Leaning on a Lamppost

I’M WRITING an article for a local magazine/newsletter and decided to take a closer look at the people that you see in the photographs and postcards of a century ago. Sometimes they’re going about their everyday business but more often they’re aware of the photographer, like this man leaning on the lamppost at Middlestown crossroads.

The Dickensian huddle of buildings behind him was later replaced by the buildings of the local Co-operative Society, including a cinema. The village’s fish and chip shop, The Grumpy Friar, and the pharmacy now stand there. I don’t remember it myself, but I believe that Middlestown Church stood on the corner to the right.

The sign points to Wakefield and Huddersfield to the northeast and southwest, Thornhill Edge and Overton to the left and the right.

Tinker the Mystery Cat

I’ve been puzzling over this undated sketch in my everyday sketchbook, the 8 inch square format, that I usually use for pen and ink, that I often have with me on urban errands.

But I couldn’t remember visiting a cafe or a shop that had cats, nor had we been in anyone’s home who kept cats. But we’d obviously been introduced to Tinker, since cats don’t readily tell you their names (see T. S. Eliot).

Then I remembered that we hadn’t met Tinker indoors; he (or she?) is one of Paul the gardener’s cats, or perhaps I should say Paul the gardener is the cats’ Human, that seems to be the way it works, and Tinker, a rather sociable cat, was enjoying the morning sun in his garden in Horbury.

He’s a pretty laid-back cat.

Line and Tone

I was reading an introduction to a How to Draw the Human Figure by Victor Ambrus about figure drawing recently.

For me springy line is the trademark of his work but surprisingly he warned his readers off focusing on line when drawing people.

I’m used to Ruskin’s advice that you should draw outlines (such as the branches of a tree) with as much care as you would make a map (of a river delta, for instance) for a group of pedantic and litigious landowners.

Ambrus’s drawings have that kind of precision and you’d think that he’d have a similar method in his mind as he drew but he points out that you shouldn’t be looking for outlines as such. If you’re drawing a nearby figure (as opposed to a distant tree) you’re seeing three-dimensional forms, which, if you’ve got vision in both eyes, don’t have a precise edge. So, I guess he’s saying, draw the forms not the edges.

He also points out that tones don’t stop abruptly at the edges of the form. I’ve always thought of this as a problem (for instance when my grizzled, not to say white, hair blends seamlessly into a white background on a passport photograph!) but it’s something to look out for as you draw. We don’t live in a world that resembles a paint-by-numbers colouring book, with precise edges and abrupt transitions of tone and colour.

I tried to keep all this in mind as I drew my left hand!

Queues Ahead

WHEN WE saw the flashing warnings for a queues ahead we thought that it was just the normal morning rush but unfortunately there had been an accident involving seven cars on the approach to junction 35 (the Rotherham junction of the M1, heading south). As we waited, drivers were strolling about chatting to each other while police cars, fire engines and ambulances hurtled along the hard shoulder to reach the scene.

My way of dealing with an unspecified period of waiting would normally be to draw anything from the natural world, a way of escaping from the situation, but although there is a belt of woodland along this stretch of the motorway I felt the need to keep looking ahead, just in case the traffic started moving again, which it did after an hour and half, giving me plenty of time to draw what I find a difficult subject, the cars ahead.

Published
Categorized as Urban Tagged

Waterton’s Watchtower

I’D ALWAYS assumed that the stone watchtowers that Charles Waterton(1793-1865) built around Walton Park were primarily birdwatching hides where Waterton, accustomed to life in the tropics, could take shelter on walks around his nature reserve but when I read an account of a visitor to the Park in 1835, I realised that these were intended as sentry boxes. It was all very well for Waterton to enclose his sanctuary with a long high wall but in order to ensure that his pheasants and wildfowl wouldn’t be disturbed by gangs of poachers from the local towns, he had to organise night patrols.

I believe there were four towers originally of which I’ve seen three. Two of them were in ruins and have now disappeared without a trace but the third has been restored. They are positioned in strategic points such as where the stream flows out of the Park under the wall and at the diagonally opposite corner with a view down the slope to the Lake.

On an evening visit to a neighbouring wood Waterton once surprised a poacher. In the ensuing fight Waterton, who was on his own, without the support of his trusty gamekeeper, John Ogden, was wrestled to the ground. Fortunately he fought off his assailant by grabbing him by the cravat and choking him until he ceased his attack and fled.

