‘We know that time spent travelling and in wild places, with the people that matter most is precious.’
It might sound like Thoreau or John Muir, but it’s a quote from this year’s Rohan Christmas catalogue. If I wrote a mission statement, that would have to be part of it. Rohan’s soft-sell marketing must have worked on me because I’m going to try out their new Nordic Jeans, ‘with innovative infrared technology’. That would have been perfect yesterday at St Aidan’s RSPB nature reserve.
It’s the nearest you can get to wilderness and wet within ten miles of Leeds City Centre and we head there when we need wide open spaces. On a clear day you can see the moors of the Peak District moors twenty miles to the south but on Sunday morning mist filled the Aire Valley and the pattern of lagoons and reedbeds as seen from the visitor centre over a latte and flapjack resembled the floating world of Chinese brush paintings.
There’s just one bird, a coot, in my photograph of Fleakingly Reservoir, in the north-west corner of the reserve, but I’ve managed to position it behind the topmost seed-head of the knapweed. Coots were probably the most abundant bird with several hundred on the various lagoons. A smart drake goldeneye dived repeatedly on the main lake and a stonechat perched on a seed-head of dock alongside the track at the foot of The Hillside.