Category: Walking

Buttermere

A rainy morning’s walk on the shores of Buttermere is the perfect opportunity to try out our new Craghoppers’ AquaDry Waterproof Systems jackets. It’s a tough contest, as we’re just five miles from Seathwaite, in Borrowdale, the wettest inhabited place in England, which gets 11 feet of rain in a year. Most of it this morning.

High Stile
High Stile

High Stile looms out of the low cloud as we walk through Burtness Wood on the south-west shore of the lake. High Stile, at 807 m, 2,648 ft, is topped with Eagle Crag Sandstone, a sandstone derived from volcanic rock, from the Ordovician Period, 450 million years ago.

Ennerdale Granite

Ennerdale Granite
Ennerdale Granite

Sourmilk Gill cascades down the hillside at the lower end of the lake eroding into the medium-grained Ennerdale Granite.

Read more: Buttermere
xenoliths in granite

Felspar crystals give the rock its fleshy pink colour. Shards of dark ‘country rock’ – a geological term for the surrounding rock – were incorporated into the molten intrusion of granite as it forced its way upwards. Some of these fragments appear to be partially melted and the top fragment has a lighter halo around it.

These fragments are called xenoliths, from the Greek meaning ‘strange stone’.

Crottle

Crottle lichen

Crottle, also known as the salted shield lichen, Parmelia saxatilis, is a green-grey lichen here growing amongst mosses on bark.

Network of white veins on crottle, Parmelia saxatilis.

If you look closely you’ll see a network of white veins on its upper surface. Crottle was used to produce a reddish brown dye, used in Harris Tweed.

Buttermere
Looking north from the lower end of the lake towards Whiteless Pike and Grasmoor.

Snockrigg

From the furthest slope in this photograph we’re looking north across the lake towards:

  • High Snockrigg
  • Low Snockrigg
  • High Bank
  • and Pike Rigg along the shore of the lake

Snoc is ‘a projecting piece of land’. Rigg means ‘ridge’.

Polypody Fern

Growing amongst polytrichum ‘haircup’ mosses, a polypody fern.

Common Polypody

Common Polypody Fern, Polypodium vulgare, doesn’t have glossy fronds . . . except when its raining.

beck
A beck in Burtness Wood.

And talking about rain, I’m afraid that the Craghoppers’ Aquadry jackets didn’t live up to their name. Discussing it with a local we feel that the Lake District rain managed to get in via the seams, so an additional improvement might be – in addition of the dual layer waterproof membrane of the AquaDry system – to tape the seams.

Our jackets have always stood up to the worst that Yorkshire can throw at them but Lakeland rain is something above and beyond that.

But we did finish our walk at the perfect place for drying out . . .

Sykes Farm

Wherever you go in the Lake District there’s an opportunity to see the local rocks in the walls. I’m guessing that the opaque white mineral under the tea room sign is fluorite.

Herdwick Wool

Herdwick wool

Yesterday we caught the opening day of Ian Lawson’s exhibition ‘Native Spirit, The Herdwick’ at the Rheged Gallery which, alongside the stunning photographs, included these samples of Herdwick wool, dyed in colours that you can see all around you in the Lake District landscape.

High Stile

Links

Rheged Gallery

Craghoppers waterproof jackets

The Walking Season

Walks booklets
Heather

It’s a lovely time to get out walking in West Yorkshire and my friend Heather, now living in exile in Staffordshire (which she tells me is also brilliant for walking) has ordered a couple of my walks books for a friend of hers who lives on the fringe of Pontefract’s liquorice country, as featured in my full colour booklet, All Sorts of Walks in Liquorice Country.

I want the one with the walk from the Chantry Bridge to Featherstone. I think it a splendid walk, and the book will make a lovely present for my friend.

Heather

The Robin Hood booklet, also in full colour, also includes walks around Pontefract and in Brockadale, Wentbridge, where Sayles, a rocky outcrop overlooking the old Great North Road, features in the earliest surviving Robin Hood ballad.

