Category: Canal

Along the Towpath

IT’S HARD to believe that at last we’ve completed all our Christmas errands and finished off as many home improvements we need to before Christmas. The days are now getting longer, just two minutes a day, but that will soon add up. To celebrate this small but significant change and to draw a line in the sand (well in the mud at this time of year), we set off for a short walk along the towpath in the rapidly fading light.

A heron flies past Beckside Farm and over the old grey viaduct. Two Mute Swans bring grace and elegance to the canal basin at Horbury Bridge.

On one narrowboat, they’ve improvised a giant Christmas pudding by the tiller, using a black plastic bin bag and cut-out holly leaves.

We turn back when we reach the pylon wires, which are sizzling and crackling in the rain like sausages in a frying pan. The pylon, standing on the steep bank above a belt of broadleaves, makes a stark Christmas tree silhouette.

Just 15 minutes walk from our doorstep and I feel as if we’ve escaped into real countryside and experienced the wider world.

As we walk back up from the towpath alongside the Bingley Arms, I rub my fingers through the Wormwood to smell this bitterly aromatic herb. It’s appropriate that it should be planted here by the pub as it has been used in brewing and as a flavouring in absinthe and in some Polish vodkas.

Kat Kong

On our walk along the towpath yesterday afternoon, I tried photographing the Canal House cat – well one of the Canal House cats, there are several – as it sat on a shed roof and it’s ended up looking giant-sized compared with the old barge-horse stables, like Kitten Kong in The Goodies, which rampaged around London and demolished the Post Office Tower. Barbara and I saw Jack Black in Gulliver’s Travels in 3D last week so perhaps that influenced my viewpoint.

Flowstone

I’ve never taken so many photographs as I have since I got my little Olympus Tough a year ago; it’s almost always with me. I’ve drawn this deposit of flowstone in my Wild West Yorkshire diary before but yesterday I took the opportunity to photograph it on the camera’s macro setting. It’s such a small camera that all I need to do is lean over, holding it at arm’s length, to get near the outflow, which comes out of the canal bridge on a steep banking. In close-up it looks like deposits that I’ve seen in limestone caves. I assume that water is dissolving lime in mortar between the stones of the bridge piers.

Hoar Frost

Yesterday afternoon the shadows were white – white with frost. The towpath is something of a sun trap, even when the sun is so low on a winter’s day, but the ridge of trees opposite casts a long shadow so in places the path is muddy but just inches away the ground is frozen solid and the vegetation rimed with hoar frost where it has remained in shadow all day.