Looking back at this rough for the cover of my Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire, I think that I prefer the drama of the arrowhead design to the oak tree dotted with characters that I finally went for. The king, Edward II really at the centre of things, trying and failing to keep the peace between two of his barons, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster and John, Earl of Warenne. One of them was destined to lose his head to the executioner Hugh de Muston, a villain of London, on a hill to the north of Pontefract Castle.

In my booklet, eight walks follow in the footsteps of Robert Hode of Wakefield, who we guess was the son of Adam Hood, a forester, charged with protecting the lord of the manor’s deer. As a forester, like Robin’s outlaws, Adam wore a livery of green in summer, grey in winter.

From Wakefield’s Manor Court Rolls, we know that in 1316 Robert and his wife Matilda rented a plot, 30 x 16 feet, at Bichil, Wakefield and built a house of five rooms. This was in what we now call the Bull Ring, which in medieval times was the town market’s Butcher Row. Bichil probably means ‘beech hill’. Beech was used to make butcher’s blocks because beech acts as a natural antiseptic.

I’ve been re-reading my 2010 booklet Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire, because Radio Leeds invited me to be interviewed about the Yorkshire Robin Hood. It was so difficult in two or three minutes to strike a balance between a brief summary and going into the arcane details that bring the subject to life.

Link

Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire is still available on my Willow Island Editions website, £2.99, post free, in the UK. Please contact me if you’d like me to send it further afield.

Nine years later some of the walks have changed, particularly ‘The Pinder of Wakefield’ walk, as there’s been a lot of house building to the north-east of the city.

It’s got to that time of year when the veg beds are at their most productive and we can wander down the garden and gather beans, lettuce, beetroot and herbs.

We’ve done well with a selection of seeds that came bundled with the April Gardeners’ World magazine in an offer at Sainsbury’s: coriander, mixed lettuce, zinnia, cosmos mixed and black-eyed Susan. The zinnias have done well, they’ve now been planted on and are filling up the border, but we’ve yet to sow the Sarah Raven calendula, which were also included, as we already had plenty of those: in the spring as I weeded the lower veg bed I found a cluster of calendula seedlings from a few plants that had been growing there last year. I transplanted them to grow on (in the corner of the L-shaped bed in my photograph, above) and we’ve now got at least a hundred flowering and attracting hoverflies.

The Gardeners’ World offer also included a decent pair of lightweight gardening gloves (Barbara’s size, but I can’t have everything) and a half-price garden pass, which we’ve already used at St Andrew’s Botanic Gardens, so in effect, we’ve already saved the cover price.

Here’s a preview of my July Wild Yorkshire diary for the Dalesman, that’s July 2020 because after three months of work concentrating on my articles, I’ve finally got to the stage where I’m a whole twelve months ahead of schedule.

This article will describe a visit the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society made to Staveley Yorkshire Wildlife Trust nature reserve earlier this month. Migrants included black-tailed godwits heading south for the winter and painted lady butterflies still heading north for the summer. We also had our best ever views of sedge warbler and reed warbler from one of the hides on East Lagoon, which are built on raised platforms so that you can see down into the reed bed.

We saw common spotted orchid and one of the outstanding specialities of Staveley, the marsh helleborine but we didn’t spot the less conspicuous common twayblade. Something to look out for when we’re next there.

Looking for a suitable bowl to stand my ginger beer plant in yesterday afternoon, I remembered these bowls that I threw on the wheel at Batley School of Art in 1969 and I brought them down from the attic.

These were the rejects; somewhere I’ve got one bowl which was slightly more successful but my ultimate ambition had been to make a teapot. Mr MacAdam, our ceramics tutor, talked me through the process, which involved throwing a spout separately and attaching that with slip (watered-down clay) to the teapot. He was keen that the handle should appear to grow naturally from the pot.

Unfortunately I never got that far. Several, if not all of these bowls, were originally intended to be teapots but they wobbled on the wheel and, in order to salvage something from my efforts, I cut them down and repurposed them.

I had some limited success with mugs. You can drink from them, but my idea of randomly blotching them with manganese powder didn’t work: they just look as if someone with blue powder paint on their hands has picked them up.

But I do like the glaze on these bowls, I just wish that I’d used the same glaze on the mugs. Mr MacAdam keep a grey, A4 hardback, which he referred to as his ‘Dirty Book’, to keep a record of recipes for glazes that he tried. He claimed that he could always tell which students had done life drawing by the shapes of the pots they threw on the wheel.

I treasured a demonstration mug which Mac made to demonstrate the process. There were subtle features, like a sharper edge on the inside of the rim to prevent tea dribbling down the outside of the mug. I used the mug right through college but sadly it got broken decades ago.