Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
In Old English, ‘tōta’ was a look-out post, which is appropriate for the hamlet of Totties, perched on the hill overlooking New Mill.
Christ Church, New Mill, built in 1830 was designed in gothic revival style by Peter Atkinson.
Drawn, during our latte and scone break, from Totties Garden Centre, one of two garden centres in the village.
York works well for us: we can clock up our 10,000 paces on a walk around the walls and then get a meal and browse around the shops. Some day we’ll find time to visit the art gallery or one of the museums, but today we just needed to escape.
Halfway through our 10,000 pace circuit of the walls we stop at the Gatehouse Cafe in Walmgate Bar, where I draw the houseplant.
Hart’s tongue fern (left) grows in the crevices of the old brick wall by Jamie’s Italian, next door to the Lendal Cellars.
Wall rue grows from crevices in the capstones.
2.55 p.m.: On the train home, we cross the Vale of York, then cut through the gentle dip slope of the magnesian limestone ridge.
Usually, as soon as I start drawing a commuter, he or she will change position or get on to a train but I thought that I had a chance with this man, sitting nursing his luggage and thoroughly absorbed with his phone. After five minutes our train started moving away but I’d made a mental note of the colours and I quickly added them. I like plain inky drawings but usually I feel that sketches like this come to life when I add a bit of colour; there’s so much more information in a drawing which includes colour.
‘You are now entering a great crested newt site’ a notice on the trackside near Hornbeam Park informs us.
The countryside has a late summer look to it. Oaks near Horsforth now look drab, dry and dusty. The flowers of creeping thistle have largely turned to downy seed heads. There’s a decadent feeling that the party is almost over, frothy creamy white flowers of Russian vine and trumpets of greater bindweed are festooned over fences. The waste ground flowers that I associate with the end of the summer holidays have appeared: Himalayan balsam, rosebay willowherb, common ragwort, goldenrod and, looking rather dull and mildewed even at its freshest, mugwort.
It’s the first time that we’ve visited Harrogate for years but we’ll certainly return. We walk up through the Valley Gardens then through the pinewood on Harlow Hill. We don’t get chance to walk around the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Harlow Carr because we spend so long queuing for a leisurely lunch at the deservedly popular Betty’s Tearooms.
Twelve ring-necked parakeets join a wood pigeon pecking on the turf by Rotten Row in Hyde Park. A great-crested grebe dives on the Serpentine, a lake created for Queen Caroline in the 1730s. At the lake’s edge, a coot pecks at a bedraggled scrap of fabric that it has retrieved from deeper water, seeing off a rival that soon appears.
A moorhen stands breast deep, scrutinising the film of algae on the stonework at its feet, pecking down at some morsel. A flotilla of grey geese sail by in single file, heading up the lake.
Kings Cross to WakefieldWe get caught in a downpour after walking through Regent’s Park so head for a bus shelter at Great Portland Street and take the number 30 bus to Kings Cross. After lunch at Leon and a browse around Hatchard’s, I draw this carnation at a cafe table in front of the bookstore.
There are almost as many people queuing up to be photographed pushing a shopping trolley into Platform 9¾ as there were waiting for trains.
On this overcast afternoon the greens of the trees have a late summer heaviness.
After Hadley Wood station we plunge into a tunnel and then, before the next tunnel, there’s a short section, a shallow ‘hidden’ valley, with nothing but trees, hedges and slopes of ochre grasses. It’s a welcome relief after three days in the city, much as I like it.
Buddleia has colonised the ballast alongside the track on the approach to Peterborough. There are yellow daisy-like flowers on fleabane and pinkish trumpet flowers on the lesser bindweed.
Wakefield Westgate to London King’s Cross, 10.18 a.m.: The embankments are splashed bright yellow by clumps of common ragwort, magenta with rosebay willowherb.
In the sidings at Doncaster there are a few spikes of mullein and a sprinkling of pale yellow evening primrose. Buddleia is in full flower but it’s only when we stop at Newark that I see two butterflies (peacocks?) chasing each other around its purple bottle brush spikes of blossom. There are white butterflies at Grantham where birdsfoot trefoil grows on the trackside ballast.
After a steady climb up the Jurassic limestone scarp at Grantham the countryside opens out south of Peterborough. There’s a glimpse of cattle grazing in water meadows near Sandy, Bedfordshire, and of stag-headed oaks near Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire.
One of the catering staff compliments me on the watercolours in my sketchbook.
“I always take it with me.”
“You’ve got very steady hands,” she says.
“I wish I had!”
It’s part of the challenge of drawing for me, especially at 125 m.p.h. on the Virgin East Coast train to London.
A bank of cloud hangs over the city but it’s just as well that it’s a bit cooler here as there’s 100 mile cycle race from Pall Mall into Surrey and back and they’re expecting 10,000 riders.
The journey into London for me is a journey back in time – to childhood visits and to my student days here and to when as a freelance I took my portfolio and my book ideas to publishers. There were always expectations and I still always feel that I’m going to come away inspired.
As usual we make our way to South Kensington via Regent’s Park, Baker Street and Hyde Park. We find a shady bench by the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens where I draw a tree, about 35 feet tall, which is in blossom.
From Keilder Water we follow the valley of the North Tyne northwest until we cross the watershed – which here follows the Scottish border – and turn southwest to follow the valley of the Liddel Water and the Esk back into England towards Carlisle and the Solway Firth. Clumps of bright yellow monkey flower grow amongst the cobbles along the upper reaches of the Liddel Water, yellow flag iris is in flower in its marshy flood plain.