I’m posting these booklets to her friend with a bookmark with a message from Heather and an artist’s impression of Heather on a recent trek she made up a hill.

If you’d like these two booklets, along with a hand-drawn bookmark please use the link below before the end of the month. Please message me via PayPal or e-mail me via the link on my contact page to let me know what you’d like drawing on the bookmark.

Links

Liquorice walks

Two walks booklets: All Sorts of Walks in Liquorice Country and Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire, plus one hand-drawn bookmark, including International Standard postage, £16.00

Rough Patch: postage to Canada

Rough Patch offer

‘. . . earthy through and through. You can feel the garden, the weather, watch the wildlife and smell the seasons through its pages.’

Liz Wright, Smallholder magazine

It’s also a great time to get out in the garden with a sketchbook, so if you’d like a copy of my paperback, Rough Patch (post free, half price but hand-drawn bookmark not included!), please order it via my website:

www.willowisland.co.uk

This booklet has recently proved popular with garden journalers and I’ve had an enquiry from Canada. If you’d like me to post a copy to you in Canada, please use the link below before the end of this month.

Rough Patch, plus International Standard postage to Canada:

Addingford

A walk through Addingford, Horbury, alongside the River Calder this morning.

Halfpenny Lane

John, who was doing well this morning after a not-so-good weekend, has a view of a grassy bank with cherry trees from his room on the sunny side of the Prince of Wales Hospice, Halfpenny Lane, Pontefract.

The local bus, which I painted from memory with a red stripe was actually blue, as I realised when I saw the next one come around.

My All Sorts of Walks in Liquorice Country features a walk along Halfpenny Lane and my Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire also has a Pontefract connection. Now available on the Prince of Wales Hospice bookshelf!

walks booklets

Five weeks ago this morning, while I drew Canada geese, John and Barbara walked around Newmillerdam Lake, a circuit of about two miles. Four weeks ago he wasn’t feeling so good and they walked by the duck pond in Thornes Park. This morning walking to the other side of the room and back was quite an achievement.

Sitlington Parish Map

Sitlington Parish Map

I feel that I know my home patch pretty well but when I drew this parish map for Sitlington I realised that there were one or two paths that I’d never set foot on.

I drew this in 1995, working with Wakefield Council’s footpath department and the Parish Council.

Keep Fit!

keep fit display

Twelfth night has just gone but the WI won’t be ready to replace our Night Before Christmas display in the Redbox telephone box gallery until February so we’re doing a bit of set dressing. We’re keeping the fireplace but out go the paper chains and the tinsel from fitter Redbox display to make way for leaner, fitter display for the new year.

Published
Categorized as Walking

The Countryside Unlocked

mooring ring
Mooring ring, canal bridge, Calder & Hebble Navigation, The Strands, Addingford.

Fifty or sixty years later, our local patch of countryside down by the river and canal in the Calder Valley near Wakefield isn’t the place where, as a boy, I could wander at will with my friends. There were no public footpath signs in those days, so the presumption was that we were free to explore any well-worn path.

Old mineral railway
Old mineral railway from Hartley Bank Colliery to Horbury Bridge.

As an art student, I shot a short and suitably arthouse Standard 8 film on location in the valley, including a scene in which my brother and his friends, who were roped in as the cast, run along the top of the derelict colliery railway embankment that straddles the floodplain between the river and canal.

A few years later, as I started trying to make a living as a natural history illustrator, I painted a detailed acrylic of a bramble bush drawn on the embankment, which was then greening up enough to attract local wildlife, including a rabbit and a song thrush that I included, life size, in the composition. I exhibited, and immediately sold, the painting at the Ruskin School in Oxford, and the painting was featured on the cover of The Artist magazine, so the old mineral railway provided me with inspiration, some welcome publicity and a much-needed financial lifeline in my attempts to keep my head above water as a freelance illustrator.

