Category: Urban

Cluntergate

THE NAME of Cluntergate is thought to come from the Viking klunter meaning logs or blocks and gata meaning a path or road.

The dialect word clunter is either a big lump or a clattering noise. I can picture Cluntergate being a muddy thoroughfare up the slope into Horbury with logs laid down along the boggier parts. Any cart approaching this way would clatter as it negotiated the logs.

This little Jack Russel terrier was tethered outside a shoe shop on Horbury High Street. It gave such a friendly greeting to each passer by that I wondered if one of them was going to prove to be its owner, but as we went off to our next port of call it was still there, patiently waiting.

Corfu Town

OUR FINAL full day and we walk up via the hairpin bends through the olives and pines for a last coffee at the Garden of Dreams, at the San Merino wine and snack bar at Milia, on the terrace opposite the Achillion Palace. Theodorus Vassilakis the owner (above) treats us to a glass of red wine made with grapes from his vineyard, a five year old vintage, and a toasted olive sandwich – his own olives of course – which is delicious. He sits patiently as I draw him. He runs a traditional Corfiot distillery, producing kumquat liqueur, which you can sample here.

After lunch we’re probably a little overenthusiastic as we set off along the road to Corfu town, a walk that takes us about 3 hours to complete and which takes us alongside one of the islands busiest roads with no pavement in several places.

We stop at a small bar halfway and manage by gestures to make the barman understand that we’d like two mugs of tea but, when he brings them, we have the problem of asking for the milk. In the three weeks before the holiday I made a half-hearted attempt to learn some basic Greek phrases but I had to resort to an internationally understood impression to make myself understood by saying ‘MOOoooo!’

We find our way to the Liston Square, where we sit at a cafe table at the Libro d’Oro in an arcade overlooking the park in front of the fortress and have a fresh fruit salad, which is something of a work of art. I try the honeyed tea. The waiter speaks English so there’s no need to do my impression of a bee.

We walk back through the old town along streets wide enough for two donkeys to pass each other then take the bus back to Benitses.

Link Vassilakis and Sons

Grey Monday

IT’S A SHAME that after all the settled dry weather that we’ve had that the Easter bank holiday has turned out so grey but it’s a good opportunity for us to head to town for some shopping we had to do. I painted this terrace of houses from a table in MacDonald’s while Barbara waited in the queue for our veggie burger wraps. MacDonald’s don’t take so very long to serve you; by launching straight into watercolour without any preparatory drawing I got this far in 5 or 10 minutes.

I replenished the bird feeders at lunchtime. Starlings soon came to the mealworm/fat block but the Great Spotted Woodpecker doesn’t seem to like it when its just been put out. It flew in as if it wanted to land then thought better of it and went off to explore the trunk and branches of the crab apple. Perhaps because the block is too slippy for it. It clings to the plastic stem once the Starlings have nibbled down the block a bit.

A surprise visitor was a Nuthatch coming for sunflower hearts an overly cute ‘Little House on the Prairie’ style feeder which our goddaughter Helen bought for us. If it keeps attracting the Nuthatch, I’m prepared to tolerate a little bit of cuteness in our garden.

House End

WE’VE BEEN on the move today but without the car, which has taken a while to get through its MOT test, as things keep cropping up. After 12 years, it’s time to change it, so we took a test drive today in a small car that proved a little too small for me.

On the return journey from the dealers I sketched passengers on the bus. There’s something that you can’t do while you’re driving a car.

Curiously if both Barbara and I are travelling together it works out cheaper to go by taxi as we did on the outward journey. Most bus travellers buy a season ticket but for short journeys without a season ticket we’d always do better going in the car (which we feel we have to have to run our book business).

Once when we were without a car we had to take the bus to make a delivery on the other side of Wakefield and the bus fares of £16 or £17 more or less soaked up any profit we might have made on the order. Having a coffee when we arrived probably soaked up the remainder!

I’m not sure why we had to go together with the order. Guess it’s more fun with company.

Starlings love the dense foliage of the holm oaks which are neatly trimmed into fat topiary lollipops in the Cathedral Precinct in Wakefield.

Waterside Mill

THE RHUBARB FESTIVAL at the weekend created a great deal of interest and they sold out of my walks book in town and at the Hepworth so we’re here delivering more.

It’s so tempting when we’re calling here to stop for lunch. The tables looking out over the river and Chantry Chapel so we make for the other window where I sketch the old waterside mills.

Gable Ends

THIS IS just the relaxed kind of drawing which I like to use my fine-nibbed ArtPen for. Adding colour, even the subdued colour of old brick and stone and grey winter skies, adds another dimension and more information, and helps to establish mood and atmosphere.

The views are disjointed because I was limited to drawing the details that I could see through the gaps in the vertical blinds at Barbara’s brother John’s when we called to see him and Margaret this morning.

Meals at Meadowhall

THIS AFTERNOON we’re at Meadowhall for my second lesson on my new computer and have a meal afterwards at Cafe Rouge. It’s the chef at Ciao Baby who got into my sketchbook, singing and keeping time with his wok tool. And the Thai food, cooked as you wait looked good.

 

Dewsbury to Leeds

I ADDED most of the colour later to these sketches from an afternoon’s return journey to Leeds from Dewsbury. The bolder line from the fine-nibbed ArtPen works well for drawing on the train or on station platforms.

Chimney Tops

MY MUM had a slightly longer appointment this morning at the opticians, giving me time to draw this chimney on the east end of the old building across the road. I’d guess that it dates from Georgian times and you can see that the chimney appears to have been originally in stone, like the rest of the building, but later rebuilt in brick.

I didn’t get time to finish the colour so I took a photograph and I’ve finished off the colour back here in the studio from the computer screen.

I’m going to finish with my current everyday A5 sketchbook at the end of the year, even if I haven’t filled the remaining 20 pages or so. I’ve been using it since March but I’ve never really taken to it because the cartridge paper in it is too soft for my liking. The second wash of colour that I added bled through to spoil the drawing of the hand that I drew the other day.

Barbara’s brother John had no room for a Christmas tree this year. One of his sons sent him this perfect real miniature tree, which has a dusting of gold on its branches. So now he and Margaret will have somewhere to put their presents, provided that they are very small presents.

Published
Categorized as Urban Tagged

The Wall by the Tithe Barn

I HAVEN’T noticed this inscription before, on a stone on an old wall by the car park on Tithe Barn Street, Horbury. In my photograph of the wall (right), you can just make out the spire of St Peter’s Church in the background. The barn where the church tithes – traditionally one tenth of the village’s harvest – were gathered stood a little to the left of this photograph. Unfortunately the barn burnt down in the early years of the 20th century and all that remains of it are timbers built into a wall behind a brick-built house that stands on the site.

I wonder if the inscription ‘C C 1831’ could have been made to mark a boundary at the time that the common fields of the village were enclosed. The area now occupied by the car park was once Horbury’s cemetery, which I assume was established here at about the time of the enclosures. The original churchyard must have been full to capacity by then. As a schoolboy I remember that the wall extended around the area alongside the road (and had an opening to a urinal built into it). There were old headstones and table tombs in what was by then a rather overgrown cemetery. Many of the remains were re-interred in Horbury’s newer cemetery, opened in Victorian times on Hall Cliffe, a quarter of a mile to the north, when the red shale car park was made in the 1960s but I believe that some of our Horbury ancestors still rest in peace under the car park.

Reception

I don’t know what makes a noticeboard, the back of a monitor and a pile of bags so compelling but I find the view of the back of the reception desk in the health centre an enjoyably absorbing subject to draw.