Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I got so much from working in black and white last weekend but with some winter sun at last as we walked around the woodland and the lagoons at Walton Colliery nature park I couldn’t resist the autumn colour against that clear blue sky.
Jay, buzzard and cormorant flew over.
Photographed this morning on the nature trail at the National Coal Mining Museum for England, Caphouse Colliery, Overton, West Yorkshire.
The bobbles of hooked seeds of wood avens are spreading out over the pavement at the end of our drive. My guess is that fifteen or twenty years ago it originally established itself from a seed carried here attached to the coat of a dog returning from a walk in Coxley woods.
It’s made itself at home at the edge of the spreading ivy beneath our rowan, the sort of shady place on fertile soil that this plant prefers. There is now so much of it that many of the seeds must be making the reverse journey back into the woods as dogs pass by each morning.
It’s a member of the rose family with a five-petalled yellow flower with five sepals. It’s lower leaves remind me of nettle but the upper leaves that I’ve drawn here are three-lobed.
Also known a herb bennet, which, according to Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica, comes from the medieval Latin ‘herba benedicta’, ‘the blessed herb’;
‘Its root has a spicy clove smell and was widely used in herbal medicine.’
Its Latin name is Geum urbanum. Geum was the name of a herb mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History. It might derive from ‘geuo’, the Greek meaning ‘to taste’, referring to those aromatic roots. ‘Urbanum’ means ‘of the town’.
Pliny the Elder died on 25 August 79 A.D. at Pompeii. A quote attributed to his nephew and heir Pliny the Younger opens the film Pompeii;
‘You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore’
I thought that Pliny the Elder might get a walk on part during the movie. If he did, I missed it.
Pompeii is an epic best enjoyed in 3D and surround-sound but I could have happily spent the time taking a leisurely tour through its impressively reconstructed street food shops, villas and temples of Pompeii and missed out on the gladiatorial combat and eruption, impressive as they were. Perhaps we could have a prequel; A Short Tour of Pompeii with Pliny the Elder.
It’s been a good year for blossom. The splash of blackthorn at the edge of the wood has lasted well and is still looking at its best.
Most daffodils are looking seedy, crocuses have vanished and as I write this I’m looking out over weedy veg beds that are crying out to be planted.
It’s National Gardening Week here and we’ve got a long Easter weekend ahead so I better get started.
I decided to go for pencil and wash for this illustration for a forthcoming Dalesman article. HB pencil seemed more appropriate for grey forms and I thought that pen and ink might flatten the forms.
I picked these up at Nethergill Farm, Langstrathdale, last summer amongst the crushed limestone of the parking area. There are three fragments of sea-lily stem, a darker fragment run through with the fossil coral Lithostrotion and, at the back, a fragment of one of the valves of a fossil brachiopod.
They date from the Lower Carboniferous period, some 350 million years ago when a tropical sea covered the Yorkshire Dales.
A morning walk on the western shore of Lake Windermere, from Ferry House to Wray castle.
IT’S ABOUT a month since we last walked through the woods at Newmillerdam and it now feels as if autumn has arrived. Bracket fungi are starting to sprout from the fallen silver birches with shapes that remind me of the cream-filled meringues of my childhood.
Like most digital cameras my new FujiFilm S6800 focuses on whatever is in the centre of the screen when you half press the shutter button. But what if you’d prefer to have your subject off centre?
As I should have worked out long ago when using previous cameras, if you keep button half-pressed you can then move the camera to get the composition you’re after but the focus of the lens will stay as it is, set to your subject.
I think that having the main subject at the junction of thirds, rather than slap in the middle of gives a better composition. Central can sometimes be too obvious, like a passport photograph.
Throwing the background out of focus also gives emphasis to the subject.
As a record shot to help with identification it wouldn’t matter if the subject was central or the background in focus but I feel that by moving the subject to one side you introduce a little bit of narrative, a bit of expectation perhaps, and keeping the background out of focus goes a little way to building up that feeling of mystery that you get when you see fungi emerging in autumn woods.
Inspired by the new camera, I’ve been reading Doug Sahlin’s Digital Landscape & Nature Photography for Dummies. I’m making an effort to get thoroughly familiar with its controls, so that they become second nature to me. With previous digital cameras I’ve had such good results with the auto or programmed settings that I’ve never got around to trying manual settings such as aperture priority and shutter priority.
It’s the photographic equivalent of making the move from marker pens to watercolour in sketchbook work. There’s nothing wrong with in-your-face boldness in photography or in illustration but when it comes to trying to express a more enigmatic mood I think you need to develop a more subtle technique.
THERE’S BEEN snow on the ground for twelve days but it’s only at sunset, after a day of chores, that I’ve made any attempt to sketch it. As the light fades and the snow takes on a hint of a pinkish tone, as Blackbird gives its alarm call.
Today we’ve had Nuthatch and Treecreeper in the garden. Will they turn up tomorrow when we record our garden birds for the RSPB birdwatch?
4°C, no breeze, 90% stratus, 1 pm
IS THIS the perfect lunchbreak? – twenty minutes brisk walk, yomping through the mud in places, twenty minutes with my sandwich and flask and even time for a lightning sketch of oaks, holly and bramble, then twenty minutes yomping back.
Nothing but the distant white noise of machinery (or is it the rush of the flooded stream?), the drone of aircraft and the occasional clatter of Wood Pigeon’s wings.
The upper branches of the oaks meet to form a canopy, a tree-top highway for a Grey Squirrel which carefully examines the mossy upper-side of the boughs before stopping to nibble some item – an acorn perhaps – that it has found.
I’ve got a long session of research on the computer today, so I can justify the break as essential rest for my eyes but I better be getting back as my twenty minutes has already extended to thirty.
Coxley Dam is well up – at its maximum, giving an impression, as the opaque eau de Nile water laps around the Crack Willows of its former extent. Plenty of headwater to power the looms of the silk and blanket mills, both now long gone. Power that didn’t have to be translated into electrical current before its final use (that isn’t strictly true as energy can neither be created or destroyed although my post-lunch dip doesn’t seem to recognise that law of thermodynamics).
A Blackbird alarms – perhaps because of the Squirrel.
THE NATURE TRAIL at Oakwell Hall Country Park starts in the picnic area; ‘Blackthorn attracts Bullfinches in winter which eat the nutritious buds . . . ‘
I smiled and thought wouldn’t it be great if birds turned up on cue but the first bird that I saw as I left the car park and entered the Picnic Area was a Bullfinch flying off towards the hedge opposite. I came across a group of three later on the trail.
The trail sketches in a historical background to the park. Once it’s been explained to you, you can see the evidence of one wood having been cut for firewood at the end of the Second World War and another wood having been planted after the closure of Gomersal Colliery.
The trail also helped me identify the plant that I’d drawn by the little stream in what had been a railway cutting. There are no flowers at the moment but the trail illustrates Brooklime, a plant that I’m not very familiar with.
By coincidence they also illustrate Comma Butterfly which I was surprised to see, very briefly, flitting through a patch of sunlight at the woodland edge where an iron aqueduct carries a stream across the railway cutting.
There’s still fungus about, for instance in the wood on the site of the old colliery I found a group of this fungus with a pale grey cap, a cap which becomes concave as the fungus grows. I haven’t attempted to identify it.
Finally, stepping out of the woodland for a change, here’s cranesbill that was growing on open, drier ground along the edge of the old railway. It grew to about 2 feet, 60 centimetres, with flowers up to an inch and a half, 4cm across.
Link: Oakwell Hall nature trail PDF version; printed version available in the Visitor Centre.
