Yorkshire colour swatches for a Dalesman article that I’m working on. Unfortunately it hasn’t been so colourful today.
The hill-top ruin is Sandal Castle where Richard of York gave battle in vain, resulting in the mnemonic for remembering the traditional colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
There’s some discussion about whether indigo should really be in there. It’s a useful colour in my larger watercolour box but I’m not sure whether I can really see it in a rainbow.
I’ve got a stack of Dalesman magazines in the attic, a run of them from January 2013 (with a few breaks) when the editor, Adrian Braddy, invited me to start writing my Wild Yorkshire nature diary for the magazine.
Since then I’ve worked with Adrian’s successors, Jon Stokoe, briefly with Dan Clare and, for the last three years with the current editor Mick Smith.
I’ve completed more than 250 nature diary pages so far.
1991: Malham in Winter
In January 1991, when David Joy was the editor, I’d written an article for them on Malham. There were just two pages of full colour in the magazine, so it was an honour to have my pen and watercolour sketch of Malham in the snow included.
Adrian Braddy
Adrian Braddy, photograph by the Dalesman.
That venerable chronicle of Paradise on Earth, the Dalesman, has appointed a new editor, only the sixth since it was founded in 1939.
The man now sliding his feet under a desk made most famous by Bill Mitchell is Adrian Braddy, who at 34 has plenty of time and energy to steer the magazine through current challenging times.
It may be less challenged than many rivals, as possessor of a formula which sees it sell 36,500 copies a month at £2.60, nearly three times as many as its stablemate Cumbria and top of the remaining regional magazines in the UK.
Martin Wainwright, The Guardian, 14th November, 2012
2013: Pennine Peat
Adrian got in touch because he’d spotted my Wild Yorkshire blog, which I’d been writing for 15 years since 1998, and he thought that the magazine could include a regular nature diary. I got to work immediately and made the deadline for the January edition.
For the first year the focus was on my local patch – the garden, the river and Coxley Valley – with a few articles going further afield, to the coast and up onto the Pennine Moors at Holme Moss.
2014: Summer Visitors
With the Tour de France opening stages bringing a lot of attention to the most gruelling Pennine hill-climbs, I made a point of exploring the moors above Haworth and Ilkley. Back home, took a closer look at garden wildlife with my new camera with its 30x zoom lens, a 200x digital microscope and a UV moth trap.
2015: On the Reserve
I like flowers, fungi and landscapes because I can settle down to draw them without the frustration of them moving away before I’m finished, so to include a few birds in my nature diary I headed to RSPB Old Moor where you’re guaranteed to see wildfowl and waders loafing around for long enough to draw them. It’s also a great place to get close to marsh orchids.
Photograph by James Garlick, Pink Pig Sketchbooks.
Adrian had the idea of incorporating mugshots of the regular writers. My thanks to James Garlick of Pink Pig sketchbooks who photographed me at Cannon Hall, Pink Pig sketchbook in hand, as the cover star their 2015 Trade Catalogue (and, as a thank you presented me with a handful of their sketchbooks).
2016: Three Peaks
Despite its name, the Dalesman includes stories from the length and breadth of Yorkshire so Adrian was quite happy for me to include our go-to escape to the hills, Langsett, on the edge of the Peak District National Park, which straddles the border with Derbyshire.
2017: The Squirrels of Snaizeholme
This is the first of a series of sketchbook format Wild Yorkshire nature diaries, suggested by Adrian, which I enjoyed putting together. I photographed a blank spread of my A5 portrait Pink Pig sketchbook on a mossy background at Aysgarth and added my sketches and hand lettering in Photoshop.
2018: Hips, Haws and Yams
For the whole of 2018 I enjoyed concocting the sketchbook format spreads as they gave my drawings room to breathe, but this is for the Dalesman and Adrian started to get comments from readers that there wasn’t actually a lot to read here . . .
2019: Summer Meadow
Here’s one solution we tried, weaving the text into a spread. Adrian said this was the most difficult spread he’d ever dealt with as he had to set the length of each line individually to flow around the insects.
2020: Bolton Abbey Woods
A new editor at the Dalesman, Jon Stokoe.
In June our friends Clive and Jenny from Sussex were visiting and keen to see pied flycatchers so we set off for Bolton Abbey Woods. No pied flycatchers unfortunately but our walk through the woods gave me plenty of material for this nature diary spread.
2021: The Lockdown Naturalist
My May 2021 diary featured my friend Roger as the Lockdown Naturalist, from a homemade birthday card I’d drawn for him when non-essential shops were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. For a while we couldn’t roam far and wide in Yorkshire but on the one-hour exercise walk we were allowed each day, we saw species such as brown hare and skylark on our local patch in places that we hadn’t spotted them before.
2022: Animated Nature
Drawing ducks and gulls at Newmillerdam inspires me to make a short animated film.
