Making a start on the flowers of Bilberry Wood. Heather grows in tussocks on drier ground, cross-leaved heath in damper places.
Heathers
Category: Habitats
Scots Pine
Drawing this Scots Pine for my Bilberry Wood article makes me realise that I’d love to make a return visit to Speyside. My summer and Easter breaks as a volunteer warden at the RSPB osprey reserve at Loch Garten were where I really got into the sketchbook habit.
It was a contrast to the rest of the year at art college, latterly in London but I feel that I learnt as much wandering around the Caledonian pine forest with my sketchbook as I did back in the studio in South Kensington.
The Big Dig
Birthday card for an archaeologist/organic gardener. Based on actual events (no, not the bit where Prof. Roberts identifies the variety of potato).
Moral: always let the guy who’s doing the rotavating where you’ve planted the potatoes.
Dry Leaves
After drawing so many cartoons, I wanted to draw from life for a change, so I picked up a few dry leaves which had blown into the corner by the front door.
Archer Hill
As we walked across the deer park at Wentworth Castle, two fallow bucks looked up then decided we were harmless and went on grazing as we passed them. The does and fawns were more wary. One made a show by ‘stotting’: prancing off stiff-legged, alternately putting the two front legs, then the two back legs down. This behaviour is thought to be a signal to predators that the deer is so fit, with its fancy footwork, that it won’t be worth the trouble of attempting to catch it.
Archer Hill Gate (all three arches of it: I’ve framed it with the tree to show only one of them) stands half way up the slope between Wentworth Castle, a Georgian mansion, and the ruins of Stainborough Castle.
Heaton Junction
‘Britain’s Biggest Model Railway’, the 200ft-long Heaton Junction layout, on show at the Old Market Hall this weekend, evokes the railway that I remember from school cross country runs in winter. The River Calder was often the colour of the resin used in the model, occasionally tinted dull indigo, probably when they were dying textiles upstream at Dewsbury.
The construction team have gone to great lengths to capture the sights and sounds of the Calder Valley in the post-British Railways era but fortunately they haven’t added the smell of the local sewage works.
The wintry feel and rusty, oily ambience is just as I remember it. I’m looking forward to the Heaton Junction layout moving on to stage 2 as their next project is to recreate a marshalling yards based on Healey Mills, which lay at the foot of the slope alongside a section of the river that had been diverted to allow the construction of the yards. Scale models of the lighting towers will be included.
Mooring Ring
The bridge at the end of the Balk over the Calder & Hebble Canal, Addingford, and a mooring ring on Beeston Bridge, by the Strands, Horbury Bridge.
A Woodland Diversion
It’s close to freezing so, despite the crisp winter sunshine, I decided not to to sit and sketch at Newmillerdam this morning but headed off to the top end of the wood, pausing only to photograph Gnome Jeff on the diversion through the arboretum.
Overflow
There’s a bit of a log jam where fallen crack willow debris has formed a leaky dam across Coxley Beck so after recent rain it’s overflowed amongst the alders.
Drawn in Adobe Fresco using the conté crayon, with a few lines ‘scratched’ into it using the eraser.
Teasel
3.02 pm: A sparrowhawk swoops around the bird feeder, perches in the crab apple for a moment, then flies off without catching anything.
Early afternoon snow, an after effect of yesterday’s Storm Arwen, covers the seed heads of the plant formerly known as Sedum, now Hylotelephium spectabile. A female blackbird and dunnock forage beneath the feeders which attract great tits and blue tits, a coal tit and a nuthatch.
The snow soon starts to melt and these cyclamen, in the bed beside the patio beneath the cordon apples, look none the worse for it.
