Recent sketches from my pocket-sized A6 landscape sketchbook.
June Sketches
Month: June 2022
Robin Hood’s Grave
Photographs from our weekend tour of Kirklees Park where all that remains of the Priory are lintels and stone recycled for use in the buildings of Home Farm and the Gatehouse where, according to tradition, Robin Hood died (see my earlier post). The barn would have been in use at the time Cistercian nuns occupied the Priory.
There’s only a fragment of the original tombstone left as over the century so many visitors have chipped off fragments – Robin Hood’s stone was reputed to cure toothache. As Dr Borlik pointed out, the plant debris (larch needles?) scattered on the surface of the stone seem to have picked out a faint impression of the shaft of the cross that early drawings show carved on the stone.
Family Album
My favourite photograph of great grandad George Swift, sneakily taken, I’m guessing, by a teenage photography enthusiast: my grandad Maurice (I bet that’s his thumb print from when he developed the plate negative). George was a third generation spring knife maker in Sheffield but times were hard in the 1880s so he and Sarah Ann opened a corner shop as a sideline (note the Peek Freans ad, board). Must have been an exhausting business.
What do you do in a family crisis? Yes, bake scones. Here’s my mum-in-law Betty Ellis in a sketch of mine from the 1980s in her kitchen baking at her fold-out Formica-topped table. She once told me about cycling 25 miles through the black out to deliver a Christmas cake to husband-to-be Bill at his temporary camp in Sheffield when he enlisted in the army in 1939. So glad that I persuaded her to write it down.
The Nation’s Family Album
I’m submitting these images to The Nation’s Family Album: the National Portrait Gallery and Ancestry.co.uk are creating a special display at the gallery in 2023, so hope that Betty and George will be featured.
The Mousy Scent of Hemlock
Newmillerdam car park, 19℃ 68℉, humid and overcast: Luxuriant should-high hogweed, nettle, creeping thistle, curled dock and growing to 8ft, hemlock with cleavers scrambling amongst the stems. Several species of hoverfly are attracted to the umbels of hogweed or resting on leaves.
Working under an umbrella, the patter of rain on the fabric reminds me of when I occasionally camped out in my one-man tent but any fresh smell of summer rain is cancelled out from the strong smell of mice from the hemlock.
The Yorkshire Robin Hood
Dr Todd Borlik and an online Dr Alex Brown were the speakers at The Yorkshire Robin Hood talk and discussion at Huddersfield University yesterday.
Todd, a Shakespeare scholar with a special interest in Renaissance Ecocriticism put the tradition of Robin Hood’s death and burial in Kirklees into context. He mentioned that shortly before Shakespeare wrote As You Like It, set in the Forest of Arden, a Robin Hood play had been performed in the Rose Theatre, just across the road from the Globe.
In his talk Riding the Wheel of Fortune with Robin Hood, Alex looked at how the fear of downward social mobility in post pandemic medieval England is taken up in some of the earliest surviving Robin Hood ballads, particularly in the story of the poor knight Sir Richard of the Lee in A Lyttell Geste of Robyn Hode.
In the afternoon we got a chance to visit Robin Hood’s Grave and the gatehouse of Kirklees Priory, recently restored as a private home.
Summer River
Stonecrop, viper’s bugloss, marsh woundwort, bream, banded demoiselle and a family of swans on our walk alongside the canal and the Calder today. Now we’re past midsummer’s day racken and bramble have grown up shoulder high, trees are in full leaf and on the riverside path, tall grasses are going to seed
Four Lane Ends
Once known as Four Lane Ends, this is the view as it was in 1967 from Tithe Barn Street looking across Westfield Road to Jenkin Road, with Arnold Tattersfield’s newsagents on the left, Lee & Briggs ironmongers on the right. The fourth ‘lane’ on the near right is Manor Road.
I drew the little sketch that it’s based on while sitting at the Tithe Barn Street back entrance to the old Congregational Chapel (extreme left) while working as a teller when my dad was standing for Horbury Urban District Council. I had to politely ask every voter as they walked in for their number on the electoral roll. Towards the end of the day the local ‘independents’ (really Conservatives) would go around rounding up anyone who had promised to support them but hadn’t yet turned up.
The original of linocut was black on white but I like this reversed version, made by going for the wrong keyboard shortcut in Photoshop (Control+I instead of Control+Alt+I. After all these years I still get that wrong when I’m resizing an image). I’m currently re-scanning drawings of Horbury for a reprint of my local guide to the historic buildings of the town.
I was influenced by Daily Mail cartoonist Trog’s bold pen and ink drawings in the paper’s long-running cartoon strip Flook.
Summer Sowing
There’s just time for one last sowing for late summer vegetables. Going through the packets of seeds that we’ve already got in, there are eight that I can try but there’s only a 4 by almost 8 foot section of raised bed that I can fit them into, so I’ve gone for 2 foot squares instead of rows to get more in.
| Calendula | Carrot | Kohl Rabi | Spring Onion |
| Salad leaves | French bean | Perpetual Spinach | Pea |
Some of the crops, such as salad leaves, will stay where I’ve sown them but as we clear the potatoes and other crops over the next few weeks I’ll be able to plant some on, such as the French beans and perpetual spinach.
Dodgson & Bickerdike
There are still a couple of candidates I haven’t drawn and it’s the Wakefield by-election tomorrow but here’s Mick Dodgson, standing for the Freedom Alliance and Paul Bickerdike of the Christian People’s Alliance.
I didn’t get around to drawing Therese Hirst, standing for the English Democrats, but here she is in a drawing I made when she was standing in the election for a Mayor for West Yorkshire a year or so ago.
Gaskell & Jones
Two more of our candidates in the Wakefield by-election: Christopher Jones, Northern Independence Party and Jordan Gaskell, UKIP. If Jordan gets elected on Thursday he’ll be the first Gaskell to represent Wakefield since Daniel Gaskell, who represented the borough as a radical independent from 1832 to 1837.
