Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Summer is over, it's turning cool, It's time to go back to the Woodland School . . . Owl seems to be sleeping, but I've a hunch, He's dreaming of Dormouse for his lunch. Just one missing, and that's the Mole, Whoa! Here he comes now, popping up from his hole!
A birthday card for Florence (she’s the one in the woolly hat).
“Last week I was in Ilkley,” the waller tells me, “and had some lovely sandstone, but I’m making the best of this.”
The irregular fragments of limestone in the Greenfield Valley, Upper Wharfedale, don’t stack up as neat layers but there’s plenty of material available. Another waller is repairing a section and he simply digs up a piece he needs from the turf alongside the wall.
The hogget hole allows sheep to pass through. This one can be blocked by the slab lying beside the wall on the roadside verge. A hogget is a young sheep.
I’m reading David Joy’s 2019 book Discover Your Woods, Trees in the Dales so this afternoon I had a walk around Bilberry Wood here as Nethergill Farm. There are pines, larches and firs but the only broadleaved species that I notice is rowan.
Rushes and sphagnum moss grow in the damper areas, with heather and polytrichum mosses on drier hummocks.
At the more exposed western corner of the wood, a swathe of pines has been flattened, the fallen trees revealing that they were shallow rooted.
The only bird that I notice is a wren, flitting about amongst the ground vegetation and it appears that a wren spotted my iPhone which I’d set to take a time-lapse sequence, flashing on the screen for a single frame.
There are ferns, bracken and a few brambles but the ground layer consists predominantly of various kinds of mosses. Tormentil straggles around, dotting the ground with its four-petalled yellow flowers.
There are a few fungi and, as the name of the wood suggests, plenty of bilberry.
It’s been another exciting day down at the chicken coop.
A Swaledale Ram in profile. Like a gunslinger or a boxer in the run-up to a contest he’s got a steady gaze and half smile. In keeping with this tough guy image he’s wearing a sheepskin jacket and understated ear pearcings. Rather like the action heroes of the 1960s – Patrick McGoohan’s ‘Number 9’ and Sean Connery’s ‘007’ – we’re introduced to him simply as a number: ‘1624’ (the year in which Louis XIII built a hunting lodge at Versailles and appointed Cardinal Richelieu as his chief minister).
There’s a hint of ‘Eye of Horus’ makeup. Also known as the Wadjet, the Eye of Horus was a symbol of protection, royal power and good health, but the horns are more reminiscent of Ammon, later know as Amon-Ra, who often wore ram’s horns.
This idea caught on and Alexander the Great was depicted wearing ram’s horns and Michelangelo added a small pair of horns to his statue of Moses.
I’m used to sheep looking sheepishly at me when I try to photograph them before hurrying off to join the rest of the flock but this ram held his ground and looked right back at me.
Hens are so expressive and this one had a fed-up demeanour about her that suited the wet afternoon. Perfect weather for geese though. I’m guessing this is the gander, puffing himself up indignantly as we stop to take a look at the little flock.
There are still clusters of flowers on birdsfoot trefoil which scrambles amongst the grasses and rushes at the edge of the track.
Sneezewort grows in buggier places, amongst rushes and sedges, on acid soils.
Eyebright is a semi-parasitic member of the figwort family, growing in grassy places.
Harebell, found on heaths and in dry grassy places is a member of the bellflower family, so not a relative of the bluebell, which is a lily.
This afternoon we’ve had a succession of showers with odd bursts of sun between, so the lighting on these shelter belt sycamores has been changing as I painted. Again, there was no initial drawing for this, not even a pencil outline.
My usual approach would be to start with the structure and draw the trees first but I’ve gone for a more traditional watercolour technique, painting in the background in light washes, as if the trees weren’t there at all.
Next came splodges of green, the top ones darker against the sky, and then, after allowing that to dry, I painted in the trunks and branches in a dull, dark brown.
The rooks appeared as I was starting to go back over the whole thing, trying to bring it all together.