Heading for the Hills

Northern England

DRAWING THIS 3D impression of northern England makes me realise how much hill country there is in my new extended study area, which now includes the whole of Yorkshire; Dales, North Yorks Moors, South Pennines and the Wolds. And I don’t intend to ignore the Lake District beyond the north west borders of the county and that for me still slightly mysterious area, the North Pennines, described by Professor Bellamy as ‘England’s Last Wilderness’.

We live a little below the centre of this map so unless we head due east towards the Humber estuary, we’re going to be heading for the hills after an hour or so’s driving in whatever direction we set out.

My current initial research reading is The Naturalists’ Yorkshire compiled by members of the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union, published in 1971. This is the second time that I’ve read it, as it was background reading when I worked on my Sketchbook of the Natural History of Wakefield as a student.

It starts with a succinct summary of the geology and structure of Yorkshire which at the time, introducing places and rock formations that I’d never seen, was difficult to grasp. Having spent seven years writing and researching Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time, it now makes sense to me.

The details that I still find a little difficult to visualise are features like the Market Weighton Upwarp, one of the major structural features of east Yorkshire which huge influence on the surrounding geology, and has done since the Jurassic period but which is invisible, except by inference, from the surface.

xplane screenshot
Somewhere near Staithes, screenshot of the VFR Photo Scenery for north east England on Xplane 10.

I’m soon going to get the opportunity to pilot a small Cessna around the county, not in reality you’ll be pleased to hear, but in the virtual environment of the flight simulator Xplane 10. As I write this my computer is halfway through loading VFR Photo Scenery for north east England. This includes detailed aerial photography from Getmapping, who ten or fifteen years ago sent four aircraft off to compile a photographic atlas of Britain.

I’ve got a copy of the atlas which comes in its own attaché case but I’ve never used it as much as I thought I would. Having a three dimensional, interactive version of the same, or rather updated, imagery seems a much better way of getting to know the lie of the land.

Fresh Page

cloudsTHE START OF THE NEW YEAR feels like opening a new sketchbook; a fresh white page to fill with whatever takes my interest.

My Dalesman nature diary for JanuaryDalesman January issueThis year I’m going to be focussing on the Yorkshire Dales because I’ve just started writing the nature diary for the Yorkshire Dalesman magazine. My new feature gets a mention on the Dalesman website;

‘Wild Yorkshire
Richard Bell hits the ground running as he gets ready to watch wildlife in the new year’

That sums up the way I feel today.

This new monthly column is all the excuse that I need to explore a National Park that Barbara and I tend to ignore. If we’ve got only a day we tend to head for the Peak National Park, if we’ve got a few days we zoom through the Dales on our way to the Lake District National Park or we head for our favourite stretch of coast where the North Yorks Moors National Park meets the sea.
male goosanderIt’s one of those New Year’s days which make you feel as if a new chapter is opening. It’s bright, cool and breezy. We don’t seem to have seen much sun over the Christmas period or any that we had, I missed.

The river isn’t in flood but it is lapping around the trunks of the willows that grow on a low silty bank by the bridge. A male Goosander, looking as freshly painted as a decoy duck, dives amongst them.

pheasant

There’s some soft but insistent tapping on the patio windows. The cock Pheasant is back. I can’t tell whether he’s pecking at his own reflection or picking little fragments of spent sunflower seeds from the glass.

pheasant, great tit and blackbird

Headwaters

Sessile oaks, holly and bramble drawn with a brown 08 Pilot Drawing Pen.
Looking  south; Sessile oaks, holly and bramble drawn with a brown 08 Pilot Drawing Pen in Hahnemuehle Travel Book.

4°C, no breeze, 90% stratus, 1 pm

IS THIS the perfect lunchbreak? – twenty minutes brisk walk, yomping through the mud in places, twenty minutes with my sandwich and flask and even time for a lightning sketch of oaks, holly and bramble, then twenty minutes yomping back.

Nothing but the distant white noise of machinery (or is it the rush of the flooded stream?), the drone of aircraft and the occasional clatter of Wood Pigeon’s wings.

The upper branches of the oaks meet to form a canopy, a tree-top highway for a Grey Squirrel which carefully examines the mossy upper-side of the boughs before stopping to nibble some item – an acorn perhaps – that it has found.

I’ve got a long session of research on the computer today, so I can justify the break as essential rest for my eyes but I better be getting back as my twenty minutes has already extended to thirty.

