Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
It’s likely that this albaster effigy of a cross-legged knight in Pickering church is Sir William Bruce (c.1295-c.1345) who founded a chantry chapel there on the Feast of St John the Evangelist Saturday 27 December 1337.
He’s said to have fought at the Battle of Boroughbridge (or possibly at a tournament held there). His family home was at Beck Isle, Pickering, where there’s now a museum of rural life.
Amongst the ripening sloes on the blackthorn are a few pocket plum galls. Pocket plum, also known as bladder plum gall, Taphrina pruni, is caused by a fungus.
There were plenty of ringlet butterflies weaving about at grass-top height in this meadow between Cawthorne and Cannon Hall Park. We thought that we spotted a single meadow brown and a skipper too.
Settling more often than the ringlets were a few fresh-looking commas. I say fresh-looking but they look like a ragged-edge dead leaf when the wings are folded shut.
Sitting outside at a table at Hillary’s cafe in Cawthorne village, I couldn’t resist drawing this chimney on a cottage across the road. It includes chimney pots of various vintages, stone, cement, brick and lead with some textured rendering on the stack plus on a tuft or two of grass and a television aerial as a final touch.
R2-D2 and C-3PO: how they are related.
Happy birthday (yesterday) to a Star Wars fan who shares her name with NASA’s plucky little (weighing in at just 200 kg at the launch) solar Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph.
Monday morning and I’m back drawing by the tangle of hogweed, hemlock, nettle, dock and cleavers at Newmillerdam car park.
When I first published Around Old Horbury in 1998 to launch at part of an exhibition at Horbury Library I borrowed a laser printer to print the pages in black and white but went for a colour cover using my own ink jet printer. I got the cover laminated and included a flip out town trail map.
That first edition would have been designed in Microsoft Publisher. That’s given me some problems as I was never able to get Publisher working on my iMac, even if I ran a virtual version of Windows 10 on the Mac using the Parallels program.
So I’m now revamping the booklet as an Adobe InDesign publication on the iMac. It’s an opportunity to simplify the typography, so I’m using just one typeface, Dolly Pro, for all the text and headings. The colour cover will stay the same, as I’ve had that printed and laminated professionally.
The launch of their first Virtual Reality baggage carousel wasn’t the success that Microsoft Flight Simulator had hoped for.
Happy birthday to Dave.
Happy birthday to Andrew (in the former Charles Roberts wagon works, where he started his career the Coffee Stop has opened in the room adjacent to the old drawing office).
Recent sketches from my pocket-sized A6 landscape sketchbook.
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.
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.
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.