Muddy Boots

It’s good for me to have a walks booklet to write at this time of year as I’m sure that I wouldn’t otherwise have set out on a six mile walk, crossing some unfamiliar corners of the countryside, and that would have been a pity because I’ve enjoyed the walk a lot, despite the muddy boots!

My ambition in life is to be able to drawn direct from nature but practically on a day like today, in locations that are a muddy half mile tramp from the nearest road, that’s impossible, so I go for the approach Wainwright used when he illustrated his famous guides to the Lakeland Fells; I take plenty of photographs which I can then draw at leisure indoors. Wainwright had to use black and white photographic prints, I can sit at the widescreen of my computer or load a few images onto a memory stick and draw them from our widescreen television downstairs. I feel I’m not being so unsociable with Barbara if I take my work downstairs; she can get on with whatever she’s doing and we can have some music on in the background. The average drawing takes me one CD album to complete.

With the ground so muddy and the paths so trampled, the hedges and woods so stark and bare, I find myself looking for other subjects to suggest how attractive the walk can be. Architectural details look good at any time of year and I also look for untrampled corners like mossy trees trunks and streams, or, even better, the two combined as on this bend on Bushy Beck (above) downstream from Ardsley Reservoir.

I took 83 photographs on this 6 mile walk. Any change of direction in the path, any stile or bridge is always worth recording, just in case I need it to illustrate a tricky point on the walk.