The final section of my proposed Rhubarb Sketchbook animation is all about the pleasures of getting out and walking in the Rhubarb Triangle between Wakefield and Leeds.
Highlights include:
a medieval deer park at Gawthorpe
a rabbit warren on Lindale Hill
the ‘world’s first railway’ at Middleton
a Viking boat and a Victorian aqueduct at Stanley Ferry.
There’s a possible fourth section too: if time (and a little extra budget) allowed, I’d add a short animation featuring the three rhubarb recipes that proved such a popular feature in my booklet of Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle.
Storyboard for section one of my ‘Rhubarb Sketchbook’ animation
Speeding along the motorway, you can cross West Yorkshire’s Rhubarb Triangle in five or ten minutes but put on your boots and get out walking and there’s so much to discover. For a Creative Digital Challenge for next month’s Rhubarb Festival, I’m putting together a proposal for a short animation. I’m trying to pack a lot into it:
8 picture maps
3 comic strips
60 pen and watercolour sketches
Section one is A Brief History of Rhubarb: From mammoths to Marco Polo; Chinese medicine and herbal cures; Victorian gardens and the Rhubarb Special night train from Ardsley Station, which, until 1966, carried 200 tons of rhubarb to London.
As a contrast to my detailed aerial view of Sandal Castle, I want quite lively, smaller drawings to dot around the spread to illustrate aspects of its history. I’m starting in the south-east corner with the gun emplacement constructed by the Royalists during the English Civil War. By then, with the introduction of artillery, the medieval stone walls were old technology. Cannon ball-proof earthworks were needed.
Unfortunately the cannon needed to complete the defences never arrived.
My swaggering cavalier directing his team of barrow boys is drawn directly from a detail in an engraving by Henrik Rusc, The Strengthening of Strongholds, dated 1645. I’ve used the ‘Blotty Ink’ virtual pen in Fresco, which matches the style of the engraving. Examining Rusc’s drawing so closely, I’m impressed with the way he could evoke character with just a few lines. The wheelbarrows themselves look as if they’ve had a history and repeated figures of the labourers in a broken rhythm give a sense of movement and suggest the hard work that was involved.
View from my studio at about 8 o’clock this morning.
Aldi’s 3 kg Crane dumbbells
It’s time for a new start and in the supermarkets there’s no shortage of encouragement for us to get fitter with a bewildering amount of gym equipment on offer. I’ve gone for dumbbells. In last year’s get-fit special offers I went for a pair of 2 kilogram dumbbells, this year I’ve upgraded to 3 kilograms, that’s that’s three bags of sugar!
I’m convinced that my few minutes a day exercise with the 2kg dumbbells has given me a bit more strength in my arms and shoulders but unfortunately I haven’t seen any improvement in my shaky hands, which the doctor tells me are the result of familial, also known as essential, tremor. I guess it could also be caused by spending too much time drawing, but I’m not going to give that up!
The cars in the car park were the final details that I added to my Sandal Castle illustration. The car park looked too empty without them but I tried to draw them fairly sketchily so as not to distract attention from the main subject, the castle ruins. Also included a few visitors – dog walkers and a lone pushchair pusher – in the positions they were in when I took my reference photographs.
The advantage of having drawn this in Adobe Fresco is that if I change my mind about the figures and cars, I can delete them and redraw them as I like because they’re on a separate layer.
It’s hard to believe that we’re already two decades into the twenty-first century.
Six long-tailed tits visit the feeders at breakfast time. They tend to come as a group either early or late. Before Christmas we had eight of them gathering around the edges of the two half coconuts, pecking at the fat as the light faded.
Too Many Swans
Obelisk Lodge, Nostell
It’s that time of year again: the Mute Swans are starting to establish their territories. On Nostell’s Middle Lake this morning, the resident pair with their six cygnets are up at the top, shallower end of the lake but they’ve got competition because at the other end of the lake two pairs of swans are circling each other, wings raised in a threat display.
Twelve swans on one small lake isn’t going to work. In the next two or three months, the grown-up cygnets will spread their wings and leave, or be persuaded to leave, and the three rival pairs will have to fight it out.
