Category: History

Sketching Smeaton

SmeatonSmeatonWriting my nature diary for the January edition of the Dalesman magazine, I got sidetracked by the story of John Smeaton (1724-1792), ‘the father of civil engineering’. He only has a walk-on part in my article, where he described the rock in Coxley Quarry as ‘the best Blue Stone’ he had ever seen (I’ve come up with a theory of why he described the buff sandstone in the quarry as ‘Blue Stone’).

He visited the quarry in 1760 when he was acting as superintendent engineer on what would become the Calder and Hebble Navigation. The year before he had completed the construction of the Eddystone Lighthouse, which he designed to have the proportions of the trunk of an oak tree.

SmeatonHe’d also recently been awarded a medal by the Royal Society for his work on the mechanics of waterwheels and windmills. His enquiries into the relationship between pressure and velocity for objects moving in air led to a formula for calculating lift that the Wright brothers used in designing their aircraft.

Coxley QuarryI wanted to draw Smeaton looking suitably dynamic for my article but for the main illustration we’re going for an acrylic on board painting that I made on location twenty years ago in 1996.

Cavedale

Peveril Castle from our room at the Castle Inn, Castleton.
Peveril Castle from our room at the Castle Inn, Castleton. William Peveril was a Norman knight.
Tree at the Riverside Cafe, Hathersage.
Tree at the Riverside Cafe, Hathersage.

If it wasn’t signed, you’d miss the entrance to Cavedale in Castleton as, going up between the houses, it looks more like the entrance to someone’s back yard. An information panel explains that you’re entering via a narrow gap in rocks that are part of a fossil reef.

The dale soon opens out into a canyon. The keep of Peveril Castle is perched on top of the cliff on your right. Today the stony path, which gets steeper as the dale narrows ahead, seems more like a water feature after all the rain they’ve had in the Peak District recently.

barker bank
Barker Bank, north of Castleton, from the Three Roofs Cafe.

We climb the path which steadily levels out then we follow a green lane across the plateau to Mam Tor. Passing the Blue John mine, we take the old road, closed due to landslips in 1979, down into the Hope Valley.

Salvage or the Skip?

Blacker Hall FarmOne approach to the restoration of a building is to rip everything out and produce a space fit for purpose for the 21st century. The approach that I prefer  – as here at Blacker Hall Farm Shop – is to compromise a little and keep the old features that give a building character and give us a sense of its story.

I’m always sorry to see history thrown in the skip because so many bits and pieces can be recycled. But even architectural salvage only gives you half the story because when you wrench some prize feature from a building and pop it into another it’s like cutting and pasting a paragraph of Charlotte Brontë into a Charles Dickens novel. You might have just about got the right period but you’ve lost the vital context.

barn, Blacker HallHaving said that, I suspect that, several hundred years ago, whoever built this barn – which now houses the farm shop restaurant – went down the architectural salvage route: each of those beams looks as if it had a history before it ended up in its present position.

Link: Blacker Hall farm shop

Blast Furnace Slag

blast furnace slagblast furnace slagI picked up what I think is a piece of blast furnace slag from the beach at Sandsend last week. It looks a bit like a motorway chipping with the contrast of limestone fragments and black coating but the top surface is hard and pockmarked with bubbly holes, so this fragment has been subjected to intense heat.

There were ironstone workings at Sandsend.

The Gatehouse

casement

Greylag goose at Clifford's Tower.
Greylag goose at Clifford’s Tower.

We like to walk the full circuit of the medieval city walls of York when the daffodils are out and today we found the perfect latte (and orange carrot cake) stop half way around at Gatehouse Coffee, Walmgate Bar. Two of the windows in the upper room are medieval style cross-shaped arrow slits but this later leaded casement window looks out onto the impressive barbican, a pre-gatehouse obstacle that any attacker would have to negotiate if they were determined to storm Walmgate Bar.

Kings & queens, knights and bishops, have entered York through the four main medieval ‘bars’ or gatehouses in the walls of York and they’re still doing battle today as a couple finish a tense chess game at the table by the window.

Commuters, Leeds station
Commuters, Leeds station

‘I could have taken your rook,’ the woman suggests.

‘You could have taken the rook, but you’d still have lost the game!’ the man retorts.

An onlooker, a woman who has been reclining on a bench in the corner, walks over to inspect the board:

‘If you don’t mind me saying, what I would have done is . . . ‘

Luckily the inquest on the game doesn’t escalate and the couple leave, still the best of friends.

Roe Deer

Wood pigeon and squirrel in the grounds of the Yorkshire Museum.
Wood pigeon and squirrel in the grounds of the Yorkshire Museum.

On our outward train journey from Leeds the trees are still bare but crows are building. Gorse is in blossom on a south-facing rocky embankment in Leeds.

roe deerOn the return journey at four o’clock a little to the east of Church Fenton, I spot a roe deer on farmland close to a belt of trees. It’s years, probably ten or fifteen years, since I’ve seen one.

