Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
If you’d been standing on Flamborough Head 8,000 years ago, as early man began to move back into Britain, you’d be looking out over Doggerland, a landscape of woodland, marsh, rivers and lakes.
In the nature diary that I’m writing for September’s The Dalesman, I’m delving into prehistory but thought that I’d pop in one of my cartoons to lighten the mix a bit. But so as not to leave you in suspense, you’ll be pleased to hear that 8,000 years later we’ve found that missing hammerstone.
Another ‘start with a shape’ drawing: this time it was a star. It suggests that after 100 days of lockdown I’m missing browsing, drinking lattes and visiting historic towns. Wakefield had its own Shambles and a cluster of half-timbered buildings which survived wartime bombing but which were swept away in the 1960s to provides space for new modern concrete and brick shops.
Apologies that there’s too much zooming in and out in this little iMovie clip. I thought that the best thing to do was to dive in and do something but having re-familiarised myself with the set-up, I can now try something more calm and considered.
Another homemade birthday card, this time in honour of our nephew Andrew’s profession – no he’s not a professional gangster, but he trained as an engineer so in the distant pre-CAD days he must have experienced the perils of preparing a technical drawing.
It’s been a busy week in the homemade card factory. Here’s one for my brother-in-law and aviation enthusiast Dave’s birthday today. It’s as near as I’m ever going to get to hard-hitting satire. I’ll have to resign myself to never making it into Private Eye.
The white cliffs of Flamborough Head aren’t white all the way to the top. As I learnt on a field trip led by Richard Myerscough, they’re covered by boulder clay – the Skipsea Till – left by the last glaciation to reach Yorkshire.
From Sewerby south through Holderness all the way to Hessle near Hull, the cliff is completely buried by the Ice Age deposits. Not far from Sewerby Steps you can still find the remnants of a raised beach which dates from the last interglacial. The sea level was a metre higher than its present level.
Fragments of bone found amongst the shingle of this ancient beach include straight-tusked elephant, bison, hippopotamus and narrow-lipped rhinoceros.
When you’re starting with a geometrical shape – in this case a hexagon – and your mind goes blank about what to make it into, the traditional robot is a useful character to turn to. My comic in my primary school days was Eagle, which featured Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future on its cover, so I like the style of 1950s science fiction where the rockets, robots and space stations look like a plausible extension of the technology of the period. While drawing the telescreen, I thought about our 405-line black-and-white television and our record player – similar to the classic Dansette – covered in wine-red and cream leatherette.
Eric Reichbaum, photographer on today’s Adobe Live ‘From the Sofa’ with Tony Harmer and Emma Lextrait.
These grasses and the clump of geranium by the pond reminded me of the sort of subject that Frederick Franck would draw in his book The Zen of Seeing, so I decided on a change from my usual pen and colour wash and I’ve stuck with line only. Typically Franck would add a hint of tone by dabbing parts of the drawing with a wet brush or finger tip. I can’t do that as I use waterproof ink.
I had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to pin down this subject as the grasses were swishing around in the breeze.
Fill a page with ‘drawings without any plan or image in your head, just start drawing’. Our latest assignment on Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching course is a challenge for me as I’m usually either drawing from life in my sketchbook or getting together reference for an illustration. To be sure that I wasn’t starting with a plan in mind I started with a shape for each of these: square, circle and triangle. A theme soon emerged of buildings on rocks.
For the first I was thinking of Greek islands and while drawing the second I found myself thinking about Scarborough’s Rotunda Museum. The third would be at home deep in a German or Austrian forest.
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’.
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.
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.
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.