Again for this illustration I’ve worked from reference, this time from two photographs kindly supplied by John Whitaker, curator at Wakefield Museum. I hadn’t realised that the towers originally had a conical turret roof. When the watchtower was restored a few years ago the roof was omitted, I guess for structural reasons, but what a difference it made when I reconstructed the tower with the roof in place. It changed from looking like a military installation to looking like something out of a fairy tale, the sort of enchanted little tower that a traveller would find on a walk through the woods.

No doubt one or two gangs of poachers were in for a big surprise on the night that they they went down to the woods and first came across the tower and the band of guardians that presumably hid inside it.

Waterton’s Wall

CHARLES WATERTON completed his wall around Walton Park in 1821. It had taken five years to build and cost £9,000. Refusing to go into debt to complete it, Waterton, who as a teetotal Yorkshire squire was something of a rarity, quipped that he’d paid for it with the money he hadn’t spent on claret.

It seems a simple concept today but it had never occurred to anyone before to enclose an area with the sole purpose of providing a sanctuary for wildlife. Enclose an area to hunt wildlife, yes, but not to preserve it for the purposes of enjoying it for its own sake and studying its habits.

He also pioneered the concept of a country park by providing an area for picnics and outdoor concerts in a clearing in a small wood near the farm buildings known as the Grotto. Keeping some areas strictly for the birds and allowing open access to the public in others ensured that visitors didn’t unduly disturb the birds and animals in the perfect patch of unspoilt countryside (a rare commodity in the industrial districts of mid-Victorian West Yorkshire) that they’d come to enjoy.

Waterton been inspired by his experience of the wilderness of what is now Guyanna to recreate a pristine version of as many English natural habitats as he could fit into his park; lake, swamp, hedgerow and woodland. He regretted that he didn’t have an arm of the sea available to complete his selection.

He picked up ideas on his travels in Europe, notably the use of ivy to cover ruins which he’d seen in Italy in a park where pheasants could coexist with the throng of townsfolk taking a stroll because the birds had instant access to dense cover.

I’ve enjoyed working on this illustration even though I decided not to go on location to draw it, which is usually my preference. I’d taken a photograph of one of the few complete and uneroded sections of the wall in the summer, so I worked from that. As you can imagine drawing the sandstone blocks of the wall had a therapeutic effect on me. Unlike when I’m writing, I find that I can listen to the radio as I do this kind of step by step drawing, alternating from classical music on Radio 3 and news and documentaries on Radio 4. Bliss.

I don’t as yet know whether the final use for this illustration will be in black and white or colour so I took a high resolution scan before I started adding the watercolour. The illustration has to sit easily with nineteenth century engravings of the Park.

The line drawing was in Noodlers black ink, using an ArtPen with an extra fine nib.

Mobbed

1.10 p.m., Horbury; A BARRED brown Sparrowhawk is being mobbed by a flock – a ‘charm’ but I’m sure that the Sparrowhawk doesn’t see it that way – of about 20 Goldfinches over the trees by the Memorial Park. It swoops over the town hall then soars up towards the convent, pausing occasionally at the top of its arc of flight, as if it’s considering stopping to hover like a Kestrel.

Blacklight

The new Field Guide to the Micro Moths of Great Britain and Ireland by Phil Sterling and Mark Parsons, illustrated by Richard Lewington, has inspired me to have a go at setting up a moth trap at the end of the garden in my recently mown and hacked back ‘meadow area’.

Having asked a couple of friends who’ve done a bit of moth trapping – in fact one of them has done moth surveys for a living since since he left college – I’ve decided to go for the cheaper but more fiddly option of making my own moth trap.

The basis of this is a low energy flourescent blacklight; a 20 watt ultra violet light as used in discos.

Martins

As I walk down the garden to close the greenhouse, 14 House Martins are circling and chattering a hundred feet above the meadow. A reminder that autumn hasn’t totally set in although it won’t be long before they set off back to Africa.

I pick a couple of Supersweet tomatoes in the greenhouse and a couple of raspberries from the canes as I walk past, none of which makes it back to the kitchen.

Sketchy Impressions

First page in a new A4 Pink Pig cartridge paper sketchbook.

