Dandelion

 

Oak, Blacker Hall farm
Oak, Blacker Hall farm

dandelionSouth Ossett, 10.20 a.m.: The morning sun is just getting into this sheltered corner and the flowers of the dandelion are steadily opening; ants are scurry across the paving.

The dandelion head on the lower right has turned to seed but dozens of them are lying on the wet paving slab, parachutes (pappus) unopened. It looks as if some bird has been pecking at it, perhaps one of the sparrows that I can hear calling from the rooftops.

bridge

railway embankmentWe’re back at Blacker Hall Farm shop for lunch with a view from the restaurant in the barn of the Barnsley to Wakefield Kirkgate railway.

Farmyard Goose

farmyard gooseAt the car park at Cannon Hall a gaggle of about a dozen farmyard geese, mainly white, graze on the grass verge until a couple of walkers arrive with a bag of breadcrumbs.

The domestic goose is descended from the greylag but stands more upright than its wild relative because it has been selectively bred to be three times as heavy and to accumulate fat around its rear end. One of the geese had a dewlap and a similar flap hanging between its legs. This is a feature of the Toulouse, an old French breed.

In the American Pilgrim goose, males are always white and females grey.

daffodils‘Denied the opportunity to forage [geese] are uneconomic,’ writes John Woodward in The Field Guide, ‘for they have large appetites . . . the income derived from geese rarely justifies the use of valuable pasture.’

A toddler with a large bag of breadcrumbs is next in line to feed them.

Jumbo Grip Pencil

Oak at the corner of the car park, Cannon Hall (pen and watercolour).
Oak at the corner of the car park, Cannon Hall (pen and watercolour).

My drawing is a composite as these geese never keep still. I started with the head and worked down. When the birds set off in a different direction I kept adding to the sketch, transposing the shapes as if I was mirror-writing. Sometimes I’d be drawing one of the white geese, sometimes the one with the dewlap but the greyish-brown geese did have the white rear end, as I’ve drawn it here.

I drew the goose with a Faber-Castell Jumbo Grip pencil (below). With its triangular cross section and its rubberised ‘SoftGRIP’ stipples, this is one pencil that you’re not going drop even if you’re working in gloves. The matching pencil sharpener is easier to use on location than a craft knife. There’s a pencil-thin slot in my art bag that it fits neatly into so it’s not going to lose it’s point by getting jammed in with my pens and watercolours.

jumbo grip pencil

I’ve used various clutch pencils, otherwise known as propelling pencils, but they don’t have the bite of  a real pencil. The Jumbo Grip is rated B for hardness and is described as ‘ideal for learning to write’. But I like it for drawing too.

Link: Jumbo Grip Pencil

Mist over Mam Tor

meadow crane's-bill

Coffee break at the Riverlife Cafe, Bamford.
Coffee break at the Riverlife Cafe, Bamford.

Losehill has its head in the clouds as we walk along Hollowford Road, the old route between Castleton and Edale. The verges are lush of meadow crane’s-bill, yellow vetchling and meadowsweet.

A male bullfinch investigates a blackthorn by an old field barn then joins his mate as they make their way along the tall hedgerow.

bullock

Dock leaf
Dock leaf with creeping buttercup.

Calf number 500196 takes a passing interest in us as I photograph him through the fence with Mam Tor in the background.

It still amazes me that we can reach this horseshoe shaped valley in just over an hour’s drive from home. We’re delivering books today, so we’ve come the long way around via Sheffield. On what’s become a regular run for us, I find it impressive that such a busy, and what I’d call vibrant city –  with galleries, theatres, museums and a botanic garden so close to lonely gritstone moors and green limestone dales.

In the Hope Valley we’re right on the border of these two Peak District landscapes, where tropical limestone seas gave way to the river deltas of where the millstone grit was deposited. Between the two, looming behind calf number 500186, we have a great pile of Mam Tor sandstones and Edale Shales. Which are notoriously unstable. Beyond 500196’s hindquarters, you can see that landslip that closed the A625 Sheffield to Stockport road in 1974.

Castleton barn

Silver birch, drawn as we had a late lunch at the Seed Room, Overton.
Silver birch, drawn as we had a late lunch at the Seed Room, Overton.

There’s more lush vegetation by the stream in Castleton including an umbellifer (hogweed?); a garden escape, yellow loosestrife and a clump of reed canary grass, Phalaris arundinacea.

Hope we’ll be back in the Peak District again before too long.

bullock

Stubble

stubbleWe’ve had a little round of appointments to catch up with over the last couple of days, not just the dentist’s and doctor’s, where I made the two sketches in the waiting rooms, but also the opticians where I had a fitting for my new glasses (same frames but with new high tech varifocal 100% UV proof lenses) so we deserved a lunch break at the Seed Room, where I drew the view looking north over Smithy Brook Valley and Thornhill Edge.dentists and doctors

Swallows

swallowsswallowAt least a dozen swallows fly low over the pastures alongside the Balk, some of them nesting in the stables.

