Lot Essay
In July 1943 Vaughan was transferred from Wiltshire to the West Riding of Yorkshire. Like many southerners he had never been in the North of England before, and his response to its distinctive landscape was that of a tourist in a foreign land, fascinated by the strangeness of it all. He spent about a month billeted in an abandoned mill by a river near Keighley, "where the air is so exhilarating one feels breathlessly alive" (M. Yorke, Keith Vaughan his Life and Work, London, 1990, p. 83). From here he explored the moorland area around Bradford and Ilkley.