Four weeks old now, and the piglets at Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour are larger and leaner.
I choose a couple to draw that seem to be settled but soon another piglet nuzzles in to sleep beside them, then another squeezes in between them.
The piglet’s concave snout fits comfortably into the concave contours of its sleeping partner.
Another sign that the piglets are maturing: today, when the sow finishes feeding and disappears into the shelter, the piglets are grunting, rather than squeaking, as they did when they were younger.
It’s hard to believe that the top end of Newmillerdam Country Park was ever as open as this. Richard Brook photographed the upper end of the lake from the end of the Causeway on Sunday, 9 September, 1973. He describes this as the ‘fish hatchery and cleared area’. I remember the slope on the right being birch woodland before it was clear-felled and, like Richard, I took photographs here, in my case before the felling started, so I must set about archiving those too.
But for the time being, I’m taking a break as I’ve now finished the first two boxes of Richard’s slides; there are three still to go. I’m looking forward to more glimpses of familiar habitats as they once were.
As with the Stanley Ferry Flash photograph, Richard returned to the scene, in this case seven years later, on Monday, 26 May, 1980, but this time he’s looking down the lake across what he calls the willow swamp with the Causeway in the background (to me it looks like the lake-shore path in the distance, rather than the Causeway).
Again there’s a bare slope which I believe was as a result of felling conifers which had been planted in the 1960s after the original deciduous woodland had been felled.
The same view of Stanley Ferry Flash, near Wakefield, taken by Richard Brook on Sunday, 9 September, 1973 (above), and on Friday, 24 January, 1986 (below). The colliery spoil heap in the background, from one of the Stanley Collieries, perhaps Stanley Deep Drop, has grown, or at least been reshaped in the intervening years.
Part of the spoil heap area became Stanley Marsh Nature Reserve.
Common Reed, Phragmites, has colonised the area, although some reedmace remains. The rough grasses, greater willowherb and water plantain seem to have been drowned out, so I wonder if the whole site subsided, or whether water levels stayed about the same but the reed out-competed the other plants.
Greater willowherb, reedmace and water plantain, 1973.
One of the pleasures of archiving Richard Brook’s slides of West Yorkshire wildlife habitats of half a century ago is being reminded of familiar places from my earliest birdwatching expeditions. Already in 1966, Fairburn Ings was establishing a reputation for itself as a nature reserve. At that time, if I remember rightly, it was managed by the West Riding County Council.
As he was trekking around the wilder fringes of the area, there are rarely figures in Richard’s slides, but he wasn’t quite able to crop this little boy feeding the swans out of the frame.
Richard took the photograph on Tuesday, 2 August 1966.
Ferrybridge Cooling Towers
I can make out just three cooling towers at Ferrybridge Power Station. There had been eight but there had been a catastrophic collapse of three of them on 1 November in the previous year, due to vibration caused by a westerly gale with winds of 85 mph.
I’ve been making a start on archiving a collection of colour slides taken by Richard Brook(1943-2017), for many years the Conservation Officer of the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society. He photographed the East Ash Lagoon at Leventhorpe from the lagoon’s northwest corner on Sunday, 2 September, 1973. Pulverised fly ash was pumped from power stations into lagoons and left to settle out.
Richard could see the potential of these lagoons as nature reserves and he documented every one of them – along with subsidence flashes and sand quarries -within five or six miles radius of Wakefield, so his collection of slides form a unique record of post-industrial West Yorkshire.
Dust & Scratch Removal
Before.
I’m gradually learning my way around the slide scanning option of my SilverFast scanning program and also learning easier ways to remove specks of dust and other blemishes from the slides.
In Photoshop CS5, I’ve just discovered the Dust & Scratches filter, which is hidden away in the Photoshop Filter Menu under the heading Noise.
After
It’s a lot quicker than using the Spot Healing Brush to individually remove blemishes, although that has it’s part to play too: Dust & Scratch Filter for the whole sky, Spot Healing Brush for getting into more detailed parts of the image.
I’ve decided to feature woodland flowers in my Dalesman magazine nature diary for May, but it’s still early in the season so I’ve dug out a copy of a drawing I made over forty years ago, in the 1970s.
Unfortunately I no longer have the original artwork: they were pen and ink drawings which I cut out of my sketchbooks – something I hate doing! – and pasted onto large sheets of card in same-size page layouts for my first book, A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield. A few years after the book was published, I made the difficult decision to throw out the paste-ups. I really regret that now!
Each page was A5 landscape, so the individual drawings, made on location in Coxley Woods, were each only inches across. My original drawing of the ransoms or wild garlic was just 6 cm across, less than 2½ inches; my new version (above)is 8cm, 3 inches, across.
Bluebell, soft-grass, wood anemone and dog’s mercury.
I scanned the page from the book and blew it up to A4 size, then put it on a light-box to trace the outlines onto cartridge paper before re-drawing the whole thing as near as I can line for line. It’s fascinating to follow so closely the marks that I made all that time ago, a way of getting back into the thought process I used at the time. I can see that I was at pains to follow as closely I was able the curves of stem, leaf and vein, so pretty much what I’d attempt to do today.
The original was dip pen and India ink, the new enlarged version is Lamy Safari, filled with Noodler’s waterproof ink. I’m pleased when, despite my shaky hands, I can follow a line more smoothly today than I could when in my mid-twenties. But then I would have been crouching uncomfortably on the woodland floor, not sitting at my desk in the comfort of my studio, overlooking those same woods. The Indian ink that I used then didn’t flow as smoothly as the Noodler’s I use now.
Even with a white flower like the wood anemone (above), adding a watercolour wash adds information and clarifies what is going on the drawing.
The yellow of the lesser celandine adds a little brighter colour and I’ve still got to add watercolour to the yellow archangel in the top right-hand corner of the page. It should make an suitably spring-green nature diary spread for the May issue of the Dalesman.
4 p.m., 1°C, 34°F: A grey afternoon; a blackbird’s scolding alarm call. One hundred wood pigeons disperse from the wood – or, more probably, from the field behind the wood – flying over quietly as I draw our compost bins.
There’s an unlikely warble, which soon gets extemporised; only a song thrush would improvise such a varied and eccentric song.
Twenty or thirty winter gnats are dancing in a loose column, five or six feet above my bedraggled square of meadow.
There’s a thin song from a robin and repeated nasal chirrs from a blue tit. As sunset approaches every bird seems tetchy and alarmed, then there’s a strident insistent call that sounds exactly like a house alarm. Hang on, it is some kind of alarm which my neighbour is testing out.
Flaky bark and even flakier tree recognition: I take a closer look at the tree that I photographed on Friday and, although the bark is flaky, it isn’t as flaky as that of London Plane: it’s Horse Chestnut, which probably explains why the bark is so polished; it’s been climbed by generations of conker collectors.
At this time of year, the swelling buds are almost as distinctive at the autumn conker fruits. The bud scales are red-brown and sticky and beneath them are the shield-shaped scars where last year’s leaves were attached.
The lenticels that dot the twigs are raised pores which allow for gaseous exchange.
These boughs of a Horse Chestnut*, snaking out over the Middle Lake at Nostell Priory have been polished by generations of young explorers so that the scaly bark resembles the skin of a serpent.
*Not London Plane, as I’d said in the original version of this post. I went back and checked the buds and they’re big, brown and sticky.
Four weeks old now, and the piglets at Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour are larger and leaner.
Another sign that the piglets are maturing: today, when the sow finishes feeding and disappears into the shelter, the piglets are grunting, rather than squeaking, as they did when they were younger.
