Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’ve long known the story that my grandad’s brother Charles Bell died in a stable fire when looking after a sick mare but now, thanks to a newspaper report from the Derby Mercury, Wednesday 11 May 1898, I know a lot more about the circumstances of the tragedy and about his daily life.
You can read the full story, from a newspaper clipping posted by a distant relative of mine on Ancestry, at the end of this post.
There are plans to build 4 million homes on the green belt according to today’s Telegraph.
There’s a triangle of countryside at Broad Cut Farm, Calder Grove, near Wakefield, that has survived between to the river and the M1 where there’s a now plan to build a hundred of those homes plus 10 manufacturing units..
The causey stone public footpath in my 1983 drawing was originally a colliery tram road, where horse-drawn trucks were taken to Hollin Hall Coal Staith just downstream from Broad Cut Lower Lock. There’s a row of six ‘Old Limekilns’ next to them.
The small building at ‘Th’ Owlet Lathe’ in the top right corner of the map was a dovecote.
I perched on the southbound side of motorway embankment in 1983 to draw it:
Room for 260 pairs of pigeons
A ruinous dovecote stans close to the motorway embankment at Owlet Laithes, just north of junction 39. It is built of handmade bricks on a ssandstone base which acted as a damp-course. The roof is of large Yorkshire stone (andstone) flags held on to a rough-hewn timber framework by wooden pegs.”
Unfortunately this old building disappeared within a few years of me drawing it.
Broadcut Against Development BAD Facebook Group
Great celebrities who trod the boards at Horbury School:
. . . and not forgetting:
Happy birthday to Zac, who may get tread the boards at Horbury Academy in the next few years.
Jane MacDonald, singer and BAFTA award winning TV presenter
Allan Schiller, classical concert pianist
A rainy morning’s walk on the shores of Buttermere is the perfect opportunity to try out our new Craghoppers’ AquaDry Waterproof Systems jackets. It’s a tough contest, as we’re just five miles from Seathwaite, in Borrowdale, the wettest inhabited place in England, which gets 11 feet of rain in a year. Most of it this morning.
High Stile looms out of the low cloud as we walk through Burtness Wood on the south-west shore of the lake. High Stile, at 807 m, 2,648 ft, is topped with Eagle Crag Sandstone, a sandstone derived from volcanic rock, from the Ordovician Period, 450 million years ago.
Sourmilk Gill cascades down the hillside at the lower end of the lake eroding into the medium-grained Ennerdale Granite.
Read more: Buttermere
Felspar crystals give the rock its fleshy pink colour. Shards of dark ‘country rock’ – a geological term for the surrounding rock – were incorporated into the molten intrusion of granite as it forced its way upwards. Some of these fragments appear to be partially melted and the top fragment has a lighter halo around it.
These fragments are called xenoliths, from the Greek meaning ‘strange stone’.
Crottle, also known as the salted shield lichen, Parmelia saxatilis, is a green-grey lichen here growing amongst mosses on bark.
If you look closely you’ll see a network of white veins on its upper surface. Crottle was used to produce a reddish brown dye, used in Harris Tweed.
From the furthest slope in this photograph we’re looking north across the lake towards:
Snoc is ‘a projecting piece of land’. Rigg means ‘ridge’.
Growing amongst polytrichum ‘haircup’ mosses, a polypody fern.
Common Polypody Fern, Polypodium vulgare, doesn’t have glossy fronds . . . except when its raining.
And talking about rain, I’m afraid that the Craghoppers’ Aquadry jackets didn’t live up to their name. Discussing it with a local we feel that the Lake District rain managed to get in via the seams, so an additional improvement might be – in addition of the dual layer waterproof membrane of the AquaDry system – to tape the seams.
Our jackets have always stood up to the worst that Yorkshire can throw at them but Lakeland rain is something above and beyond that.
But we did finish our walk at the perfect place for drying out . . .
Wherever you go in the Lake District there’s an opportunity to see the local rocks in the walls. I’m guessing that the opaque white mineral under the tea room sign is fluorite.
Yesterday we caught the opening day of Ian Lawson’s exhibition ‘Native Spirit, The Herdwick’ at the Rheged Gallery which, alongside the stunning photographs, included these samples of Herdwick wool, dyed in colours that you can see all around you in the Lake District landscape.
Colliery spoil heaps were once such a prominent feature of our local landscape that it never occurred to me to photograph one but this example, at the top end of Coxley Valley, featured as a stand in for an extinct volcano in our 1966 Indiana Jones-style mini-movie ‘Quest Coxley’.
That’s my friend John as the intrepid explorer clutching the cavalry sword he used to hack through the dense undergrowth of New Hall Wood.
Today at the same footbridge you’re entirely surrounded by woodland and the spoil heap itself has been landscaped to create a gentler slope.
The banking at the foot of the spoil heap in the 1966 photograph was the dam wall of a settling pond constructed to prevent sediment discharging into Coxley Beck. It has now almost completely silted up. In the 1980s it attracted hundreds of mating toads in springtime and hopefully it still does.
The footbridge over Stony Cliffe Beck is top centre in this map from 1930. Denby Grange Colliery was then called the Prince of Wales Colliery. One feature in the old map that isn’t obvious when you’re walking through what is now Stonycliffe Wood Yorkshire Wildlife Trust reserve is the band devoid of trees across the top of the map: a fire break?
Our ‘Quest Coxley’ travelogue was just one minute long, so that’s about 12 feet of Standard 8 cine film at 18 frames a second. In Photoshop I’ve stitched together 20 frames from a second or two of a panning shot to make the panorama.
Stoneycliffe Wood Nature Reserve, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust
Earnshaw’s Yorkshire Garden & Fencing Centre, Midgley, on the site of Denby Grange Colliery