By the way, apologies for the scrappy drawings but there’s a reason for these. I’m out of the habit of regular sketching, particularly of wildlife subjects so I decided that to get myself back in drawing mode for the autumn I’d go back to the main method that I used for my Wild West Yorkshire nature diary in the early years, drawing the day’s wildlife observations from memory in as simple a way as possible, in this case fountain pen and watercolour crayons.

To get over the time that I spend sitting at the computer writing and revising text, I decided that I’d also write my notes in the sketchbook.

Writing by hand makes me slow down and think about what I’m writing and it usually turns out to be coherent enough not to need the revisions and tweaks that I always find myself doing when I’m typing my thoughts directly to the computer.

To Mow a Meadow

The meadow area this afternoon, before cutting.

THE END of summer; I think that the time’s right for cutting back the small meadow area at the end of the garden. There are a few scarlet poppies but most of the flowers are over now and should have set seed.

As I empty the trimmings on the compost heap, a Robin comes so close to me that I could reach out and touch it. There are two of them, equally tame, one hopping around where I’ve mown, the other near the shed. For the moment they seem to be sharing the garden in peace.

But inevitably cutting back this grassroot jungle has left one or two creatures homeless.

I try to mow the grass in sequence of swathes that will allow frogs and toads to gradually retreat towards the hedge as I progress. I get a brief glimpse of something hopping away near the log pile but I’m afraid that a couple of large slugs aren’t so lucky. I know they’re a traditional gardener’s ‘enemy’ but I’d have rescued them if I’d spotted them first.

I can see what appear to be vole runs in the turf and I notice two tiny newts, wriggling through the debris looking for cover in crevices in the damp earth. I manage to carefully rescue one and release it under the cover of the hedge, near next door’s pond.

Hope the Robin doesn’t spot it as it hops around under the hedge.

Mare Humorum

8 pm; A WAXING gibbous is hanging serenely above the wood so I set up my telescope on the desk and spend an hour drawing craters, mountains and maria, sketching the basics in pencil then picking out features in pen.

It’s the first time that I’ve used my telescope since I started wearing varifocals and I’m pleased that with the rubber eyepieces folded down I can manage reasonably well. I’ve never found it easy to draw using a telescope.

As always, most of the detail is near the terminator (the line between the sunlit and shaded halves of the Moon) but on the illuminated side the rays of the craters Copernicus and Tycho are prominent. These rays cross other – therefore older – features so Copernicus, at 93 kilometres in diameter, and Tycho, 85 kilometres, are relatively younger.

In the southwest quarter, Mare Nubium and Mare Humorum are the ‘Sea of Clouds’ and the ‘Sea of Moisture’ while Palus Epidemiarum is the ‘Marsh of Diseases’. That doesn’t sound like an appealing destination so it’s not surprising that Apollo 11 headed for Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of Tranquility diagonally opposite in the middle of the northeast quarter of the Moon.

On 20 July 1969 Neil Armstrong, who died at the weekend, set foot there, in what Buzz Aldrin called the ‘magnificent desolation’ of the southwest corner of the Sea of Tranquility.

Curiosity

Mount Sharp, 23 August 2012, image from NASA

Curiosity has just touched down on Mars and is sending back the best pictures yet of the red planet. The colour balance in this photograph has been tweaked so that we can see the natural colour as it would appear in earthly daylight. The disant boulder, a pinhead in the middle of the square is about the same size as the Curiosity rover. So there’s lots of geology to explore.

I’m looking forward to following Curiosity’s progress on the slopes of Mount Sharp.

Of course I’d volunteer if they ever needed an artist in residence on a Mars mission but if the choice was between one spectacular manned mission and half a dozen robotic explorers I’d prefer the latter. We’ve got so much to learn about the planet and so many different landscapes to visit.

Link; NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory

Ichneumon

THIS FEMALE Ichneumon wasp was climbing up the studio window so I caught her in a bug box, photographed then released her and drew from one of the photographs.

As you can see from the scale on the base of the bug box (left) she is about 1cm long with an ovipositor that’s as long again.

She seemed to be a wasp with a mission, busily pacing up the window, pausing only to bend the long ovipositor over for cleaning. I can’t remember now if she held it bent beneath her or over her back. I think the latter.

Just in case there’s anyone out there who can identify the species for me, I’ve included this close up of the wing, as I understand the wing venation is one of the keys to identity. I wasn’t able to take a decent side view.

The nearest I can see in the book is the Large Ichneumon Lampronata setosas but that is getting on for twice the size. This looks like a close relative. The Large Ichneumon uses its long ovipositor to drill into wood to lay its eggs on the larvae of the Goat Moth.

