Category: Woodland

Brockholes

WE TAKE the Mallard car ferry to Waterhead then walk along the lakeside path through the woods, following a trail of snack packets as there’s a school party ahead of us, some of whom have brought their own music with them. The way through the woods must be so boring for them without the music and snacks!

Columbine

For us though, it’s a break for coffee and a scone at the newly reopened National Trust property Wray Castle. The steam launch Columbine is down at the landing stage as we wait for the ferry to Brockholes.

Monkey Puzzle

While a second school party disembarks and heads for the treetop walk (now that does look fun) we decide it’s time for tea and a toasted teacake on the terrace by the house, where I draw this Monkey Puzzle. Monkey Puzzles, Araucaria, evolved at a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and you can appreciate that only the tallest sauropod, standing on its hind legs, would be able to browse the scaly foliage on its top branches.

Deep in the Wood

The last time that we were at Brockholes was in 1987 when I launched my children’s book Deep in the Wood. Barbara and I organised the event with the Lake District National Park, informed the local press and booked ourselves into a bed and breakfast at Hawkshead. All the publishers had to do was supply the books and we’d seen them a few days before and their top rep had promised to do that.

‘Have the books arrived yet?’ I asked in eager anticipation when we called in at Brockholes the day before the event.

‘No, no sign of them, have you got copies with you?’

I had yet to even see a copy so we phoned the publishers who told us that, yes, they were going to send them but when they went to the stock room they found that the book had sold out in the first few days of publication, so they couldn’t!

They rounded up a few copies from around the office and sent them on via overnight courier. I think this was when I realised that my future lay in self-publishing!

As it happened, it rained heavily all weekend so we had sufficient books for the few visitors who braved the weather. As a consolation, the Lakeland National Park Authority invited us to take a stall at their annual national show at Chatsworth. Princess Diana opened the show and on her tour of the marquees took a brief look at our stall. But she didn’t buy a copy of the book for William and Harry. She seemed rather shy but we’d been instructed not to talk to her unless she spoke to us first. I was equally nervous; I’d been determined to be drawing when she came to the stall but I just froze as she stopped to take a look. This awkward moment ended when a child, peeking in through a gap in the canvas behind our stall, waved at her. Diana smiled and moved on.

In fact the only person who she talked to in the whole marquee was a watercolourist, who was the only exhibitor who had her back turned to the public, as she was working on a painting. Diana leaned over to take a closer look and confided to her; ‘I’m hopeless at that!’ (unlike Prince Charles who has painted watercolours for years).

Birds at the feeding station included Nuthatch and a juvenile Great Spotted Woodpecker.

Return Trip

Langdale from Brockholes landing stage

The return ferry, taking an anticlockwise route around the northern end of Windermere via Ambleside back to Bowness gave me an opportunity to draw the landscape, and add some watercolour.

Hills to the north east of Ambleside

Western shore of Windermere, Ambleside to Bowness.

 

How Green is my Valley?

A HEAVY DEW and a touch of frost, the rising sun appearing through mist over the wood. It might not officially be the first day of spring but today it feels like it.

There’s a meeting tomorrow about two 130 metre tall wind turbines which are going to be erected (so it seems) in the centre of Coxley Valley, overlooking Stoneycliffe Wood nature reserve. I have mixed feelings. Yes, renewables should be used wherever possible but no, not at any cost.

Sitlington Parish Council appears to be promoting to scheme and I guess that the potential income that might be generated for the community must be a great temptation to them but to me Sitlington’s greatest asset isn’t its village hall or children’s playground or even the library (currently closed and in need of repair) – the kind of things that the revenue could be used for – it’s definitely the bluebells woods, stream and fields of Coxley Valley; I couldn’t begin to put a value on it: a patch of countryside which is right on our doorsteps but where you can get a real sense of freedom and turning your back on the everyday world. You can immerse yourself briefly in the natural world.

I don’t think we’d entertain any other light industry dominating the valley, however ‘green’ it was and however many jobs it created.

Concrete Proposals

I feel there's an element of 'greenwash' in the design of this leaflet promoting the scheme. The scheme isn't without its environmental costs.

