There are patches and small drifts of wood sorrel alongside the path through the plantation alongside the reservoir at Langsett. On a tree-stump there are discarded scales and the nibbled core of a pine cone, left there by a squirrel.
We hear our first willow warbler singing as well as a resident wren.
A mallard duck is accompanied by ten ducklings and followed by a second adult female. She gathers her dispersed brood from our shore of the reservoir, where they’re foraging for insects or plant material on the surface of the water and they follow her in single file towards the far shore.
Red grouse are calling on the moor and perching, as they do on rocks and broken walls.
There’s a sandpiper feeding at the water’s edge where the little river enters the reservoir on the southern shore and there more sandpipers on the stone embankment at the dam head.
The Mist in the Mirror
Only a brief chance to draw the ornate balcony of Matcham’s Opera House in Wakefield before the curtain goes up on Susan Hill’s ghost story The Mist in the Mirror.
You might think that the teapot on the mantlepiece is part of the set but I drew this when we went back for coffee at Richard and Carole’s after the show.
Once again these are drawn with my new Lamy Safari pen.
Stanley Ferry from site of St Swithen's chantry chapel.
Stanley Ferry Flash.
Mute swans.
Route of proposed Wakefield East relief road.
River Calder near Southern Washlands.
Dripstone on brick under arch of railway bridge.
Ashfields circular walk.
Foundary Shoal bridge.
Back of Rhodes Group factory.
Chantry Chapel of St Mary Magdalene, dating from c. 1342.
This walk, which starts and finishes at Wakefield cathedral and passes Pinderfields, the Old Park and the Chantry Chapel. There are a number of Robin Hood connections, including a sculpture of his sparring partner George-a-Green, the Jolly Pinder of Wakefield. On 25 January 1316 the maidservant of Robert Hode, was fined two pence for taking dry wood and green vegetation from the Old Park. This walk must pass very near the scene of the crime!
More about Robert Hode and the early Robin Hood ballads in my Walks in Robin Hood’s Wakefield, available in local bookshops, visitor centres and some farm shops. Also available online, post free in the UK, from Willow Island Editions, price £2.99.
The walk passes the site of St Swithen’s chantry chapel. Walk it while you can because there are plans for a relief road which it is proposed will go through the Old Park, later the site of Parkhill Colliery, linking with the roundabout near Wakefield Hospice at Stanley Hall.
A perfect September morning to walk around Langsett Reservoir; through the conifer plantations, across the river Little Don and up onto the moor.
Not such a restful day for the red grouse and the brown trout though. The gamekeepers and beaters were getting in place (you might spot them moving through the trees on one of the shots of the river) to wave flags while walking across the moor whooping and hollering, accompanied by their dogs, driving the grouse towards the guns.
We hurried across the moor before they started and missed out on our coffee stop at the ruined farm known as North America, pausing instead by a lichen-covered rock overlooking the stream on the far side of the moor.
A student in full-length waders emerged from the stream. He explained that he was from the University of Hull, setting up a project to monitor the movements of brown trout by tagging them and installing a couple of electronic sensors, one where the stream runs into the lake, the other further upstream.
YouTube
Unfortunately my recordings of natural sounds – running water, bird calls and the wind in the heather – were interrupted by the sound of the plastic lens cap, which is attached to the camera by a loop, rattling in the breeze so I’ve added a music track.
My thanks to Silent Partner for making Days are Long available for use on my YouTube video.
If you’ve got a fast connection, Langsett looks good in HD.
Filmed with my FujiFilm FinePix S6800. The shots that I didn’t use my little ‘Spider’ tripod for needed image stabilisation in iMovie.
I’VE BEEN getting a new edition of Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle off to the printers today. I checked out all the routes and was delighted that there was hardly anything that needed changing and all those changes were for the better, for example some of the wobbly old stiles had been replaced by new metal kissing gates.
But I thought the new building – I think it’s the distribution centre – at the Coca Cola Enterprises site at Lawns village, Wakefield, should go in, so I redrew that corner of my picture map and managed to included a few facts about this ‘largest soft drinks plant by volume in Europe’.
From miles away it can look surprisingly conspicuous but strangely when you get nearer to on those leafy footpaths it often disappears altogether.
