At 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.
The 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.
To 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. Many 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.
We’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.
A 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, 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.
I arrived in time to see the goats milked. First, as always, the large Nubian but I’m afraid after that the nannies didn’t form an orderly queue. Occasionally an extra would slip out of the pen, keen to get the small treat that is the reward during milking. Not much more than a couple of pints between the whole group.
There was no doubt that Tom was the alpha turkey, seeing off his rival with bluster and intimidating vocalisations.
I’d started drawing the left-hand sow when the second walked around the pen grumbling, then settled down right next to her.
A few grunts from the sow and piglets woke from their sleeping session and gathered to feed. Play time in the pig pen might seem like chaos if you came in in the middle of it but like sleep and feeding it’s a time-limited burst of madness. They chase around the sow, push at each other in a piglet version of arm wrestling and I got the impression that there was some informal game of tag in progress.
I was amazed how soon the piglets went into REM sleep, you could see that their eyes were moving beneath closed lids, as were the legs, running on little dream adventures. Even the little tail wagged about expressively
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.
A 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
With 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.
Also 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
Up 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.
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.
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.
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.
Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour, Whitley, 11.30 a.m. THE PENNINES are fading into the mist and the mist grades into the low cloud above. A Skylark rises high over a pasture in which donkeys and cattle are grazing.
Besides the small stocky black cattle, which I think are Dexters, there are two young Jersey cows. One takes a break from grazing to rub her chin on the fence.
WE’RE HEADING down the M1 with an urgent consignment of Rhubarb and Liquorice; another batch of my Walks books for the distributor. The spring countryside is looking so inviting for walking so it’s ironic that we have to spend so much time delivering walks books when we’d really like to be getting out to walk ourselves!
Barbara is driving, giving me chance to scribble in a notebook. Scribbling is all that I can do to start with, as the little roads around home are bendy and bumpy, but I make a start with the sky, attempting to sketch and to write ‘100% cloud’, a contrast to the 100% blue sky that we had a week ago today.
When you’re getting into the mood for sketching or taking notes, you sometimes have to start with the abundantly obvious, just to break the ice and get you moving.
Dandelion and Gorse are in bloom and in the fields Oilseed Rape is starting to come into full flower so yellow is the dominant colour but in gardens there’s the dusky crimson of flowering currant alongside Magnolia and flowering cherries. Red Deadnettle brings a touch of crimson to disturbed ground by the roadside verge.
Collared Dove, Blackbird, Wood Pigeon and Carrion Crow are the birds that I jot down before we reach the motorway and, as we slow down because of a minor accident at Tinsley, I sketch Crows building their nest and a larger, domed Magpie’s nest (or possibly a Grey Squirrels drey?).
At Orgreave a large Red Fox lies by the road near the extensive open area of the old colliery site.
IT SEEMS so long since we had such a bright day. It’s as if someone has turned up the colour saturation across the landscape. It’s so clear and breezy that distant buildings and wind turbines on the tops of the moors add a sparkle to the panorama of West Yorkshire’s old Heavy Woollen District, as seen from Charlotte’s ice cream parlour up on the ridge at Whitley.
Two ArtPens
The Rotring ArtPen with the fine sketch nib that I drew my brown shoe with this morning is my current favourite. The Noodler’s black ink in it’s fountain pen filler flows smoothly.
My identical ArtPen filled with Noodler’s El Lawrence brown ink by comparison doesn’t flow as consistently. It does’t give me a feeling of inky reliability as sometimes it doesn’t seem to be flowing enough while at other times it will produce a sudden blot.
I have to admit that when it blotted I was holding the pen upside down at a shallow angle to get into a small detail of the roof that I couldn’t seem to reach comfortably – or see properly – with my hand in the normal position below.
7.55 a.m. Inverness, Light rain: CLOUDS ARE lying in the valleys north of Carrbridge and the view of the Cairngorms as we pass through Aviemore is blotted out altogether. I hope it won’t be too long before we’re back in the Highlands again because I’d like to see more of this rugged landscape.
As we pass the distillery at Dalwhinnie I spot the pantechnicon carrying the ‘Pole Position Dodgems’ parked in a layby alongside the A9. Like us, the fun-fair is making its way back to the lowlands after its weekend in Inverness. They were pitched in Bught Park by Ness Islands. Somewhere in one those wagons must be the giant glossy fibre-glass figure of Jiminy Cricket which presides demurely over one of the spinning, dipping and diving rides of the fair. We once accidently brought a cricket back in our suitcase from the island of Rhodes, a male which we didn’t discover until a week or two later in our bedroom when he started making a noise like a smoke alarm in need of a new battery. Luckily he wasn’t eight feet tall and carrying a folded umbrella like the fun-fair’s Jiminy.
I spot Red Grouse, a deer (probably roe) and plenty of Buzzards from the train. The journey goes remarkably quickly as, apart from drawing the wonderful landscape that is passing by, we’re treated to two meal breaks; a breakfast as we pass through the Highlands and, as we reach the Firth of Forth, then the Northumbrian Coast, a lunch – as on the journey here – of feta and roast pepper quiche with a rocket salad in a balsamic dressing, accompanied by a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. By now the Scotch Mist has been replaced with a sunny interval and a mighty rain cloud hovering over distant Newcastle. As we pass through Berwick I can see Lindisfarne, the Farne Islands and Bamburgh Castle in the distance across the wide open spaces of this coast.
It will be hard to consider anything other than a bargain first class rail break on East Coast next time we feel the need of a relaxing weekend in Scotland. And I’m not getting sponsored by East Coast for saying that! I ought to, but I’m not; they filmedVic Reeves’ artistic escapade (video still online at the time I posted this) on the East Coast mainline but he only travelled as far as Darlington, so he missed the most scenic stretch in my opinion. He took far more artist’s materials with him than I do! And they gave him a table to himself. There wasn’t room for that on this morning’s service with so many of us heading back south after the weekend.
At least a dozen swallows fly low over the pastures alongside the Balk, some of them nesting in the stables.
The 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.
To 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. 
Many 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.
We’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.
A 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.