It’s something of a miracle that the valley has survived unscathed when it lies circled by the four communities that make up the parish. And that’s why the concrete towers have to go there in the middle; they’ve got to be sited a certain distance away from houses so that is the only place available for ‘wind farm’ development.

The consultant/developer’s leaflet inviting us to the meeting has all the buzzwords – environment, communities, renewables etc – but only one mention of the word ‘wind’, and that is in brackets, sandwiched between the words ‘hydro, solar . . .  and biomass’.

I’d have had more respect for them if they had illustrated the likely outcome of the twin turbines. The leaflet depicts the sun shining though beech leaves, a feel-good diagram shows the benefits for all, there’s a tree made of hands and a delicate skeleton leaf. All suggestive, evoking the touchy-feely helping hand to the community spirit that multi-nationals and banks like to project – but with no specifics such as a diagram to give an impression of the scale of the enterprise. Or a pie chart of the proportions in which the profits are shared. I guess that’s all available but this is a coyly one-sided publication.

What the leaflet might have looked like if they were being honest about the likely outcome.

Even at this ‘interim findings’ stage of ‘a parish-wide study’, I think they should have been less disingenuous about the way things are going.

We’re not likely to go for a hydro plant by flooding the valley. If it was decided that we should grow biomass instead of food crops on local farms, would we really need a partner to step in to ‘share the profits’ with the community? Would the money being spent on this consultation be better invested in fitting solar panels on the village hall? Would geothermal schemes have less impact on the landscape?

It seems likely that the wind farm would be the preferred option.

After my experiences during the Coxley Meadow public enquiries I know better than to get involved in local politics these days!

Ridge or Valley

I’ve been discussing this with Stephen, who lives outside the area but remembers the valley from his schooldays:

“Shame about the wind turbines. I know we can’t just hark back to the halcyon days of our youth but I have vivid memories of Coxley carpeted from top to bottom in bluebells, grass on which you could play and picnic, and water burbling down the stream.”

It’s still pretty much like that but I think what really unsettles me about this proposal is that the only place in the parish where you can find yourself a quarter of a mile from all habitation, surrounded by farmland with a panorama of woodland, is the place they’ve chosen.

I sometimes draw the pylon that dominates the ridge beyond the wood at our end of the valley – I’m not against large man-made structures – but our end is surrounded by roads and houses. The spot they’re putting these is the furthest that you can get away from a road. If the concrete towers could be grouped next to an existing structure such as the water tower and communications mast on the ridge at the top end of the valley or here at this urbanised lower end I might feel different (leaving aside problems of bird-strike and discussions of their efficiency which I’m not qualified to comment on), but that’s not an option because of the proximity of houses.

In My Backyard?

A friend who as a boy used to tickle the trout in Coxley Beck writes:

As a fan of wind turbines I believe you should think your comments through again. Outside your window do you not have power pylons?

Would you rather have a couple of wind turbines in your local area or a nuclear power station, or how about Ferrybridge power station?

Yes, we’ve got to look for alternative sources of energy and I was trying to make the point, obviously not very clearly, that I’d much prefer that the wind turbines were sited outside my window at this utilitarian end of the valley amongst the power lines, derelict railway viaduct and housing estates than in the quiet rural centre of the valley overlooking Stoneycliffe Wood nature reserve.

We used to have Dewsbury power station a few miles up the valley and I drew there on occasion. It might not have been very green but it was rather magnificent. But it fitted in amongst the canals, railways and grim Victorian mills. They didn’t build it overlooking a bluebell wood in a valley that has been considered a ‘beauty spot’ since mid-Victorian times.

In my opinion, and it’s only an opinion, Coxley Valley has a rather intimate quality and I think that wind farms are better sited in a larger scale landscape – but I know a lot of people would disagree.

Links: The Community Campaign against the Coxley Wind Turbines

Misty Dusk

I HAD INTENDED to make a start on the garden this afternoon but it was so cold – well not just cold it was so damp too with ‘freezing rain’ part of the forecast – so I got on with some office work instead. However by quarter to five, I thought that I was entitled to spend half an hour drawing. The bleary view out of the rain-spattered studio window meant that sharp focus drawing was out of the question so I dipped straight into the watercolour for these two sketches drawn during the last half-hour of daylight.