We take a break at Rheged, the most cunningly disguised of visitor centres, hidden under an artificial craggy mound. I draw the old lime kiln from the cafe.
We take a brief tour of the Lake District – we’re well overdue for another break there – by following the shore of Ullswater then heading over the Kirkstone Pass to Bowness on Windermere.
Heading home via the Yorkshire Dales, I sketch the view of the valley of the River Greta from Country Harvest near Ingleton. I say the valley of the Greta but this is a misfit river and the broad dale owes its shape to the action of Ice Age glaciers.
Oystercatchers fly over the surrounding pastures piping at each other.
Two red kites soar alongside the A1 in North Yorkshire. A buzzard circles over the Northumbrian Hills. When we first started making our way to Scotland along the A68 in the 1980s, as well as the wild scenery along the route we had the choice of two picnic sites, each with a woodland nature trail, to choose from to take a break from the driving.
At Toy Top near Tow Law, the theme of the trail was forestry (introduced on the interpretation panels by nursery rhyme characters) while at Collier Wood the trail touched on the history of the landscape, inviting you to pause at a view out over the hills, and pointed out a well worn badger trail.
By the time I started writing my online diaries in 1998, the picnic sites and trails were looking a bit the worse for wear as the toilets got vandalised and the edges of the car park started to get strewn with litter. Toy Top was the first to close but Collier Wood lingered on and when we took Barbara’s parents to the wedding of their eldest grandchild at North Berwick we were still able to take a break here.
It was the last time that we went on a country walk, a short country walk, with Bill, Barbara’s dad, who died the following month and it also turned out to be the last time we were able to walk around that familiar woodland trail. Happy memories.
Link: Collier Wood from my Wild West Yorkshire nature diary for 18 October 1998
Collier Wood in August 2000.
‘It would be a pity if he disappeared to Yorkshire & just wrote for the Dalesman’
That was the typically wry comment of my professor, Brian Robb, head of illustration, as he looked through my folio at the Royal College of Art in March 1975. So, with apologies to Brian, you can probably guess what I’ve been writing for the last three years?
With this January article, I’m starting the fourth year of my Wild Yorkshire nature diary for the monthly magazine, described as the parish magazine for the whole of Yorkshire by Alan Bennett. As my deadline is always four or five weeks ahead of the month in question, I’ve based my articles on the observations and sketches in my online Wild West Yorkshire nature diary, which I started on Sunday 4 October 1998.
I’ve kept the focus of my Dalesman diaries on the kind of things that anyone can see in Yorkshire if they get out and about in their local patch and explore gardens, country parks, woodlands, waterside and moor. Now I’m ready to go a little further . . .
Here at Middlestown, five miles south west of Wakefield, close to where Coxley Beck joins the Calder, I’m well placed for heading for the hills with four National Parks – the Peak District, the Yorkshire Dales, the North York Moors and the Lake District – and I mustn’t ignore the Vales of York, Pickering and Mowbray, the Humber Estuary and the Yorkshire Coast.
I should be able to find plenty of material for next year’s Wild Yorkshire diary!
3.45 pm, Kings Cross to Peterborough; Once you’ve gone through the tunnels north of Kings Cross, it’s amazing how soon you find yourself travelling through open country, starting with the rolling, wooded Chiltern Hills. Somewhere beneath the layer of glacial debris which was plastered over the landscape north of London during the last advance of the ice there are chalk downs.
For a short while we follow the course of the River Great Ouse, a delightful stretch of the river that would make a suitable setting for The Wind in the Willows then, after Huntingdon, we start crossing flat fenland which stretches out for miles, as flat as a chessboard.
The scribbled birches at the top of the next page of my sketchbook represent the brief view we get of Holme Fen national nature reserve (and before it, further from the railway, Woodwalton Fen) as we approach Peterborough.
As the light fades the colour seeps out of the landscape and I carry on in pen only until we cross the Trent at Newark and I decide that drawing is no longer possible.
Then I can indulge in the other pleasure of a train journey; reading something from the station bookstall. St Pancras does better than most because as you walk in and head towards the Eurostar terminus there’s a Hatchard’s on your left, built into the Victorian brick arches. However, I had my eyes on a magazine that I’d spotted earlier in W H Smith’s, How to be a Hit on You Tube; ‘Become rich and famous doing something you love.’
Don’t laugh, that could be me once I’ve read it, but at least I’ve managed one out of those three so far.
‘We don’t need colour!’ says Barbara, as I hurry to complete my thumbnail sketches.
‘We need to remember which is which.’ I suggest but really it’s just the pleasure of slapping on colour that makes me go a little over the top with my scribbled notes.
We’ve got a trip coming up and we’re determined to travel light but, you know how it is, you get to the store and, out of context, in different surroundings, sizes can look different. On one occasion we spotted a rucksack that looked just the right in-between size we’d always been looking for and came back to discover that it was exactly the same size, in litres capacity, as the one we had at home.
I’ve been drawing exclusively natural history recently and putting a lot of effort into completing a page a day, so these quick sketches are a rare example of offhand note-taking.
Result; we went for two ‘cabin size’ 1.56 kg cases. Should be easier to carry, or pull along behind us (they have wheels) than one large case and they’re designed to suit the hand luggage requirements of all airlines, even the budget ones that we’re most likely to use, although these can change so you’d always have to check before travelling.
When we were travelling to France a couple of years ago, my sister-in-law Michelle inadvertently exceeded the limit when she popped in a blockbuster novel in the front pocket of her bag at the last minute! Luckily Barbara had some spare capacity.