There’s a double yellow line of stonecrop in flower on a sunny, south-facing stretch of the concrete canal bank,
one line along the top of the bank, the other on the lower ledge.

stonecropThe green roof of an outbuilding in Netherton is covered in stonecrop but there it is showing predominantly the red of the succulent leaves rather than the yellow of the flowers.

song thrushTo judge by how many times we’ve heard them singing, it must have been a good year for song thrushes. I recognise them by their thrice repeated phrases. canalMany of these varied phrases sound familiar but I can’t quite place them as impressions of other birds. Sometimes they’ll insert an anxious mewing phrase that reminds me of a bird of prey.

Blackbirds and others are joining in a late afternoon chorus in a strip of hawthorns and trees alongside a canal cutting. The vertical wall of sandstone on the opposite bank adds resonance.

moorhenWe’re always listening for approaching bicycles on the towpath so we both automatically glance over our shoulders when we hear what sounds like a child’s hooter behind us; ‘pip, pip, pip, pi – peep!’. It’s a moorhen calling.

swanA moorhen swims alongside a mute swan nesting on a platform of vegetation at the edge of the canal. There’s no sign of cygnets this afternoon.

Town End Farm Shop

View from Town End Farm shop cafeTown End Farm Shop, Airton, Malhamdale, 12 noon; Looking north north-west, over pastures, drystone walls, an ash wood and a field barn.

A flock of fifty to a hundred gulls sits on a low-lying pasture by a bend in the headwaters of the River Aire. A few crows head off up the valley with more purpose than the drifting gulls.

Link; Town End Farm Shop

Notton Bridge

  • Railside path, Notton Bridge, near Royston

At Notton Bridge the Trans Pennine Trail passes the Chevet branch line, itself now a traffic-free cycle route and, in part, a nature reserve.

Cannon Hall Farm Sketches

Beyond Wuthering Heights

Top Withins

sign

MAPPING OUT a walk for my next book we make our way from Howarth up onto the moor-top plateau, crossing Dick Delf Hill, which rises to 452 metres up beyond the ruined farm of Top Withins, a remote cattle farm at the top end of the valley which is often suggested as the inspiration for the setting of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

We return via an easier route along sections of the Pennine Way and the Brontë Way, a hill path that is unique in having footpath signs in English and in Japanese, although the parties of Japanese visitors that we passed on our walk today were back around the Brontë Parsonage Museum and main street in Howarth.

Cotton-tails

11.50 a.m., Sand Delf Hill, Haworth Moor; There are occasional drifts of cotton-grass, looking very much like the tail of the small startled rabbit that runs along the track in front of us.

round-upA shepherd is moving on his flock without the aid of a sheep dog, hooting and hollering as he drives his Land Rover across the moor.

Small Heath

small heathWith so much checking out to do, including a whole new section of the walk, there isn’t time to stop and sketch except when we take a break for a flask of coffee at Top Withins.

A small butterfly that flies low over the bracken in the valley below. It suns itself with it wings folded shut but we see enough to be able to identify it later as a Small Heath, a smaller cousin of the more familiar Meadow Brown but more typical of rough grassland, from coastal dunes up to 2,000 feet (600 metres) in the mountains.

The name of the butterfly is a neat description of the habitat where we found it.

tiger beetleAlso on a sunny bank, on the rocky path above the Brontë bridge, this Green Tiger Beetle is hunting.

My little Olympus Tough is useful for insects like this which will pause when you crouch near them but it’s not so handy for butterflies which are likely to take flight, which is why I stood a few paces away and quickly sketched the Small Heath, adding the colour later.

The Very Hairy Caterpillar

oak eggar caterpillarUp on the plateau Barbara spots this Oak Eggar Moth caterpillar. Despite the name it is equally at home on the moors as one of its alternative foodplants is heather. The name ‘eggar’ apparently means just what it appears to mean; that it’s a moth that lays its eggs on a particular plant.

oak eggar caterpillar

This caterpillar has stopped, motionless as we take a look at it. It’s just had a narrow escape as my size 13 hiking boots passed over it, so it’s a good subject for the macro setting on the Tough. I try to do a bit of ‘gardening’ to get a better shot of its head but when I try to gently lift up the heather twig it wraps itself around it. No chance of seeing either the head or the tail in this pose but at least I get a record of the black bands and white marks on its body.

Lazy Circles in the Sky

sheep and cockerel

IT’S GOOD to be back at Charlotte’s ice cream parlour where I drew this cockerel and the Soay sheep a couple of weeks ago. The distant moor tops are lost in the mist today but the blue skies and sunshine that the area of high pressure has brought are a welcome change from the uninspiring weather that we’ve been used to during the past month.
My mum celebrated her 95th birthday at the weekend but we’re getting back to normal taking her for her regular appointment and to our current favourite coffee stop to take in the wide open spaces of the view over a broad curve in the Calder Valley.

Tilly the bookshop Welsh border collie.
Tilly the bookshop Welsh border collie.

We watch a buzzard circle to gain height over a sunlit slope then make its leisurely way down the valley. I say leisurely but no marathon runner could cover the ground in anything like the time that the buzzard takes.
I haven’t been drawing as much as I’d have liked recently as we’ve been doing so much on the house, in the garden and with my business and I’ve been writing a couple more instalments of my Wild Yorkshire nature diary for the Dalesman magazine.