Our Crumbling Conveniencies

I drew this picturesquely crumbling wall this morning as I waited for my mum at the opticians, adding the drab colour later.

If I remember rightly, about 40 years ago this wall formed one end of a rather rudimentary public toilets. It was demolished and a cherry tree was planted on the spot. Such basic facilities wouldn’t meet today’s standards and the scrap value of copper has now risen so that within a few weeks the plumbing would probably get ripped out anyway, the result being that Horbury doesn’t have any public toilets these days.

Part of the Scenery

BY THE TIME we finish the backdrop, eventually with even David, our resident joiner helping to fill in the blanks, it looks a ridiculously simple cartoon-style scene . . . something that a child could have drawn in about an hour perhaps – but it’s taken us (four of us, off and on) most of the weekend.

Just time for this snow scene before the light fades. It snowed last night but during the day most of it has melted.

Hail Showers

4.20 p.m. THE LIGHT is fading and a towering wall of grey cloud is lumbering in from the south. The colour drains from the landscape so that it is guesswork when I add the final washes to my sketch. A waning Moon and Jupiter appear to get brighter and brighter high above the wood.

With a final bit of decorating completed this morning, we’ve had a free day but unfortunately it was too wild for us to get out walking. Hail rattled the roof of Armitage’s garden centre as we sat looking out from their appropriately named Season’s café towards the tops of the Pennines.

Plant Window

Finally, here’s a third sketch of my room as it appeared in my 1978 sketchbook. I brought back a plant box that I’d made at college and devised a plant window for my room in the flat by getting a piece of plate glass cut to size as a shelf. The species are limited to streptocarpus, also known as the Cape Primrose, which I grew from leaf cuttings, and Spider Plant, Chlorophytum, which is even easier to grow from the plantlets that grow at the tips of branches. The spiky plant bottom right is a Euphorbia, a native of Madagascar, which I had grown from a stem cutting a year or two earlier from the college greenhouse.

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Categorized as Woodland

Woodland Edge

12.45 p.m.: WOOD PIGEONS clatter about and coo in a clump of trees and bushes by Coxley Dam. A Dunnock methodically pecks amongst the gravel, grasses and weeds at the edge of the parking area. Short heavy showers are interspersed with watery sun.

A Wren flits from the post to a clump of nettles, following the same route along this short stretch of woodland edge as the Dunnock but a foot or two higher, amongst the vegetation.

So that’s ground layer and herb layer that are being checked out for invertebrate prey. Up in the tree canopy, around fifteen feet above the ground, a Blue Tit is making an equally thorough investigation of the branches and foliage.

And of course there are those noisy Wood Pigeons too. They’re no doubt doing some feeding in the canopy while they’re there but I suspect most of their feeding is taking place in the surrounding arable fields and pastures, with frequent trips back to the cover of woodland when they’re disturbed.

Middleton Woods

Lesser Celandine

WHEN CHECKING out my Middleton Park route for Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle, I was intrigued by the sign for a cycle-path route to the centre of Leeds.

‘How long will it take?’ Barbara asked, sceptically.

‘Oh, by the time we’ve walked down through the woods, it will only be about another ten minutes.’

Dog’s Mercury

It turned out to be more like another hour, but it’s still a walk that I’d do again as I like the way it follows ribbons of green to heart of the city. Once you’ve walked down from the park lake through Middleton Woods, you follow the line of the Middleton Railway then pass under the motorway to its depot, passing a line of rusting tank engines. You then go alongside a playing field before following a busy dual-carriageway for half a mile. Thankfully it’s not too long before you dip down to a quiet path alongside the River Aire to reach the city via Clarence Dock and the Royal Armouries.

Woodland Flowers

Coltsfoot

It’s the first day of spring but it seems more like summer this afternoon. Woodland flowers are showing; the odd clump of delicate Wood Sorrel holds its clover-like leaves folded back. The the banking beside the path is dotted with Lesser Celandine and green swathes of Dogs Mercury. The leaves of Bluebells are already showing. As we approach Leeds the rough ground beside the path is dotted with Coltsfoot.