It sits pretty much in the centre of the Rhubarb Triangle, but as far as I know it doesn’t manufacture a rhubarb beverage. Dandelion & burdock perhaps but I can’t think of a rhubarb drink that they might try. Rabarbaro Zucca, an Italian aperitif, is alcoholic.
MAPPING OUT a walk for my next book we make our way from Howarth up onto the moor-top plateau, crossing Dick Delf Hill, which rises to 452 metres up beyond the ruined farm of Top Withins, a remote cattle farm at the top end of the valley which is often suggested as the inspiration for the setting of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
We return via an easier route along sections of the Pennine Way and the Brontë Way, a hill path that is unique in having footpath signs in English and in Japanese, although the parties of Japanese visitors that we passed on our walk today were back around the Brontë Parsonage Museum and main street in Howarth.
Cotton-tails
11.50 a.m., Sand Delf Hill, Haworth Moor; There are occasional drifts of cotton-grass, looking very much like the tail of the small startled rabbit that runs along the track in front of us.
A shepherd is moving on his flock without the aid of a sheep dog, hooting and hollering as he drives his Land Rover across the moor.
Small Heath
With so much checking out to do, including a whole new section of the walk, there isn’t time to stop and sketch except when we take a break for a flask of coffee at Top Withins.
A small butterfly that flies low over the bracken in the valley below. It suns itself with it wings folded shut but we see enough to be able to identify it later as a Small Heath, a smaller cousin of the more familiar Meadow Brown but more typical of rough grassland, from coastal dunes up to 2,000 feet (600 metres) in the mountains.
The name of the butterfly is a neat description of the habitat where we found it.
Also on a sunny bank, on the rocky path above the Brontë bridge, this Green Tiger Beetle is hunting.
My little Olympus Tough is useful for insects like this which will pause when you crouch near them but it’s not so handy for butterflies which are likely to take flight, which is why I stood a few paces away and quickly sketched the Small Heath, adding the colour later.
The Very Hairy Caterpillar
Up on the plateau Barbara spots this Oak Eggar Moth caterpillar. Despite the name it is equally at home on the moors as one of its alternative foodplants is heather. The name ‘eggar’ apparently means just what it appears to mean; that it’s a moth that lays its eggs on a particular plant.
This caterpillar has stopped, motionless as we take a look at it. It’s just had a narrow escape as my size 13 hiking boots passed over it, so it’s a good subject for the macro setting on the Tough. I try to do a bit of ‘gardening’ to get a better shot of its head but when I try to gently lift up the heather twig it wraps itself around it. No chance of seeing either the head or the tail in this pose but at least I get a record of the black bands and white marks on its body.
THIS TREE by the old mineral railway bridge over the River Calder at Addingford mystifies me every year. It’s the combination of catkins, which I associate with willows, with broader, glossy, bright green leaves that don’t look willow-like. I stop to draw the details and my best guess is that it’s Black Poplar, Populus nigra, a tree introduced to Britain from Europe.
Chiffchaffs are now singing in the trees and bushes on the old railway embankment, along with Chaffinches. I sketch a Long-tailed Tit which flits amongst the branches as I’m drawing.
Despite its loud and cheerful song, I have difficulty spotting a Chaffinch in a hedge.
The song is so conspicuous that I expect the bird to be conspicuous too; I look in the top branches but, no, it’s singing from half way up in the hedge 12 or 15 feet tall hedge.
I think this must be the preferred height for a song post for Chaffinches because fifty yards along there’s another one, singing from exactly the same height.
I’d usually walk straight into Horbury up Quarry Hill alongside the busy A642 but I decide to give myself a bit more time today, to walk via the quiet towpath, derelict railway and Addingford Steps, returning alongside Slazenger’s playing fields and the riverbank (right). This stile is little more than 10 minutes walk, via Wynthorpe Road and across the bypass, from Horbury High Street. New footpath signs direct you to Thornes downstream or Netherton across the valley.
IF YOU represented Lake Windermere as an elongated clock face, today we walked from Ferry House at 9 o’clock to Wray Castle at 11, finishing up at Waterhead, Ambleside, at just past the top of the hour, so about a quarter of the way around England’s largest lake.