There are another eight swans on the Upper Lake, one standing by the sluice that connects with the Middle Lake. Another possible contender in the contest to claim the territory.
Beneath the hollies near the house, the first winter aconites are beginning to show. A nuthatch investigates the branches of a lakeside tree.
Middle Lake, path to Menagerie, Nostell
A few gadwall have joined the regular mallards on the Lower Lake and we see a single drake wigeon there. Goosanders seem to prefer the deeper waters of the Middle Lake and we’ve noticed that they sometimes dive alongside the swan family. I wonder if they’re attracted by the chance of catching small fish that have been disturbed by the activities of the swans.
Small Tortoiseshell
Ichneumon wasp
On one of the colder days last month we had a small tortoiseshell butterfly fluttering around in the dining room and decided that the best place to release it would be in the cool shelter of our garage.
A few days later it had emerged and it perched motionless for a day or two on the outside of the up-and-over garage door. It must have eventually flown because I then saw it fluttering about at the back of the house, caught on a strand of spider’s silk in the top corner of my studio window. I released it and it flew off across the garden. Ideally I should have offered it sugared water, to allow it to replace some of the energy that it has lost.
There was no frost this morning and today a few insects were active. A tiny black fly drifts around in the kitchen and a small ichneumon wasp (or possibly a sawfly?), perhaps a centimetre long, climbs up the bedroom window. I catch it in a bug box and take a few macro shots as it goes through a grooming routine.
December was a warm month and I regularly noticed an orb web spider run out to despatch some tiny insect that had been trapped in its web in a corner on the outside of our living room window.
Keep & Barbican
Working in from the edges, I’ve finally made it to the centre of my Sandal Castle aerial view, finishing off the Barbican: an impressive internal gatehouse between the castle’s bailey and the Keep.
I’ve been working on this illustration as if it was a jigsaw, making a point of going around the edges of the Sandal Castle site, drawing the trees and hedges before turning my attention to the centre. This afternoon I’ve made a start on finishing off the centre by redrawing the ruins of the Great Hall. That’s working pretty much as I imagined it, although I think that it now needs a suggestion of a shadow, to look more three-dimensional.
Sandal Castle is rarely this lonely, so I also need to add those cars, dog walkers and visitors. And perhaps a table or two outside the cafe.
I’ve been adding shading and hatching to the aerial view of Sandal Castle to create a more three-dimensional effect. I had intended to fade out the hedgerows around the perimeter but as the earthworks are looking so solid, I think that might be too much of a contrast.
I’ll probably add a few figures for scale and a few cars in the car park. I’m drawing with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro, using the program Adobe Fresco.
10.30 a.m.: On North Ings, RSPB St Aidan’s, a greater black-backed gull is feeding on the carcass of a brown hare. Two crows and several magpies, dwarfed by the gull, have gathered around it, like vultures at a kill on the savannah, waiting their turn in the pecking order. As the gull tears at the carcass with its large bill, we glimpse the long back legs of the hare and the black and white markings on the tips of the hare’s long ears.
At the field centre, there’s speculation about who was responsible for the kill. One possibility is a peregrine. For a peregrine, St Aidan’s isn’t far from the nest site on the tower of Wakefield Cathedral.
Peregrine Pellets?
Sternum, about 6 inches long.
A few days ago, we were looking at the remains of what looked like a duck or goose, perhaps even a cygnet. Pellets left by the scattered feathers and bones could have been those of a peregrine.
A short distance, perhaps twenty yards, along the track we saw a sternum, the breastbone of a bird, which we thought looked large enough to be a goose or swan. We can’t be sure that it was part of the same kill.
Pellet about an inch and a quarter long.
There were fox droppings nearby, so the red fox was our number one suspect, but, as far as I know, foxes, unlike birds of prey, crows and herons, don’t produce pellets of indigestible material. In my photograph you can see that the two small feathers appear to have been flattened and nipped off at the quill, rather than plucked, which to me suggests fox.
It’s unlikely that the brown hare that we saw the gull feasting on had been killed by a fox, as it was on a part of the reserve that is surrounded by what is intended to be a fox- and badger-proof fence.
When we walked back past the kill nearly an hour later, the gull had moved and three magpies were picking over the remnants.