Link: Gatehouse Coffee

The Old Mill Race

ashbankCoxley Beck, Capri car park, 1.50 p.m., 39ºF, 4ºC, sun and showers: This ash and sycamore are growing on top of the steep bank that was once the mill race of a corn mill. The stone embankment has been eroded here, probably by flood damage. On the exposed mud banks fresh leaves are sprouting: dock, dandelion, cow parsley(?), hemlock(?), creeping buttercup, seedlings of himalayan balsam and a clump of snowdrops, which was no doubt washed down from one of the stream-side gardens. hart's tongeHigher up the bank, where it hasn’t been scoured so much by the December floods, there are a few clumps of hart’s tongue fern.

There’s a passing shower but I’ve brought my fishing umbrella so that isn’t a problem. I start adding the watercolour, lightest tones first, and, just when I’ve got those in, the sun comes out again and I’m able to mix in some neutral tint and paint in the shadows.

cropped-ashsyc.jpg

The Raven in the Bailey

ravenKnaresborough Castle, North Yorkshire: ‘Why would they keep ravens at a castle?’ I ask Isabella, Her Majesty’s Keeper of the Ravens, Duchy of Lancaster, ‘because they did from back in medieval times?’

She explains that there is no documentary evidence to suggest that anyone was paid specifically for the role at the Tower of London in medieval times; it appears to be a story told by the Victorians to visitors to the Tower but perhaps they had some inkling of a genuine tradition.

There are plenty of legends; ravens were sacred to Brân the Blessed of Celtic legend whose head was said to have been buried on Tower Hill, long before William the Conquerer built his bastion there. There’s a nice story that the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, begged Charles II to employ someone to control the ravens at the Tower that were leaving their droppings on his telescope.

Door in the keep, Knaresborough Castle.
Door in the keep, Knaresborough Castle.

Perhaps ravens were valued for the work they did in scavenging around castles.

Whit Walk

poster artworkI’ve redrawn the scene for my poster and added watercolour. By keeping the background figures rather muted I’ve been able to make Sabine Baring Gould stand out from the crowd.

Horbury Bridge’s hard-drinking tough guy, ‘Old Nut’, is leaning nonchalantly against the wall of the Horse and Jockey viewing the proceedings with mocking disdain. It’s difficult to get someone to look as if they’re leaning nonchalantly! He looks rather awkward but he’ll do as an onlooker for the purposes of the poster.

This illustration is a one-off but I’m looking forward to exploring the possibilities of comic strips a bit more, perhaps returning to the exercises in Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, the ‘definitive course from concept to comic in 15 lessons’ by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden.

Sabine’s Christian Soldiers

Sabine Baring GouldcrowdWe’ve got a recital coming up of hymns written by Sabine Baring Gould, including Onward Christian Soldiers, which he wrote during his time as a curate at Horbury Bridge. For the poster I’m showing him handing out copies of the hymn at the start of the Whit Walk from the mission at Horbury Bridge to the mother church, St Peter’s, in Horbury.

dogI drew the figures separately, scanned them into Photoshop then rearranged them on separate layers to get a coherent crowd scene. To break up the rhythm of figures, I added a dog, tail wagging, one ear cocked, listening to the band striking up.

Sabine in a hurryI considered putting the focus on Baring Gould by having him running towards camera, doffing his hat to greet us and clutching a wad of sheets of his newly printed hymn beneath his arm but I think that it’s more appropriate to emphasise the community involvement which was the whole point of him writing his ‘hymn for children marching with banners’ in the first place.

The Papal Ring Master

Pius and Edmund roughToday’s frame from my Waterton comic; Edmund, son of Charles Waterton, has gone into a Frodo-like trance as he examines a papal ring. The pope, Pius IX, looks on; is that a blessing or is it the gesture used by a hypnotist when he takes control of his subject’s mind?

I find myself wanting to yell out ‘Don’t trust him Edmund!’ but, with his waxed moustache, Edmund himself looks like a smooth-operating Victorian villain.

pius and edmund

pius ix
This looks like a Punch cartoon but I can’t decipher the signature of the artist.

In my original rough I’d imagined the pope as a distant figure but, when I googled Pius IX, I found portraits of a shrewd looking character who I’m guessing was very hands-on in his Papacy. I’m sure that he would have known every member of his staff, and known how to handle them. You can see in his portraits that he could project a good-natured spiritual radiance, but he doesn’t come over as a reclusive monk-like figure. I think that he would have had no difficulty winning the day at the First Vatican Council, which established the doctrine of papal infallibility.

Edmund rose as far as a layman could in the Catholic hierarchy, so the two men must have known each other. Pius died in 1878, one year after the death of Edmund who was thirty-eight years younger than the pope he served.

Pius reminds me Marlon Brando in The Godfather but not as sinister. Perhaps he acted as mentor to Edmund, rather like the relationship between Professor Dumbledore and Harry Potter.

Victorian cartoonists could see that Pius was as capable of raising two fingers in admonishment as easily as in benediction.

edmund
Detail (about 3 inches square in the original) of Edmund from my comic illustration. Lamy AlStar with Noodlers black ink, Winsor & Newton watercolours.

Edmund became a collector of rings and part of his collection will be on display at Wakefield Museum towards the end of this year. One of his interests was in papal rings. These are oversized, apparently designed to fit over a glove, and made of base metals. They typically carry the coat of arms of a pope, or sometimes those of a king.