Horbury Bridge, 2.55 p.m.; A female goosander leads her seven young up the rapids at the foot of the old weir. As we watch the whole family disappears from view, giving the impression that mother and young have dived simultaneously. It’s the first time that we’ve seen a mother with young on the Calder.
Category: Rivers
Private Fishing
Horbury Bridge, May Day Bank Holiday Monday, 9.30 a.m.; a heron gets up from the edge of the old weir and flies downstream. The sober grey livery, black wing-tips and ‘wing light’ white patches on the leading edge of the wings give it the appearance of an RAF transport plane. The ‘black goggles’ eye-stripe makes it look determined. Will it fly over the bridge or under the arch?
It veers towards the arch on the Horbury side and disappears beneath. Then we realise why; a cormorant appears and flies off up the river. The pool below the weir is evidently private fishing.
Looking down on the action from such close quarters, we get a better view of a cormorant than any we had in Scarborough last week.
Heron and cormorant were birds from another world in my school days; spectacular images in the Observer’s Book of Birds in romantic, rugged settings.
Dipper at Riverlife
Heading back from a book delivery, leaving motorway and ring-roads behind us we once again use the Peak District as the perfect escape route from everyday routine. We’ve called at the Riverlife Cafe at Bamford many times before but today we’re in luck and we spot new bird for our Riverlife Cafe list. A dipper flits downstream to perch on a fallen bough at the edge of the river. It flies a short way back upstream to a partially submerged bough then launches itself into the fast-flowing water. I don’t see it again until it pops up near the fallen bough, five or six metres downstream.
As we wait for our cinnamon toast and lattes, I draw siskin and coal tit.
First Warbler
Following the Aire into Leeds, we walk through a snow shower but as it clears and the sun returns we see our first warbler (chiff chaff or willow), just flown in from Africa, checking out the branches and twigs of a riverside willow.
A cormorant laboriously takes off flying upstream, into the icy wind before veering around and heading off down the valley.
The goosanders are diving so close and in such a good light that we can see the bottle-green iridescence on the drake’s head.
One more colourful item bobbing along on the Aire; Barbara’s wooly hat which blows off as we come to a wind-gap between the riverside blocks of flats. It’s close to the bottom of the eight foot stone embankment but as the nearest available branch is just three feet long we have to leave it, blown downstream by the icy wind.
Wakefield’s Old Park
Stanley Hall.
This walk, which starts and finishes at Wakefield cathedral and passes Pinderfields, the Old Park and the Chantry Chapel. There are a number of Robin Hood connections, including a sculpture of his sparring partner George-a-Green, the Jolly Pinder of Wakefield. On 25 January 1316 the maidservant of Robert Hode, was fined two pence for taking dry wood and green vegetation from the Old Park. This walk must pass very near the scene of the crime!
More about Robert Hode and the early Robin Hood ballads in my Walks in Robin Hood’s Wakefield, available in local bookshops, visitor centres and some farm shops. Also available online, post free in the UK, from Willow Island Editions, price £2.99.
The walk passes the site of St Swithen’s chantry chapel. Walk it while you can because there are plans for a relief road which it is proposed will go through the Old Park, later the site of Parkhill Colliery, linking with the roundabout near Wakefield Hospice at Stanley Hall.
Langsett September
A perfect September morning to walk around Langsett Reservoir; through the conifer plantations, across the river Little Don and up onto the moor.
Not such a restful day for the red grouse and the brown trout though. The gamekeepers and beaters were getting in place (you might spot them moving through the trees on one of the shots of the river) to wave flags while walking across the moor whooping and hollering, accompanied by their dogs, driving the grouse towards the guns.
We hurried across the moor before they started and missed out on our coffee stop at the ruined farm known as North America, pausing instead by a lichen-covered rock overlooking the stream on the far side of the moor.
A student in full-length waders emerged from the stream. He explained that he was from the University of Hull, setting up a project to monitor the movements of brown trout by tagging them and installing a couple of electronic sensors, one where the stream runs into the lake, the other further upstream.
YouTube
Unfortunately my recordings of natural sounds – running water, bird calls and the wind in the heather – were interrupted by the sound of the plastic lens cap, which is attached to the camera by a loop, rattling in the breeze so I’ve added a music track.
My thanks to Silent Partner for making Days are Long available for use on my YouTube video.
If you’ve got a fast connection, Langsett looks good in HD.
Filmed with my FujiFilm FinePix S6800. The shots that I didn’t use my little ‘Spider’ tripod for needed image stabilisation in iMovie.
Link; Silent Partner on YouTube
A Walk in Wharfedale
THIS SUMMER we’ve had so much cool rainy weather and few mornings like this; warm but not sultry; clear, bright sunlight and intensely blue skies with fair weather cumulus. With trees in full leaf and verges frothing with Cow Parsley the countryside now has the fullness of summer but grasses, flowers and foliage still have the un-nibbled freshness of spring.
We’ve missed out on this, a favourite spring walk through Wharfedale, in the last two or three years and when we arrive at Skipton we discover that we can’t get to our starting point at Bolton Abbey by bus because the county council has been cutting back on rural services (except at weekends), so we opt for a taxi. But we start our walk from the bus stop and just over the wall, down in a culverted water course, the first bird that we see is a Dipper flying low just above the water under a old stone bridge, which I guess is where it has its nest.
‘Have you seen any Kingfishers?’ a couple ask us later on the walk. No Kingfishers but we’re pleased that despite the recent heavy rains there’s a lot of activity around a Sand Martins colony in the riverbank at Gibson’s Mill, where a pair of Oystercatchers are standing on the sand below and a Grey Heron stalking in the pasture beyond.