This didn’t leave any time for drawing, so I sketched our route from the ferry on the return journey to Bowness.
We had hoped there might be a cafe at Wray Castle, a Victorian country retreat built in the style of a toy fort, but it’s closed at the moment after plans to turn it into an upmarket hotel fell through. The National Trust plans to reopen it to the public . . . and open a cafe there.
Beatrix Potter celebrated her 16th birthday at Wray Castle when the Potter family spent a summer holiday here.
Kestrel perched in the a tree in Coxley near a couple of Wood Pigeons; it was instantly distinguishable from them, even in at a distance, by its distinctive silhouette; a cross between a juggler's club and banana-shaped.
WE ENJOYED dipping into a couple of hampers that friends and family had bought us for Christmas and although it was a welcome treat to indulge in the selection of pork pies, patés and home-made chocolates, the result was that we ended up a few pounds over our target weight by the time the new year arrived. And we can’t just blame the hampers; we’d been slipping a bit in our healthy eating ever since our holiday in Switzerland last summer. Whatever the reason, new year seems like the right time to make a fresh start.
We’ve been going for food with fewer calories, for instance soups and a kind of rustic stew of seasonal vegetables made with a dash of Worcestershire Sauce but we’re also determined to get out a bit more and burn up a few calories in the process.
Hazel catkins had opened where the path from Thornhill comes down to Mill Bank lock on the canal.
Walking can burn somewhere between 100 and 175 calories per hours so on our 1 hour 40 minute walk to Thornhill Park and back this morning we burnt a good 150 calories or more – which I guess was about equivalent to the muesli etc that we ate for breakfast!
However, if we’d sat around all morning, we wouldn’t even have burnt off our breakfast.
Rhode Island Reds leaving the barn at Low Cunsey FarmI remember these enamel warning signs from family holidays in the Lake District in the late 1950s and early 60s.
THE END of October marks the end of the season for many Lakeland businesses; village stores close, parking restrictions are eased and ferries start running to winter timetables so it’s an opportunity to explore a quieter countryside. From our hotel at Bowness-on-Windermere we walk to the car ferry and at Ferry House pick up the route of one of Mary Webb’s Tea Shop Walks in the Lake District. In six miles walking we don’t meet a single hiker or dog-walker, just one cyclist on a road section and two farmers auguring a pasture for soil samples. The Tea Shop closed for winter at the weekend, as did Beatrix Potter’s house at High Sawrey, which it stands close to. The Cuckoo Brow Inn at Far Sawrey makes a welcome alternative as a lunch stop.
Nuthatch on oak left standing on cleared area, Waterbarrow
We walk close to the shore of Windermere, from the tiny island of Ling Holme to the promontory of Rawlinson Nab. It’s quiet except for a gaggle of Canada and Pink-footed Geese. Other birds: Grey Wagtail, Robin, Great-crested Grebe, Black-headed Gull and, as we walk by a stretch of woodland cleared of conifers at Waterbarrow, Blue Tit and Nuthatches on the tall broadleaved trees that have been left standing. We see several squirrels, but all of them Grey, not Red, like the one we saw yesterday in Keswick. Perhaps the central fells act as a barrier to the spread of the Greys in Cumbria.
As this is Wordsworth country, I found myself inspired to verse. I wasn’t going to inflict this on you, but our friends had to have this on our postcard from the Lakes so I thought I’d add it to this post, just to show that I was getting into holiday mood:
As we were walking in the Lakes,
We searched in vain for tea & cakes.
We tramped five miles then had to pause
At Far Sawrey village stores.
Alas, the sign we chanc’d to see
Said ‘CLOSED NOVEMBER’ (no more tea!).
But round the corner we said ‘Wow! –
they’re serving soup at Cuckoo Brow!’
Soup of the day was French onion, complete with crouton, made with good stock (not vegetarian, I’m guessing) and not too salty like French onion soup often is.
THORNHILL EDGE is only a mile or two from home but until today I’d never walked the full length of the footpath that runs along the top of the ridge, overlooking the Smithy Brook Valley. This morning I’m following the Kirklees Way, from Thornhill to Denby Dale.