2023: Winter’s Afternoon
I’ve chosen so many spreads from the summer and from further afield but my January 2023 spread featured part of my local patch that I’d known since I ran the school cross country (or walked, finding some interesting short cuts, once we were out of sight of the school).
Those rusty trackside junction boxes, daubed with a bit of graffiti, in the photograph aren’t the real thing: they’re part of a huge model railway layout, 200 feet long, which depicts the Dewsbury to Healey Mills line as it was about the time that my friend John and I ambled around the cross country route.
2024: Morels and Scurvygrass
Roadside flowers and fungi from March 2024.
2025: Fascinating Ferns
Last month’s page inspired me to do a short talk on the ferns of Wakefield for this month’s members’ night at the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society, with a bit of help from my friend Sue Gaynor on the biographical details of Thomas Gissing.
As usual, don’t rely on the colour, as I’ve colourised my original black and white 35mm shot in Photoshop.
One last snapshot from our 16 July 1965 third form trip to Swaledale. Sorting through the old gang (‘gangue’ = waste) near Hurst, Swaledale are my two school friends Derek Stefaniw examining a chunk of mineral – perhaps fluorite or galena? – alongside cool dude Paul Copley.
From this distant view, I can’t identify any of the teachers or pupils examining the lead mining waste heap.
My thanks to James Alderson and Farming Lass on Instagram for identifying yesterday’s lime lorry incident from summer 1965 as being on the Hurst road at the Reeth end of Swaledale. I’m guessing that the cottages and lead smelting chimney are at Hurst or nearby.
I’ve gone with the daguerreotype vibe for this gallery of colourised photographs from our walk, which include my friend Stef making friends with a Dales pony.
In addition to the scratches and blobs my inept film development has also resulted in some solarisation. The shot of our party negotiating an area of mining spoil (possibly above Langthwaite?) would have made a good cover for an Alan Garner novel.
I’m on to the final transfer of my local pocket guides from PC to InDesign on Mac and it looks as if I’ve stepped away from my local patch into Wainwright country with my pen and ink illustrations to Malham Magic, which I first published over twenty years ago.
Limestone pavement
It’s also a bit of a follow up to my Yorkshire Rock, a journey through Time from a few years earlier because I follow the classic limestone trail around upper Malhamdale.
Clints and grykes
I also included the origins of place names, folklore, literature, ferns, wild flowers and even the movies, several of which were filmed on location in Malhamdale. I realised that I’d pushed the pocket book format of my first local books to its limit so in the new edition, which has a few minor revisions and updates, I’m almost doubling the size of the page. I’ll probably rescan the artwork which I had scaled down to fit the smaller format.
I’m hoping to print the new edition next month.
Link
Willow Island Editions, my imprint. Malham Magic is currently out of print, in fact I don’t have a copy of the first edition myself.
10.20 a.m.: All the Three Peaks have their heads in the clouds this morning as we head home from our week in Langstrothdale, but there’s a patch of blue over Settle.
At Geartones there’s a bright half rainbow near the viaduct on the Settle Carlisle railway. A friend was telling me that if you can get to Leeds in time for a suitable connection you can get a train at Ribblehead station and arrive at London Kings Cross a little over four hours later. Quite a contrast.
Ragged wisps of grey cloud trail down from the edge of the moor.
Ravens make their way across the hillside. With primaries outspread like spiky fingers, one of them quarters the open ground then plunges down amongst the grasses and rushes.
Ravens mate for life and often stay together as a pair throughout the year so, as Bertel Bruun suggests in the Hamlyn bird guide: “two dots moving along a ridges are often Ravens.”
We get a chance to compare them when a small group of carrion crows fly up the valley and settle in a tree. They seem altogether more lightweight with a less powerful way of flying. Barbara’s instant reaction when the raven appeared over the ridge was that it was a buzzard (although she’s still not convinced that we really did see a pair of ravens, and not a pair of crows!).
Captive raven at Knaresborough Castle drawn earlier this year.
Rooks and jackdaws which are congregating on the rough pasture below Nethergill Farm along with a flock of starlings, are generally more sociable than either carrion crows or ravens. I’d describe crows as cawing more raucously and harshly than rooks.
The pair of ravens fly over the valley and we briefly hear them vocalizing. To us it sounds like a rather nasal grunt but Bruun characterizes the call as a deep, resonant ‘pruuk’. They also have a ‘krra-krra-krra’ alarm call and, in the spring, a range of clucking noises.
We need to see ravens more often to get familiar with the character of the bird.
Kestrels
Kestrels are doing well in this stretch of Langstrothdale. We’ve seen them almost every time that we’ve been out. This morning two fly down the slope, the first with some scrap in its talons. The second dives down on it as they fly over the stream but the first retains its prize and settles in a tree.
Nethergill sheep enjoying a scratch against the picnic table in front of the field centre.