Coxley Dam is well up – at its maximum, giving an impression, as the opaque eau de Nile water laps around the Crack Willows of its former extent. Plenty of headwater to power the looms of the silk and blanket mills, both now long gone. Power that didn’t have to be translated into electrical current before its final use (that isn’t strictly true as energy can neither be created or destroyed although my post-lunch dip doesn’t seem to recognise that law of thermodynamics).

A Blackbird alarms – perhaps because of the Squirrel.

Diving and Dabbling

IT’S A COUPLE of weeks since we last managed a country walk so we’re glad to be back at Newmillerdam where I sketched the multiple trunks of this Ash on the corner of the Barnsley Road by the old watermill as we waited for our coffee at Becket’s Cafe (formerly the Waterside but recently revamped by the new owners).

Amongst a flock of sheep one has died and Crows and Magpie have gathered to scavenge the carcass.

There are at least 4 Goosanders on the lake, two males and two females. There could have been eight in total but their ability to swim together underwater and pop up together 50 yards away makes me think we saw the one group in two different locations.

A bird which I suspect we often miss spotting at Newmillerdam because it spends so much of its time diving underwater is the Dabchick. After a quick view of it diving we waited a minute or so and, unlike the Goosanders, it popped at the same spot.

Ash

IT’S NOT LOOKING good for our  Ash trees. The fungus, Chalara fraxinea, that has killed around 90% of Ash trees in Denmark and in other parts of Europe has spread here, with cases reported from several locations in Yorkshire. It’s hard to think of this familiar view from my studio without those two tall Ashes on the edge of the wood, the one on the right thickly covered in ivy. As I type this two Magpies have flown into its top branches.

But two large Ashes at the entrance to the woods have blown down since we moved here in the 1980s and a third was felled before it got a chance to fall on the newly built houses but the wood doesn’t take long to rejuvenate itself and fill in the gaps.

Ash saplings soon colonised a rock fall in the old quarry in the wood; they prefer well drained, even rubbly soils, for example the steep little roadside embankment leading to the bridge over the railway at the bottom of Quarry Hill.

On damper ground by the stream that runs through the wood, Crack Willows are the dominant tree although a level meadow area, long neglected, has been transformed to Alder woodland in the few decades that we’ve been here. Horse riders used to break into a canter on this short stretch of open level ground but now what’s left of what was once a conspicuous path has almost disappeared in the thicket of new trees.

It’s hard to imagine the West Yorkshire countryside without Ash trees – they grow like weeds in the right habitat, and their wavy limbs are a wayward contrast to the dominant sturdy but rather dour Sessile Oak. I feel that they’ve got a central role in north country folklore because of their place in Viking mythology.

My guess would be that if they go Sycamores would move in to replace them in most situations. Sycamores have similar ‘helicopter’ seeds; samara is the exotic sounding botanical name for this kind of winged nut. Perhaps in more open areas Silver Birch would take the place of Ash as a coloniser.

Old Rugged Cross

TODAY RICK, a freelance scenic painter, is putting the finishing touches to the Saxon Cross exhibit in the new Wakefield Museum. The last time that you’d have seen a man painting this cross in Wakefield would have been over a thousand years ago.

In this reconstruction what remains of the shaft of the original, covered in plastic sheeting in my drawing (and no, Rick’s not going to paint that bit!), is in a plain Anglo Saxon knotted tendril design, with no birds, beasts or warriors popping out from the tracery. It might date from any time from the 800s to just before the Norman conquest.

Saxon crosses were painted and, judging from surviving artwork of the period, such as The Lindisfarne Gospels, they would have used the brightest colours available. We’re used to seeing monuments of such antiquity in worn, mellow stone so this reconstruction reminds us that, in a world where these brighter colours were the exception, this was intended to be a focus of attention – like the sign of a MacDonald’s restaurant today.

When this cross was erected in Wakefield’s market place there might have been a Saxon Church in Wakefield but I suspect that it stood alone as a focus of community life and worship. Paulinus, the Roman missionary who became the first Bishop of York, is said to have preached to the pagan Anglo Saxons at Dewsbury in 627 A.D. The last pagan king in Englad, Penda of Mercia, had been defeated and killed in 655 at the Battle of Winwaed, which was possibly alongside the River Went at Ackworth.

The cross was still standing in 1546 but then disappeared until 1861 when Edmund Waterton, son of the naturalist Charles, rescued it from the demolition of an old butcher’s shop, which stood on the site of Unity Hall, Westgate. It had been used as a doorstep.

