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Grasmere and Langdale

View from our room at the Belsfield, Bowness

WE STROLL around Grasmere village for a couple of hours then hurry back along the riverside path as we’ve underestimated how long we might need to see all that we’d like to see.

I can’t believe that in all the years that I’ve been coming to the Lake District, this is the first time that I’ve visited the village or the famous Heaton Cooper Gallery. Of the founders of this fell-painting dynasty, I think that I prefer the work of the son William (1903-1995) to that of his father Alfred. William’s watercolours can be a little reminiscent of railway travel posters of the 1930s in the way he simplifies the landscape into interlocking arming shapes in harmonious colours while his father introduces more texture but the suggestion of powerful natural forces in the arching shapes, like billowing sails, of William’s work make the fells and the clouds interacting with them look suitably monumental.

We make the pilgrimage at last to the graves of the Wordsworths; William, Dorothy and Mary, at St Oswald’s church.

As we stop for coffee the most conspicuous subject for me to draw is the passing throng of  visitors to the village. In these situations a universal law applies; whoever I choose to draw someone will always come and stand in front of them or park a car in front.

Loughrigg Tarn

We take the narrow road along the hillside to the west of Grasmere Lake because I’d like to see – also for the first time – Loughrigg Tarn (left). The name is so familiar yet in all the years that we’ve been coming here we’ve never visited it.

With Loughrigg ticked off, we soon pass through Skelwith Bridge, a familiar junction on our Lakeland tours, but instead of heading for Coniston or Tarn Hows as we’d normally do, we turn up towards Langdale, passing Elterwater, another lake that I’m not familiar with.

Langdale

Langdale isn’t on an Alpine scale but it reminded me of the similarly shaped Lauterbrunnen Valley that we walked along in Switzerland last year – a U-shaped valley with a flat bottom contrasting with soaring cliffs on either ride. It didn’t boast the vertically plunging cascades of its Alpine counterpart but Stickle Ghyll and Dungeon Ghyll have their own rugged appeal.

We normally return again and again to favourite walks in the Lakes, usually amongst the ancient Skiddaw Slates to the north of the National Park or the Silurian Slates around Windermere to the south. We’ve tended to miss out on the craggier fells of the Borrowdale Volcanics between.

Stickle Barn, Langdale

I-Spy

One thing that prompted this Langdale tour was a little booklet that we picked up in Grasmere this morning, I-Spy The Lake District.

It’s aimed at children who’re keen on spotting and ticking off the sights of the National Park but it’s also useful as an itinerary for like ourselves who have our favourite corners but feel that we’d like to see more of what is out there.

Returning by the Little Langdale road to Skelwith Bridge, we get another tick for our I-Spy book; Blea Tarn. Another ten points!

Ducks on Ice

SINCE YESTERDAY most of the lake at Newmillerdam has frozen over. Mallards, Black-headed Gulls and Coot have gathered by a small open area no bigger than a garden pond near the causeway across the top end of the lake. A Canada Goose waddles awkwardly across the ice towards the war memorial where someone is feeding the ducks.

We get a better view of the Dabchick. As the main lake is frozen it’s on the inlet channel, along with a few Mallards. While my drawing was enough to serve as a field sketch (even though it was drawn from memory later), I didn’t catch the buoyant character of the Dabchick; not as rounded and buoyant-looking as a rubber duck but not as lean and lanky looking as my sketch, which took on the proportions of an adolescent Moorhen.

I realise when we walk under the conifers where we saw the Siskins yesterday that I drew them (from memory) on pine branches, while in fact they were on Larch. I picked up this branch with two female larch cones on it to draw.

 

Looking North

THE CAFE at Marks & Spencer’s Birstall looks out over the higher ground between the valleys of the Aire and the Calder. Ignoring the cars and the stores of the retail park I drew the trees and made quick watercolour sketches of the sky to the north when we called with my mum for coffee this morning.

Birstall appears as Burstall in 13th century manuscripts, a place name that derives from the Old English burgsteall, meaning the place of the burn, or fortified homestead’.

