Five Wells [video game excerpt]
Nicholas Delap
2025
Digital video
Runtime: ~60 seconds (looped)
Situated at 427 meters above sea level on Taddington Moor, Five Wells is reputed to be the highest megalithic tomb in Britain—a Neolithic chambered cairn whose protective earth mound was dismantled in the eighteenth century by local wall-builders, leaving its two limestone orthostat chambers exposed, oriented east to west, oriented toward nothing. What was sealed has long since been opened.
In this short video, representing one virtual realm from artist Nicholas Delap’s forthcoming game Ffynnon Gybi, the artist constructs a virtual analogue of the site using photogrammetric 3D scans and CG sculpts rendered within a real-time game engine. The result is a wintery, spectral environment—neither archaeological reconstruction nor outright fantasy, but held in suspension between the two. By transposing Five Wells into the logic of a game engine, Delap activates the site's latent condition as threshold space: a place built to hold the dead, progressively stripped of its concealing mass over millennia, now re-encountered as traversible data.
The scene’s central figure—the White Hilt—resists resolution. In its deliberate ambiguity it operates less as referent than as lure: something interred, something not yet drawn. The white of the Peak District limestone plateau, the pallor of winter, the handle of a weapon whose blade remains buried. The burial mound becomes, in this reading, not a tomb so much as a scabbard.