Rick painted jungly scenic backdrops for the 1990s revamp of the (Charles) Waterton exhibit Wakefield Museum and he’s painted a fresh jungle backdrop for the new exhibit here in the Museum’s new quarters at Wakefield One. My acrylic on canvas Waterton’s World mural, painted for the 1980s Waterton gallery at the Museum is now in the collection of the Hepworth art gallery. As well as museum work Rick, who lives in Wensleydale, has worked as a scenic artist on numerous Yorkshire Television and Granada series such as Emmerdale and Heartbeat.

As I sketched him, Rick worked mainly with a brush, as his Anglo Saxon predecessors would, but occasionally, to build up a transparent shadow, he’d add a touch of airbrushing.

I’m sure that many visitors will, at a glance, assume that the reconstructed head and base of the cross are three dimensional. The touch of trompe d’oeil that impressed me most were the chipped edges of the base. They look convincingly three-dimensional to me but go close enough and you’ll see that they’re freely painted in blobs of colour.

Parasol

I DIDN’T get as far as I’d hope with identifying fungi last month. Looking back through my sketchbook I found this drawing, made from a photograph taken on a walk around Newmillerdam. As I’ve mentioned in my notes, it was growing not far from the track in mixed woodland which included larch.

I guess that it’s a relative of the Parasol, although this lacks the scales on the stem and the cap has turned concave; the Parasol mushroom, Macrolepiota procera, would be convex, with a boss in the middle but like this fungus, it has a ring around the stem and dark, flattened scales.

Published
Categorized as Fungi Tagged

Fireside Sketch

THE LANDSCAPE is looking increasingly wintry so we appreciate the wood-burning stove when we take my mum out for a coffee at the new garden centre at Grange Moor.

We’ve had a period of zooming around on errands so there’s been little in my sketchbooks recently but I always tell myself that a table of magazines or leaflets in a waiting room, or quick sketch of a mug of coffee is better than nothing!

However with various loose ends tied up I’m really feeling the need to get down to some solid drawing.

These are all from my ‘urban’ sketchbook, the one I take on errands around town. They’re mainly drawn with my Lamy Safari pen except for the wood-burning stove which I wanted to add watercolour to, so I went for an ArtPen filled with Noodler’s ink.

Oakwell Hall Country Park

THE NATURE TRAIL at Oakwell Hall Country Park starts in the picnic area; ‘Blackthorn attracts Bullfinches in winter which eat the nutritious buds . . . ‘

I smiled and thought wouldn’t it be great if birds turned up on cue but the first bird that I saw as I left the car park and entered the Picnic Area was a Bullfinch flying off towards the hedge opposite. I came across a group of three later on the trail.

From the viewpoint on the nature trail.

The trail sketches in a historical background to the park. Once it’s been explained to you, you can see the evidence of one wood having been cut for firewood at the end of the Second World War and another wood having been planted after the closure of  Gomersal Colliery.

The multiple stems of this sessile oak, each 60 or 70 years old, are a clue that it was coppiced – cut back to the stump – in the middle of the last century.

The trail also helped me identify the plant that I’d drawn by the little stream in what had been a railway cutting. There are no flowers at the moment but the trail illustrates Brooklime, a plant that I’m not very familiar with.

I think this is Broad Buckler Fern, growing in the shady, damp woodland of the old railway cutting.

By coincidence they also illustrate Comma Butterfly which I was surprised to see, very briefly, flitting through a patch of sunlight at the woodland edge where an iron aqueduct carries a stream across the railway cutting.

The drier soils of the northern part of the wood ‘have favoured the development of a Brich wood’ the trail guide tells us, ‘though native Sessile Oak is slowly spreading into this area.’

There’s still fungus about, for instance in the wood on the site of the old colliery I found a group of this fungus with a pale grey cap, a cap which becomes concave as the fungus grows. I haven’t attempted to identify it.

They were growing in swathes in mixed woodland.

Finally, stepping out of the woodland for a change, here’s cranesbill that was growing on open, drier ground along the edge of the old railway. It grew to about 2 feet, 60 centimetres, with flowers up to an inch and a half, 4cm across.

Link: Oakwell Hall nature trail PDF version; printed version available in the Visitor Centre.

Sweet Chestnut

WHEN I collected this Sweet Chestnut at Newmillerdam a few weeks ago, the spiky case was still green and the nuts, barely ripe, were just starting to peep out as the fruit started to split.

The little necks sticking up from each nut are the remains of the stigma and style – the female parts of the Sweet Chestnut flower. The male part of the flower, a small bobbly ‘catkin’ usually gests detached from the ripening fruit.