 

Wasps in Winter

AT THIS EVENING’S 139th annual general meeting of the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society (we’ve been going since 1851 but we obviously missed a few AGMs along the way) there are records of wintering wildfowl, such as the Great Northern Diver at Pugneys, but also unseasonal appearances of insects with a couple of wasps being seen today in one garden and a Red Admiral elsewhere. Things were different last year during a long cold spell.

The Edge of the Moor

IT’S TOO WET and windy for us to continue up onto the moors after our stop for a flask of coffee on the bench overlooking the River Little Don upstream from Langsett Reservoir so we take the shorter route back to the car park through the plantations. Some of the tall – but shallow-rooted – conifers have recently been blown down.

There’s a flock of between one and two hundred Redwings in one of the pastures sheltered by the top edge of the wood. Amongst them what appears to be a bird with a much paler version of the plumage. I think the term would be leucistic, which means lacking in pigment – the word comes from the Greek leukos meaning white. This one I would describe as a pale biscuit colour.

My sketch is of a normal Redwing from the earlier years of this diary, which explains its dotty quality as in those days I always scanned at 72 rather than 100 dpi and this is a GIF, a compressed image file that uses a limited range of colours. In those days of painfully slow dial-up connections, I could get away with this kind of image when it was viewed on the lower resolution monitors of that time.

A Nibbled Cone

I picked up this nibbled cone by the side of the track. I’m guessing that this is the work of a squirrel rather than a Crossbill, which we’ve seen here in the past. A Crossbill tends to tweak and twist the seeds from between the scales while a squirrel would eat it like a corn-on-the-cob, discarding the core.

We saw several Grey Squirrels on our walk through the woods, including two pairs. At this time of year the males are likely to be trailing around after the females or giving chase.

Plan Chest


You can see why it was a bit of a wrench to part with my battered old oak plan chest. I guess that it's Edwardian. Back in the early 1980s, the woodworker teacher at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield was going to break it up for timber but when he heard that I was after a plan chest he arranged for me to buy it from the school. It was originally a third bigger with another two panels at the back on this end (an early form of plain plywood on the other) but it was too big to fit in my studio so I cut the whole thing down and rebuilt all 10 drawers.

I’VE BEEN treating the birch plywood carcass of my new plan chest/worktop with Osmo top oil. This oil and wax treatment is based on sunflower oil, soya bean oil and thistle oil with wax from the leaves of the Carnauba Palm, a native of Brazil, and from a spurge, Euphorbia sp., native to Mexico and Texas, known as the Candelilla or Wax Plant.

This non-toxic treatment worked so well on our beech-block kitchen worktops that I decided to go for the same finish in my studio. The two Ikea Alex range A2 drawer units that slot snugly inside the plywood frame are already finished in a white plasticised coatings of various sorts.

The whole unit is lighter in tone than my old oak plan chest and it fits a lot better into my long narrow studio space. The room is now less of a furniture repository and more a light, airy and, being less cluttered, a calm working space. I’m looking forward to a session of printing, folding, stapling and trimming copies of some of my black and white walks booklets, using my new work-top.

The £180 that I got fro my battered old plan chest paid for the two A3 drawer units that have replaced it. Even so I was sorry to see the old plan chest go, because it has been with me for a long time and I had put a lot of effort into restoring it.

A Corner of the Studio

I’VE FINALLY got there with my interior re-design, spending most of the day getting my shelves up in their new position and filling them with books. They really look good; an artwork, of sorts, in their own right. I’m now ready for the joiner to start on constructing my new slimline plan chest/working surface.

The pen and ink sketch is another from one of my 1978 sketchbooks, from the period immediately after I left art college when I lived in the flat. I’m not so keen on artful clutter these days, although even in my new studio I have a green Lyles Golden Syrup tin full of pens on my desk right next to the computer. I’m pretty sure that this the smaller of the two in my drawing.

Also in the drawing: the blue Thermos flask which I took on my travels around Britain in 1979-80 when I produced my sketchbook for Collins publishers. Between that and the coconut is a mug that Mr MacAdam, the pottery and general studies tutor at Batley School of Art, made for me in c. 1969, to demonstrate the processes involved. Sadly that hasn’t lasted as long as the treacle tin. The Muffin the Mule tin half hidden in the background once contained Huntley and Palmers mini iced biscuits (each coin-sized biscuit had a tuft of hard icing on it). The fruit bowl (in walnut?) was hand-turned by my mum at Mr Bailey’s evening class in Horbury in the early 1969s.

