Birstall Retail Park: Beyond the stores you glimpse belts of trees interspersed by hillside meadows. The nearby M62 is out of the sight, if not quite out of earshot. This is such a contrast to when we first came here (see link below), when old colliery spoil heaps to the east were being used as a municipal rubbish dump prior to landscaping the whole area.
Even the car park itself holds some attractions for the local birds. A magpie scouts around beneath a shrub, a sparrow closely inspects the links of a chain, a crow surveys the scene from a lamp-post, a wood pigeon flies over.
Daisy, sowthistle, willowherb, creeping buttercup and black medick are in flower on the verges. Leafy backwaters aren’t far away beyond the stores.
With a hour to spare before the film, we take a walk around the Showcase cinema car park. Beyond the steep grass verge at the bottom end of the car park there’s a steep valley where alders, willows and giant hogweed grow beside a storm channel which is currently running dry.
A chiff chaff is singing and we hear another warbler – a bubbly song – which we identify as garden warbler. This deciduous woodland with dense undergrowth is the right habitat for it.
Looking east towards Bruntcliffe
Link: Lapwings over Ikea, my Wild West Yorkshire nature diary for Tuesday 1 December 1998.
The vocabulary of ths post is so particular, it reminded me of Robert Macfarlane. His _Landmarks_ is on my wish list. Do you read him?
Thank you, I’m trying to get into ‘slow writing’ instead of hammering it out directly on the keyboard. I got myself a notebook, with the intention of slowing down and going through a draft or two but I haven’t quite got there yet, so ‘Beyond the Edge’ was from a few notes taken at the retail park – any quick note is always better than none – and typed up directly in WordPress. I haven’t read any Macfarlane, or very much of the current flowering of nature writing. I’m always more likely to buy the latest field guide rather than the latest nature writing, but I ought to give them a try more often. I’ve just bought a copy of Brian Cox’s ‘Forces of Nature’, which I’m really enjoying. I decided that for once I’d read the book first and watch the television series later. The theme of the book – asking simple questions and making simple observations and through that getting the bigger picture – is exactly what I’m into.
Oh, that sounds like a good one. I’ll look into it.
(I think Macfarlane’s latest is an attempt to save words that are being lost.)