of the sculpture go some way towards the rehabilitation of flood plain grasses on the site and provide a fruitful habitat for the future regeneration of wildlife to the area.

“Until this point, I tend to work quite hermetically on projects, sealed off in the studio and locked into productive solitude in the build up to a show. The opportunity to work with so many fantastic people who have brought so much more to this work than I ever could on my own has been a truly amazing experience.” – Jamie Fitzpatrick

While the physical sculpture is designed to disappear in tune with the seasonal and ecological rhythms of the floodplain, the digital artwork creates a lasting digital legacy, allowing the story of King Herla to continue to be experienced on the meadows.