Spotlighted by a beam of sunlight and framed by a blaze of autumn colour against a clear blue sky, Hardraw Force makes an appealing subject for the movie option of my camera.
The waterfall, with its 100 foot drop, can claim to have the highest unbroken drop of any waterfall in England, at least above ground: Fell Beck plunges three times as far down into Gaping Gill, 14 miles to the southeast of Hardraw, on the slopes of Ingleborough.
Hardraw Force is an extreme example of the stepped landscape features found on rocks of the Yoredale Series in Wensleydale, Swaledale and elsewhere: near horizontal layers of hard rocks – in this case Carbonferous limestone – are interspersed with softer strata and erosion acts on these, undermining the more resistant layers, to produce a stepped landscape.
A Step into the Past
There are echoes of past environments in the steps and the paving stones of the footpath across the fields back to Hawes with fossil ripple marks (right) and what look like the outlines of brachiopod shells (above).
We climb one of these steps on the north side of Wensleydale out of the village of Hardraw up to Simonstone and then follow the terrace through sheep pastures almost as far as Sedbusk, taking the footpath down the steps to Hayland packhorse bridge on our return to Hawes.
I’m fascinated by a twin-engined military aircraft making its way up Wensleydale, following it with binoculars until it flies directly in front of the low autumn sun! It probably helped that I’m wearing my 100% UV proof varifocals and that I turned away the instant that I was dazzled.
On our way to Semerwater, as the road from Langstrothdale starts to drop from Green Side moor down Sleddale towards Hawes, we drive very gently through a small herd of hill cattle, a tough-looking bunch, who have gathered around some piles of rock salt at the road side. It’s the equivalent of the natural salt-licks which attract animals and birds in places like the African savannah and the Amazon rainforest.
Four whooper swans are relaxing on the narrow beach at the top end of Semerwater. They’re the first that I’ve seen, other than those at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve at Martinmere, in over twenty-five years. They appear to be the same size as our resident mute swan but, even at a distance, I can see that triangle of brilliant yellow on their bins. I also get the impression that they have a straighter neck than the mute, with its gracefully curved ‘swan neck’, giving them a somewhat goose-like appearance.
We’re first made aware of the wigeons as we approach the lake by their whistling calls. I count thirty-eight but they’re outnumbered about ten times over by mallards. A flock of Canada geese leave the grassy eastern shore as we approach and launch themselves onto the lake in a leisurely fashion.
There’s a small flock of lapwings, perhaps twenty or thirty, by the inlet at the quiet western corner of the lake.
Swaledale Round-up
Swaledales have been described as ‘the hardiest of all British sheep apart from the Herdwick’.
Marsett to Stalling Busk
We spot one roe deer running through the trees on the northeast shore of the lake and another, again amongst the trees, on the far side of Marsett Beck.
As we cross another beck, Cragdale Water, via an elevated footbridge I disturb a grey partridge which flies off over a marshy field. At that moment we hear an unfamiliar piping call and a kingfisher zooms across just yards in front of me, just below my eye-level, giving us a flash of its brilliant color in the bright afternoon sunlight.
A buzzard drifts over as we climb up towards the hamlet of Stalling Busk then a flock of 23 fieldfares flies up from a group of bushes on the hillside but the highlight of the afternoon is a fly past by a merlin. It’s a neat-looking grey and black male, zooming down the slope above the village at wall top level, with a nimbler style of stealthy flight than the larger sparrow hawk. It sweeps up into a tree but we can’t tell whether it settles there or not. Five or six crows appear a few moments later; they’re not calling but I can’t help thinking that they’ve been disturbed by the merlin.
Short-eared Owls
Driving back over the moor with the sun low over Ingleborough, we see two short-eared owls flying low and briefly swooping at each other. We pull into the viewpoint lay-by and, resisting the urge to get out of the car to retrieve our binoculars from the boot, we use the car as a hide. This works well as one of the owls flies to within twenty yards of us as it crosses the road to join a third short-eared. Every hundred yards or so one will dip down into the moorland vegetation but we don’t see them emerge clutching any prey.
following it with binoculars until it flies directly in front of the low autumn sun! It probably helped that I’m wearing my 100% UV proof varifocals and that I turned away the instant that I was dazzled.
They appear to be the same size as our resident mute swan but, even at a distance, I can see that triangle of brilliant yellow on their bins. I also get the impression that they have a straighter neck than the mute, with its gracefully curved ‘swan neck’, giving them a somewhat goose-like appearance.
As we cross another beck, Cragdale Water, via an elevated footbridge I disturb a grey partridge which flies off over a marshy field. At that moment we hear an unfamiliar piping call and a 
It sweeps up into a tree but we can’t tell whether it settles there or not. Five or six crows appear a few moments later; they’re not calling but I can’t help thinking that they’ve been disturbed by the merlin.