Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Even George Clarke would struggle to restore this battered old horse box as an Amazing Space.
I drew it with a dip pen with a Clan Glengarry Pen nib, which has a rounded end, so you can draw it across the paper in any direction. It’s De Atramentis Archive Ink, which dries a lot quicker than regular Indian. I used a Chinese brush for the solid areas, which I dragged across the cartridge paper to give a suitably grungy tone.
Oh dear, it looks as if the game is up for our plucky little tenon saw. If there’s a moral to this folksy fable from Yes it is, it’s never put your trust in an even-toed ungulate.
These two could have auditioned for the latest series of All Creatures Great and Small but they’re appearing in one of the folksy fables in Yes it is. I like the pig – just need him to tilt his head on one side as he listens to the tale – but for the farmer I need his expression to be flummoxed rather than irate.
Although Yes it is has a retro children’s story setting, it deals with themes that are all too contemporary, like the loneliness and isolation – in this case the loneliness of this green ball. The fact that the author has specified the colour makes me tempted to go for a spot colour, perhaps backed up with blocks of neutral grey, to hint at the style of children’s book illustration in the 1950s and early 60s; I’m thinking of Dr Suess and Gene Zion’s Harry the Dirty Dog, illustrated by Margaret Bloy Graham.
Margaret Bloy Graham uses a textured line which reminds me of conte crayon with a soft watercolour or gouache wash. With this in mind, I tried bamboo pen, to try and deliberately simplify the line (left) and dip pen (above) but inevitably, as I use it every day, I’m more relaxed drawing with a fountain pen, as in the farmer and his pig drawing, which was drawn in De Atramentis Document Ink with my Lamy Vista with an EF nib. That gives me more of the energy that I’m after, but without getting the particular vintage graphic look that I had in mind.
I’ve been using Photoshop for over twenty years but I’ve never got into using masks to select areas of an image, partly because I find it difficult to draw precise outlines with a mouse or a graphics pad. Now that there’s an iPad version of Photoshop I’m beginning to see the point of it. Masks are non-destructive, so your original image, in this case the highland cow, is still there if you decide you’ve erased too much of it.
The meadow is the river embankment at Skelton Lake, while to highland cow (or bull?) was grazing in a pasture at Middle Wood near Redmire Force on the River Ure in Wensleydale.
Despite the stringent security, the sheep in the beet field have finally staged an escape and half a dozen of the more adventurous of them are enjoying the lush grass in the back garden of the end terrace house on the other side of the fence.
“What variety are they?” I ask the shepherd (I knew he was the shepherd because his 4×4 had an ‘EWE’ registration).
“They’re Swaledales with a few Texel, but they’re mainly mules. These came from Horton-in-Ribblesdale.”
So none of them are Beulah Speckleface, as I’d guessed the other day.
A few weeks ago in Hawes we saw Swaledales being rounded up from the moors. That morning we’d seen people gathering up at Bardale Head two miles south of the town, so I guess the sheep had been driven up Bardale and Raydale onto the moor then turned back down Beggarmans Road and through Gayle into Hawes. There were certainly hundreds, if not thousands of them.
The man with stylus and tablet isn’t drawing, he tells us, he’s surveying trees and vegetation impinging on the power lines. The pole that he’s looking at is so swathed in ivy that it almost looks like a tree.
“Do you have to go to species level?” I ask him.
When he explains that he’s a trained arborist, I can’t resist asking if he can tell what species of pine I’ve just photographed. Is it Corsican? Or Scots Pine?
As the tree is 50 yards down the lane, I’m expecting a lot, especially, as he points out, if it has been pruned that can change the silhouette, but he suggests that it might be black pine.
Opposite the pine, an old ash tree was pollarded a few months ago, following hints of die-back on some of its boughs.
A report on BBC Leeds Look North this week showed the efforts that the National Trust are going to in the Yorkshire Dales to deal with the 80% of ash trees in their woodland that have been infected.
The surveyor tells us that local authorities have been surveying their ash trees because an infected tree can shed a large bough.
We tell him of a couple of near misses that we’ve had with the sweet chestnuts shedding branches in the woods at Nostell, where in recent years they’ve lost some centuries-old beech trees.
The trees around here are either 200 years old or saplings, he suggests; there hasn’t been any consistent replanting.
The sheep in the beet field look like Beulah Speckleface, or a similar-looking hybrid, a breed that combines the hardiness of hill sheep with the growth and reproduction rates of lowland varieties. For the last few weeks, these sheep have been enjoying a more high-energy, sugar-rich food than they’d get out on the moors, eating first the tops of the beet, then the beets themselves, although I can’t help thinking that they must be looking longingly at the grass in the next field as a change from gnawing the beets.
I’m trying to photograph three ponies feeding together at a hay bale but I don’t have much luck with the Shetland. All I can see are the tops of its ears at the far side but then it spots me and wanders over to the wall to say hello. Some day I might get a group portrait.
This snoozing hen soon realised that she was being watched.
It droops like oats and it has long awns like barley. As this is growing at the edge of a wheat field, I’m guessing that it is great brome, Anisantha diandra, although there are some similar-looking species. Great brome is a grass from the Mediterranean region which grows on waste ground, roadsides and field edges.
The Wikipedia reports that it, and a similar brome, also get referred to as ‘ripgut brome’ in some parts of the world, where the species have become troublesome weeds.
While some of the ponies on Middlestown Hill are still wearing their winter coats, there are three nearer the village that are now roaming about unencumbered. They’re enjoying the freedom of being able to groom each other and to roll on the ground to hit that hard-to-reach itchy spot on their backs.
But yesterday morning the wind was from the north and all three of them had gathered in the lowest corner of the field, sheltering close to the hedges.
Yesterday at 9.30, we could see the cold front moving in from the north across the Calder Valley. Ten minutes later it had reached us and we had a very light shower of rain. Cool breeze.
Fifteen minutes later, this faint rainbow appeared over Thornhill Edge.
As happens to me with so many farm animals, as soon as I tried to photograph him in a relaxed, natural pose, this White Shorthorn bull immediately stopped what he was doing – grazing – and looked straight at the camera with a suspicious ‘what are you doing?’ expression.
White Shorthorns are a rare breed, well adapted to being out in all weathers and here at Nethergill Farm in Langstrothdale they’re free to roam, either in the fields around the farm or on the open hillside beyond Oughtershaw Beck. They tend to have a daily routine, making their way down from their preferred overnight quarters towards the beck during the morning.
Along with some light grazing by a limited number of sheep, the White Shorthorns act as landscape managers here, rather like the Longhorns on the Knepp Wildland Project in West Sussex.
Wildlife projects at Nethergill include managing the meadows to encourage wild flowers, the woodland to encourage red squirrels and the beck for fish, insects, birds and the occasional visit by an otter.
Chris & Fiona Clark run the award-winning Eco-Farm at Nethergill but the bull belongs to a farmer friend of theirs in Cumbria – Gordon
“Gordon takes our calves when old enough,” Fiona tells me, “and we use his mature bulls to cosy up with our girls.
‘Trump’ is the new kid on the block, 2 years old. Probably weighs 700kg approx.
The ladies rule at Nethergill he sidles up to each female over several weeks.
His technique obviously worked as all bar 1 are in calf due this Summer.”
Nethergill Eco-Farm and Self Catering Accommodation in the Yorkshire Dales