After writing half a dozen walks booklets, it’s a change to follow someone else’s route. The Kirklees Way is a 72 mile circular walk around Huddersfield, so it curves away through the countryside along paths that it would never occur to me to follow, even though they’re so close to home.
Small Copper butterflies are perfect miniatures. I count 5 of them on the sunny south-facing fault scarp of Thornhill Edge. That’s probably more Small Coppers than I’ve seen over the past two or three years.
Grange Wood
After the pastures of Lower Dimpledale (what a wonderful name), a tributary valley of Smithy Brook, I enjoy the shade of Grange Wood(above).
Warter Wold
It’s clear day with row after row of fair weather cumulus lined up across a blue sky. When I get up to The Rough, 195 metres (640 ft) above sea level, on the watershed between Smithy Brook (which flows into the Calder) and Mill Beck (which flows into the Dearne) I can see not only the cooling towers of Ferrybridge, Drax and Eggborough, but also hills beyond. By putting a ruler on the map to trace my line of sight, I can tell that the distant blue hills in my photograph (above), way beyond the flats and cathedral spire of Wakefield, are the Yorkshire Wolds.
The highest point to the left of the spire must be Warter Wold , 44 miles to the north-east, which rises to about 194 m (636 ft). There were more hills beyond the blocks of flats of Seacroft, on the east side of Leeds and these must have been the North Yorks Moors, also 40-odd miles away. I even suspected that I could see a white spot; the White Horse of Kilburn?
Brain-walking
Medieval bell-pits in the Tankersley Ironstone, Emley Woodhouse.
I thought that I’d be in Denby Dale in time for lunch but it was 3 p.m. before I reached the Denby Dale Pie Hall. I didn’t stop to draw on this walk so it gives me a chance to work out my average walking speed; 2.6 miles per hour, including a few short breaks. But fourteen miles in one go was quite enough for me! So why walk to Dimpledale when I’ve got the the woods of Coxley Valley in my backyard; why swelter all that way to sample the delights of Denby Dale when I could have strolled up the hill to Horbury?
One reason is that I find that walking can be an alternative to drawing; I can follow a line and explore the world around me. It gives me a sense of freedom and puts things in perspective. There’s so much countryside out there beyond my home patch.
Walking is recognised as being good physical exercise but there is new evidence that exploring a variety of environments is as good for your brain as it is for your body. Professor Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in San Diego has observed that laboratory mice kept in stimulating environments show a 15% increase in brain activity compared with genetically identical mice kept in run-of-the-mill cages.
My generation was brought up with the ‘truism’ that from the age of about 20 your brain cells start to gradually die off. Gage’s study showed that the mice in stimulating environments were generating new brain cells in the hippocampus. It seems like a big leap to extrapolate from laboratory mice to humans but similar brain activity – an increased blood flow in that part of the brain – has been observed. It’s said that London taxi drivers who learn ‘the knowledge’ – acquiring a detailed mental map of the streets of the metropolis – develop an enlarged hippocampus.
If this is true – and it seems quite likely to me – then my 14 mile slog today will have been better exercise for my brain than walking the same distance on a treadmill in a health and fitness club. Who’d want to be indoors on a day like today anyway?
There are patches and small drifts of wood sorrel alongside the path through the plantation alongside the reservoir at Langsett. On a tree-stump there are discarded scales and the nibbled core of a pine cone, left there by a squirrel.
We hear our first willow warbler singing as well as a resident wren.
A mallard duck is accompanied by ten ducklings and followed by a second adult female. She gathers her dispersed brood from our shore of the reservoir, where they’re foraging for insects or plant material on the surface of the water and they follow her in single file towards the far shore.
Red grouse are calling on the moor and perching, as they do on rocks and broken walls.
Only a brief chance to draw the ornate balcony of Matcham’s Opera House in Wakefield before the curtain goes up on Susan Hill’s ghost story The Mist in the Mirror.
Once again these are drawn with my new Lamy Safari pen.
Unfortunately my recordings of natural sounds – running water, bird calls and the wind in the heather – were interrupted by the sound of the plastic lens cap, which is attached to the camera by a loop, rattling in the breeze so I’ve added a music track.