I still have the screwdriver. One of my dad’s which to my horror, I bent one day when I’d borrowed it. My dad was very particular about tools! But a bent screwdriver is so useful. I’ve probably used in more than anything else in the toolbox during the past 30 odd years.

Spring-cleaning

Detail of my bedroom/studio in March 1978 when I shared a flat.

LIKE MOLE in The Wind in the Willlows, my year has started with a vigorous bout of spring-cleaning  and whitewashing or, to be more accurate, rollering the Dulux brilliant white matt on the walls of my studio. Half the floor space is taken up with row on row of books, which should be back on their shelves tomorrow if I get them up in their new positions but at least I now have a clean, airy and freshly whitewashed spot to work in with a view of the meadow and the woods beyond.

I’m sure that we haven’t seen the worst of the winter yet but like Kenneth Grahame’s Mole I can feel that it won’t be long before spring is ‘moving in the the air above and in the in the earth below’ and hopefully, like him, I’ll get the opportunity to set off on all sorts of adventures.

‘. . . he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said “Bother !” and “O blow !” and also “Hang spring-cleaning !”

“This is better than whitewashing!” he says to himself as he escapes into the sunlit meadow.

Bus Station

HAVING QUICKLY emptied my battered old oak plan chest after selling it on eBay last week I spent most of today sorting through its contents. It’s like going back through my life; mainly from the last 30 years of my work as an illustrator but also work from my student days and even, as here, from my schooldays.

This pastel on grey sugar paper, 10 x 12 inches, is dated 27 February 1962, when I was 11 and in Mr Lindley’s class, 4D, at St Peter’s junior school in Horbury. It might have formed part of the work for my 11-plus exam.

It brings back memories of the once very familiar old bus station. Dominating the city skyline, Wakefield Catherdral spire, yet to be sandblasted, is soot-blackened. The flats that would block the view of the spire as you approach the city from the south are under construction. The cooling towers of the Wakefield Power Station are steaming away in the distance. It’s a dull afternoon with reflections of the buses appearing in on the wet tarmac.

I’d forgotten the clock tower at the entrance to the bus station. Is it showing 4 pm or 20 past 12?

The green bus is the Ossett 20, which I used to queue for at the stand in the north-east corner of the bus station, across the road from the old Cathedral School, then still in use of as a school. Almost hidden behind the bus is one of two small waiting rooms that used to stand on either end of the island central island platform, adjacent to stand 7, according to my drawing.

The bus is a Leyland (name in block capitals above the radiator) operated by the ‘West [Riding] bus company and the red ‘VE’ on a yellow background on the poster on its side is, I guess, an advertisement for Vernons football pools.

I wish that I’d drawn more of these view of the familiar scenes of my childhood.

Along the Towpath

IT’S HARD to believe that at last we’ve completed all our Christmas errands and finished off as many home improvements we need to before Christmas. The days are now getting longer, just two minutes a day, but that will soon add up. To celebrate this small but significant change and to draw a line in the sand (well in the mud at this time of year), we set off for a short walk along the towpath in the rapidly fading light.

A heron flies past Beckside Farm and over the old grey viaduct. Two Mute Swans bring grace and elegance to the canal basin at Horbury Bridge.

On one narrowboat, they’ve improvised a giant Christmas pudding by the tiller, using a black plastic bin bag and cut-out holly leaves.

We turn back when we reach the pylon wires, which are sizzling and crackling in the rain like sausages in a frying pan. The pylon, standing on the steep bank above a belt of broadleaves, makes a stark Christmas tree silhouette.

Just 15 minutes walk from our doorstep and I feel as if we’ve escaped into real countryside and experienced the wider world.

As we walk back up from the towpath alongside the Bingley Arms, I rub my fingers through the Wormwood to smell this bitterly aromatic herb. It’s appropriate that it should be planted here by the pub as it has been used in brewing and as a flavouring in absinthe and in some Polish vodkas.