As I trim the dripping hawthorn and holly, the misty droplets in the morning air gradually build into soft rain. A robin hops around me as I work.
The sparrow terrace nestbox gets its first ever clear-out. I’m surprised that the far compartment of the three-hole box is almost empty as this was always the one favoured by sparrow, blue tit and bumble bees. The middle box contains the remains of a nest although I don’t remember it ever having been used.
Clearing it out, I evict a tiny moth, several small green caterpillars and, below the surface layer of moss, hundreds of sticky, silky cocoons, perhaps those of bee moths.
Song Thrush on Sumac
The berries on next door’s stagshorn sumac have been attracting a pair of blackbirds. This afternoon, a song thrush came to feed on a cluster of berries in the upper branches.
Buzzard
4.15 p.m.: A buzzard flies up from the ash at the edge of the wood. In the 1980s we never saw buzzards here and the ash was a regular lookout post of a kestrel, a bird of prey we rarely see in recent years.
This weed – thale cress? – is the sole survivor from a late sowing of basil in a pot on the kitchen windowsill. When the weather starts to get cooler our basil seedlings give up the will to live.
I’ve been giving my right hand a bit of a break for more than six months now but it still hurts as I write – at the base of my right thumb – so I’m going to have to learn to live with it and get back to regular drawing.
My November ‘Dalesman’ article: ‘Quest Coxley’, an intrepid search for the source of Coxley Beck, filmed on Standard 8, April 1966, with my friend John, armed with a 19th-century cavalry sword, in the Indiana Jones role.
My dad’s Leitz Leicina Standard 8 cine camera which we used for the film.
The Black Horse, Somercotes, Alfreton, Derbyshire, 2009, Google Street.
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.
‘Sandstone causeway north west of Junction 39. Hawthorns and ash tree 8th March 1983.’
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..
Google Maps 2024
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.
1854 six-inch Ordnance Survey map, made available by the National Library of Scotland
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.
Great celebrities who trod the boards at Horbury School:
David Munrow, early music historian
R. D. Woodall, local historian and head teacher
Jane McDonald, singer, who appeared as Snow White in a Pageant Players’ pantomime (she’s now starring in pantomimes at the London Palladium, so we taught her well!)
Sir Christopher Chataway, runner (one of the pacemakers for Roger Bannister when he ran the first 4-minute mile), who officially opened the school in 1963 when he served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education in Harold Macmillan’s government
Allan Schiller, classical concert pianist
. . . and not forgetting:
My brother Bill who played a pirate on the Hispaniola in the Pageant Player’s performance of the Mermaid Theatre version of ‘Treasure Island’ (we used their scripts and Bill told me that one of them was dotted with odd doodles: we suspect it was the script Spike Milligan used when he played Ben Gunn)
My sister Linda, who played Lucy Lockit in the Ossett Grammar School production of ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ (a new assembly hall was under construction at Ossett so they used Horbury’s stage for several years)
And me. I never performed on stage but I painted scenery for the Pageants for 40 years and, as a young member of the Horbury Concert Society, I illustrated and designed posters, leaflets and programme covers, including those for David Munrow and Allan Schiller
Happy birthday to Zac, who may get tread the boards at Horbury Academy in the next few years.
Link
Jane MacDonald, singer and BAFTA award winning TV presenter
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
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.
Ennerdale Granite
Ennerdale Granite
Sourmilk Gill cascades down the hillside at the lower end of the lake eroding into the medium-grained Ennerdale Granite.
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
Crottle lichen
Crottle, also known as the salted shield lichen, Parmelia saxatilis, is a green-grey lichen here growing amongst mosses on bark.
Network of white veins on crottle, Parmelia saxatilis.
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.
Looking north from the lower end of the lake towards Whiteless Pike and Grasmoor.
Snockrigg
From the furthest slope in this photograph we’re looking north across the lake towards:
High Snockrigg
Low Snockrigg
High Bank
and Pike Rigg along the shore of the lake
Snoc is ‘a projecting piece of land’. Rigg means ‘ridge’.
Polypody Fern
Growing amongst polytrichum ‘haircup’ mosses, a polypody fern.
Common Polypody
Common Polypody Fern, Polypodium vulgare, doesn’t have glossy fronds . . . except when its raining.
A beck in Burtness Wood.
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 . . .
Sykes Farm
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.
Herdwick Wool
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.
Settling Pond
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.
Fire break?
OS Six-inch to the Mile map, 1930. National Library of Scotland, colour added by me in Photoshop.
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.