Update; Thank you to Graham for suggesting Rhyssa persuasoria as the species. This is sometimes known as the Giant Ichneumon but a female would normally be two to four times as long as the specimen I drew.

Micro Moth

Colour too much towards the golden in this photograph. It’s more the washed out pale brown of a dried leaf or grass stem. x9 Olympus Tough super-macro setting.

THIS MICRO MOTH lives up to its name as it’s just 11 millimetres in length. It’s the kind of little brown moth that my mum always used to identify as a ‘clothes moth’ but I guess that this one had a vegetarian diet as a caterpillar. There aren’t as many woolly jumpers available in these days of acrylic yarns, so my mum’s old adversary might now be an endangered species. It certainly would be if she had anything to do with it.

I’ve got no intention of attempting to identify such as nondescript moth (although there is now a new field guide, illustrated by Richard Lewington, so that has become at least a possibility) but because I can’t come up with a name that doesn’t mean that I can’t take a closer look at it. By the way, I found it lying dead on the coffee table, so no clues to its natural habitat; garden, woodland, meadow or even pond perhaps.

It isn’t so nondescript if you’re able to zoom in closer. I’ve taken these photographs using my Traveler USB microscope (except for the macro photograph, left).

There’s so much about this moth that reminds me an owl, although its beady eyes and the beak-like appearance of its proboscis (right) remind me more of a frigate bird!

Actually that ‘beak’ has an extra twist at the end; its more like one of those ‘blowout’ party popper novelties.

This moth might be the original little brown job but switch on the LED light of my microscope and its wings glitter like a costume in a West End musical.

The feathery edges of the wings remind me of the soft edges of an owl’s wing feather but I can’t believe that the moth would need them for the same reason; to soften the sound of its wingbeats. Perhaps having those feathery extensions swishing away behind it as it flies might to some small extent muffle the sonar echo that a bat relies on to locate its prey.

Zooming in even closer, using the 60x setting on the microscope, it’s possible to see the individual scales, like tiles on the moth’s wing.

The depth of field at this magnification makes it impossible for me to get both the wing and its feathery margin in focus and when I zoom in to 200x it’s even more difficult however this blurry image (right) does pick out some of the detail on the scales. They appear to have parallel ribbing or surface markings.

Lepidoptera, the order of insects that butterflies and moths belong to, is from the Greek lepid pteron, meaning ‘scale wing’.

Links: Richard Lewington, illustrator of ‘more than 1,100 superbly detailed artworks’ drawn for The Field Guide to the Micro Moths of Great Britain and Ireland, published by British Wildlife Publishing

Catching up with the Joneses

“The past is a foreign country:
they do things differently there.”

L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

I DON’T LIKE to ramble on about my family history too much but I’m so pleased to have made what could be my big breakthrough in tracing my Welsh great grandparents John and Sarah Jones. Lauren posted a comment suggesting that I try www.freebmd.org.uk (BMD; births, deaths and marriages) then obtain a marriage certificate. It had just dawned on me that this could be the way forward.

I had an approximate date – the early 1870s – but it was only when I take a look at the old county boundaries that I realised that in previous searches for the Joneses I might have been looking in the wrong place. The family lived close to the English border and at one stage Sarah’s mum lived on the boundary, between Flintshire and Denbighshire.

Cross Reference

Searching on Free BMD, but not limiting myself to north Wales, I immediately tracked John Jones down as having married in Chester. As you can see from the map above this is the nearest big town to Connahs Quay. The Chester and Holyhead railway, part of the LNWR, ran through the town, putting Chester in easy reach and, in the other direction along the line, Rhyl, where I believe they might have spent their honeymoon.

What I didn’t grasp at first was how from a long list of John Joneses (right) who married in the first quarter of 1872, Free BMD had selected this particular record.

It had cross-referenced this record with the name of the bride I was searching for, Sarah George.

Her name appears in the register not next to John but amongst the Georges. Free BMD has picked out the two reference numbers; Chester, Folio 8a., page 569, the page where you’d find John and Sarah listed together.

But all I need is the approximate date – first quarter of 1872 – and their names and I can write to the Cheshire West and Chester registry office to obtain a copy of their marriage certificate.

Details such as their addresses prior to their marriage and occupations of both the fathers should be some help with the next step in my research.