Prophet Wroe is said to have based his mansion, built 1856-57, on old Melbourne Town Hall. Some of Wroe’s followers believed that the 144,000 elect of the Lost Tribes of Israel would gather here to await the Apocalypse.
I used Adobe Premiere Rush for this sequence of illustrations from the ‘Melbourne House’ walk from my booklet of Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle (currently out of print). There’s no sound, so that’s one of the next things that I’m going to work on, along with adding some movement using Adobe Character Animator and Adobe Animate.
I was surprised to see so much fungus growing on an old tree stump near the church at Nostell but this is Velvet Shank, Flammulina velutipes, which thrives during the winter and can survive being frozen solid. The stem becomes black and velvety with age and the cap becomes slimy when damp.
It’s grown commercially in a small, white, elongated form as Enoki, also known as Enokitake, for use in soups and salads.
You could eat Velvet Shank, as there’s not much else available at this time of year, although I won’t be trying it as there’s a similar species called Funeral Bell which is deadly poisonous (but which doesn’t survive into the winter).
After a month of working almost exclusively on the iPad, going back to pen and watercolour is like settling into a favourite armchair. In fact, I drew the pen and ink on a visit to Barbara’s brother John’s last autumn and today, after our regular walk with him around Newmillerdam, I added the watercolour.
It’s second nature for me now to head for the colour wheel in Adobe Fresco, so it was good to remind myself that it’s equally easy to find my way around my pocket-sized watercolour box.
You can still see where the Roundhead artillery hit Richard III’s Octagonal Tower, also known as the Well Tower, at Sandal Castle. I’ve also drawn one of the forty cannon balls that were found on this slope during the excavations. The tower was already in a poor state of repair before the siege of 1645 but the bombardment reduced much of the keep to rubble.
The rectangular structure immediately to the left of the impact was a garderobe chute.
An account from 1322 records what was being stored in the larder at Sandal Castle. This includes carcasses of beef, sides of bacon, casks of herrings and measures of salt.
Googling for ‘measure of salt’, I found a Market Scene by an van Horst, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, with a tub of salt which I thought looked just right for how I imagined the larder at Sandal, even though it was painted two centuries after the inspection of the castle.
A Saint in Pontefract
A miracle at Thomas of Lancaster’s tomb in the Priory Church at Pontefract: in 1359 it was recorded that ‘blood ran out of the tomb of Lord Thomas, formerly Earl of Lancaster.’
Seige of Sandal Castle, c. 1317, from my roughs for ‘Walks in Robin Hood’s Wakefield’.
As I discovered when I researched my booklet of Walk in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire, 1322 was a momentous year for Sandal. On Monday, 21st March, the Lord of the Manor of Wakefield, Thomas of Lancaster, was sentenced to death by beheading after a trial for treason at Pontefract Castle at which the previous Lord of the Manor, John Earl de Warenne, was one of those who sat in judgement. John got his castle back – presumably along with the casks of herrings, sides of beef and legs of bacon in the inventory.
But a year later, after miracles there, the tomb of Thomas of Lancaster in Pontefract’s Priory Church was attracting huge crowds, and Archbishop Melton of York was concerned that people had been killed in demonstrations there.
This is all that remains of the Great Hall at Sandal. The hall itself was on the first floor and the arches – recently restored – opened on to the ground floor cellar which was used as a store room. The windowsill on the left has a groove for a wooden shutter.
As with the garderobe drawing, I’ve gone for a simple graphic style, with flat colours, as a contrast to the main illustration, which is an aerial view of the castle in ruins.
Amongst the most substantial remains at Sandal Castle are two garderobe shafts on the moat side of the Great Chamber. The gardrobe gets its name because the smell associated with a medieval toilet was reputed to protect clothes from moths.
I’ve drawn this using the cartoon style that I used when I painted scenery for the Pageant Players’ pantomime. To create something that looked like pen and ink from the point of view of the audience, I’d draw the scene in slightly watered-down black emulsion using a half-inch filbert brush and get my team to fill in the blocks of colour.
We’d normally conclude a pantomime with a palace scene but occasionally we’d have a more rugged-looking castle to paint but the audience never got to see the garderobes.
My latest drawing for my Sandal Castle spread if of some of the jars found during excavations.
To quote a caption from Wakefield Museum:
Many small jars or bottles made of pottery and glass, probably for medicines and ointments, were found in the building that used to be the kitchen of the castle. This suggests that wounded soldiers were being treated there in the Civil War.
Presumably the Royalists didn’t employ any of The Diggers, otherwise known as The Levellers, in the construction of Sandal Castle’s English Civil War defensive earthworks because The Diggers were a radical Puritan group keen to claim common land on behalf of the people.
I’ve added a few more figures to my illustration of constructing defensive earthworks at Sandal Castle and now I’m adding flat colours, using a vector brush in Adobe Fresco and the paint-bucket tool to fill in larger areas. I can see why people find colouring relaxing.
I was going to go for red for the cavalier directing operations but I discovered that Cromwell’s New Model Army was issued with red shirts, so I’ve gone for blue instead.
