Fifty or sixty years later, our local patch of countryside down by the river and canal in the Calder Valley near Wakefield isn’t the place where, as a boy, I could wander at will with my friends. There were no public footpath signs in those days, so the presumption was that we were free to explore any well-worn path.
As an art student, I shot a short and suitably arthouse Standard 8 film on location in the valley, including a scene in which my brother and his friends, who were roped in as the cast, run along the top of the derelict colliery railway embankment that straddles the floodplain between the river and canal.
A few years later, as I started trying to make a living as a natural history illustrator, I painted a detailed acrylic of a bramble bush drawn on the embankment, which was then greening up enough to attract local wildlife, including a rabbit and a song thrush that I included, life size, in the composition. I exhibited, and immediately sold, the painting at the Ruskin School in Oxford, and the painting was featured on the cover of The Artist magazine, so the old mineral railway provided me with inspiration, some welcome publicity and a much-needed financial lifeline in my attempts to keep my head above water as a freelance illustrator.
So do I think that it’s a shame that I can’t now walk along what is now could be a short railway walk nature trail? Not necessarily: as it’s now out of bounds behind a high and spiky security fence, it acts as a pocket-sized conservation area where birds can nest with minimum disturbance.
In so many ways, my local patch has improved since my childhood. It’s hard to look over this view from The Balk, Netherton, and remember that in the 1970s the recently mown field, below the sandstone ridge of Hartley Bank Wood, was an opencast mine with just the pylon left in place, standing on a pillar.
You wouldn’t now guess that the spoil heaps of Hartley Bank Colliery extended over most of this southern side of the valley. Now restored to farmland, the naturalist in me still kind of wishes that the barren slopes of red shale and muddy gulleys between could have been left to natural regeneration. I suspect that fifty years later, we would now have wall-to-wall birch, ash, sycamore and oak woodland, rather than the patchwork of heath, wetland and meadow that it might have become in my imagination.
At the old lock-keeper’s cottage, the Rottweiller is really as intelligent as those graffitied reading glasses suggest but although he’s better looking than in his security guard mugshot, he doesn’t sport a handlebar moustache.