Whenever I see Bolton Abbey, whether its on television or on a calendar, I always think that it’s about time we visited it again and at last here we are. Some day I’ll buy the guide book and study the ruins but today we’re here for a riverside walk, so we backtrack along the Dales Way to its official starting point in Ilkley.
Addingham is perfectly placed for a coffee stop and when we reach Ilkley we take a break on a bench in the shade of riverside trees overlooking the Old Bridge where the sign ‘Bowness 82 miles’ marks the start of the Dales Way.
The View from the Hepworth
IF YOU STAND on one of the bridges in Inverness you can see to the bottom of the river but it’s a surprise to find that you can do the same in Wakefield, looking into our lowland River Calder. This is the view from the Chantry Bridge side of the Hepworth gallery.
You’re looking down towards the Roman river crossing – which was probably a ford. The bedrock is sandstone, which might explain the pebbles although the riverbank has been restored using landscaping fabric here, so these pebbles might have been tipped here to protect the bank.
This is the inside of the bend on the river so you’d expect slack water and deposits of silt here however there’s a weir not far upstream so the strong currents will scour the riverbed.
We’re here to deliver books but we manage to time that to coincide with a late lunch (goats cheese and spinach risotto, a good winter warmer on a cold, wet breezy afternoon) at the table with the view of the Chantry Chapel so I get chance to make a quick sketch as we wait for our meal.
One of my paintings, Waterton’s World, a large acrylic on canvas from 1984, is in the Hepworth collection but wasn’t hanging in the public galleries today. Perhaps one day . . .
Actually I say it was a large painting but it was tiny compared to Clare Woods’ mighty composite panel paintings of Brimham rocks which are getting on for the size of the actual rocks themselves.
Link: Waterton’s World image of my painting on BBC Your Paintings at the Public Catalogue Foundation. You’ll also found a student picture, acrylic on board of Denby Grange colliery.
Ness Island
WE WALK along the towpath beside the Caledonian Canal for a lunch break at the café at the Floral Hall then return to the centre of town via the footbridges to Ness Islands. I draw the standing waves at the upstream tip of the first island. It’s like sitting at the prow of a ship. Anglers stand waist deep in the river.
Giant Sequoia
At the downstream end of the second, longer island, there’s a large Wellingtonia or Giant Sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganticum, with drooping lower branches which make an effective umbrella when there’s a passing shower.
The reddish bark feels slightly spongy which must provide effective insulation from winter frosts and from the forest fires that occasionally sweep through the tree’s native habitat on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California.
Looking up into the branches (top photograph) it appears as if the tree has long slender needles like a pine or fir but if you look closely the leaves are scale-like, as seen in this photograph of a dry twig (they’re green when fresh) that I’ve taken with a low-power microscope.
The Top of the Tree
Sequoias can grow to 50 metres but how tall is this specimen?
I made a rudimentary clinometer using my hand lens (which hangs on a loop of string) as my plumb-line to establish the vertical and the long edge of my sketchbook, held to my eye, to point at the top of the tree, marking the vertical across the inside back cover of the sketchbook.
I measured the distance to the tree as 76 lengths of my hiking boots and added another four lengths to get me near the centre of the tree, which was probably an underestimate. Because the ground fell away sharply at one side I was unable to measure the girth of the trunk.
By drawing out the angle to the horizontal and the baseline distance to scale (right), I can measure the height as 96 hiking boot lengths so that’s 96 x 34 centimetres (they’re big boots, but very lightweight!); that’s 3264 cm, making the Sequoia approximately 32.64 metres tall, about 107 feet.
Errors include the gentle slope of the ground down to the river and my eye being about 1.8 metres above ground level but those two probably cancel each other out. Also from such an oblique angle I couldn’t actually see the top of the tree.
The River Ness
Mas leat an saoghal, is leat daoin’ an domhain
Mas leat an saoghal, is leat daoin’ an domhain
If the world is yours, the people of the world are yours too.
Gaelic proverb on the wall of the Cuach Coffee Shop, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery.
(A Cuach or quaich is a shallow, two-handed drinking cup, still used on Burns Night in Scotland)
DOES THIS PROVERB mean that if you go out into the world and become a part of it people will accept you and welcome you? It could just as easily be the motto of Cináed mac Ailpín (Kenneth MacAlpine), “The Conqueror”, the ninth century King of the Scots who is reputed to have conquered the Picts.
Inverness, known as ‘the Capital of the Highlands’ is the only capital city that I know of where you can look down from a bridge and see the bottom of the river.
10.25 a.m.: A juvenile Herring Gull wheels 
down to the grassy bank on the far side of the river to peck and preen, oblivious of the people walking past yards away on the pavement at the other side of the wall. My sketches suggest that this is a juvenile that fledged last year because its back is beginning to turn grey (top left). In a first year bird, the back would be entirely mottled brown.
Some of the litter bins have posters on them asking you not to feed the gulls. The gulls are streetwise, hanging around on the bustling pedestrianised high 
street of the city, on the look out for scraps. They can recognise a bag of teacakes from a hundred yards away; a man and boy walk past, the man holding a white plastic bag of teacakes (for human, not gull, consumption) and soon three gulls and two crows appear.
These crows are black like the Carrion Crows we’re used to seeing in Yorkshire but we also see Hooded Crows which are grey with black head, breast-patch, wings and tail. Seeing this race of the crow always makes me feel that I’m in the Highlands. They’re also the crows that you’re likely to see in Europe to the south and east of the Alps. We see a number of hybrids of the two races.
An immature Grey Heron watches then strikes. I can’t see whether it actually caught a fish but I suspect that it did as it then wiped each side of its bill against the branch that it’s standing on.
Three Herring Gulls swooped down on the Heron and half-heartedly tried to dislodge it from its perch. They then took up look-out posts on the tops of buildings overlooking the river.