So do I think that it’s a shame that I can’t now walk along what is now could be a short railway walk nature trail? Not necessarily: as it’s now out of bounds behind a high and spiky security fence, it acts as a pocket-sized conservation area where birds can nest with minimum disturbance.

keep out

In so many ways, my local patch has improved since my childhood. It’s hard to look over this view from The Balk, Netherton, and remember that in the 1970s the recently mown field, below the sandstone ridge of Hartley Bank Wood, was an opencast mine with just the pylon left in place, standing on a pillar.

You wouldn’t now guess that the spoil heaps of Hartley Bank Colliery extended over most of this southern side of the valley. Now restored to farmland, the naturalist in me still kind of wishes that the barren slopes of red shale and muddy gulleys between could have been left to natural regeneration. I suspect that fifty years later, we would now have wall-to-wall birch, ash, sycamore and oak woodland, rather than the patchwork of heath, wetland and meadow that it might have become in my imagination.

At the old lock-keeper’s cottage, the Rottweiller is really as intelligent as those graffitied reading glasses suggest but although he’s better looking than in his security guard mugshot, he doesn’t sport a handlebar moustache.

High Summer

Ebor Way

It’s a perfect midsummer’s day for our walk from Wetherby alongside the River Wharfe, past Flint Mill Grange to Thorp Arch but we appreciate the shade of the Sustrans route along the old railway on the return leg.

wayside birds

Each bird has its favoured habitat. The song post for the yellowhammer in open farmland is on a phone line in contrast the blackcap makes a call that sounds like pebbles clacking together from the foliage of a tree in a deep, shady railway cutting. The warbler (willow?) prospects elegantly in the shrubs of a burgeoning hedgerow while the red kite swoops through parkland as we reach Thorp Arch.

Shortest Day

Monday morning on the shortest day of the year but it’s so overcast today that we don’t stand a chance of seeing the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter this evening. Even so, on our regular walk around Illingworth Park, Ossett, this morning it didn’t look quite this grim: I’ve reduced the saturation of the colours when editing the iPhone footage in Adobe Premier Pro.

The Cobblestone Path

cobblestone path

I think that you can tell how much I liked discovering this cobblestone path from my drawing. You take a fork in a path deep in Middleton Woods, cross a stream and there it is, looking like the kind of place that Dorothy, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man might stride along on the look-out for ‘Lions . . . and Tigers . . . and Bears’.

Middleton Walk 1
My Middleton Woods walk from my ‘Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle’ (now out of print). Please don’t rely on the directions as I haven’t checked the route for five or six years.

You get a great sense of history walking through the Woods. The cobblestone path must go back a long way because one map shows a Borough Constituency Boundary following it.

Middleton Walk 2
As I say, please don’t rely on my directions for this walk as they’re now out of date.

Unfortunately there’s a bit of a question-mark hanging over this path as Leeds Council, the current owners intend to dispose of it so that a car park can be built (there’s more to it than that, but you get the picture. I’ve had an update from a local campaigner, below).

The constituency boundary seems to have moved, but hope that Hilary Benn, MP for Leeds Central since 2010, when the boundaries were last changed, will lend his support to calls to keep the path and preserve its character.

Update from a local campaigner

These are the details as I understand them, but it’s quite a complex picture, and it’s the implications of the scheme have appeared rather suddenly, so apologies if any these details are incorrect.

The council are meeting on Wednesday to discuss handing over the path to the school and 7.4 acres of greenbelt formerly South Leeds Golf Club land. The council had advised the public in March that the land was to be rewilded and incorporated into Middleton Park. The school want a new car park on their land and they propose to build a hard sports area on the rewilded land plus a new football pitch. Many mature trees will be destroyed. As they are an Academy Trust this is public green space being gifted by a local authority to a private organisation. The school already have a 3G pitch and plenty of space for sport if they didn’t build the new car park. John Charles Centre for Sport is also a short walk from the school through the wood.
We have all enjoyed walking on the rewilded area especially over lockdown so this has been a real shock to local residents. I’m not sure of the procedure after Wednesday’s meeting. Presumably the land will be transferred to the school and then maybe we will be fighting individual planning applications.