Brockholes

WE TAKE the Mallard car ferry to Waterhead then walk along the lakeside path through the woods, following a trail of snack packets as there’s a school party ahead of us, some of whom have brought their own music with them. The way through the woods must be so boring for them without the music and snacks!

Columbine

For us though, it’s a break for coffee and a scone at the newly reopened National Trust property Wray Castle. The steam launch Columbine is down at the landing stage as we wait for the ferry to Brockholes.

Monkey Puzzle

While a second school party disembarks and heads for the treetop walk (now that does look fun) we decide it’s time for tea and a toasted teacake on the terrace by the house, where I draw this Monkey Puzzle. Monkey Puzzles, Araucaria, evolved at a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and you can appreciate that only the tallest sauropod, standing on its hind legs, would be able to browse the scaly foliage on its top branches.

Deep in the Wood

The last time that we were at Brockholes was in 1987 when I launched my children’s book Deep in the Wood. Barbara and I organised the event with the Lake District National Park, informed the local press and booked ourselves into a bed and breakfast at Hawkshead. All the publishers had to do was supply the books and we’d seen them a few days before and their top rep had promised to do that.

‘Have the books arrived yet?’ I asked in eager anticipation when we called in at Brockholes the day before the event.

‘No, no sign of them, have you got copies with you?’

I had yet to even see a copy so we phoned the publishers who told us that, yes, they were going to send them but when they went to the stock room they found that the book had sold out in the first few days of publication, so they couldn’t!

They rounded up a few copies from around the office and sent them on via overnight courier. I think this was when I realised that my future lay in self-publishing!

As it happened, it rained heavily all weekend so we had sufficient books for the few visitors who braved the weather. As a consolation, the Lakeland National Park Authority invited us to take a stall at their annual national show at Chatsworth. Princess Diana opened the show and on her tour of the marquees took a brief look at our stall. But she didn’t buy a copy of the book for William and Harry. She seemed rather shy but we’d been instructed not to talk to her unless she spoke to us first. I was equally nervous; I’d been determined to be drawing when she came to the stall but I just froze as she stopped to take a look. This awkward moment ended when a child, peeking in through a gap in the canvas behind our stall, waved at her. Diana smiled and moved on.

In fact the only person who she talked to in the whole marquee was a watercolourist, who was the only exhibitor who had her back turned to the public, as she was working on a painting. Diana leaned over to take a closer look and confided to her; ‘I’m hopeless at that!’ (unlike Prince Charles who has painted watercolours for years).

Birds at the feeding station included Nuthatch and a juvenile Great Spotted Woodpecker.

Return Trip

Langdale from Brockholes landing stage

The return ferry, taking an anticlockwise route around the northern end of Windermere via Ambleside back to Bowness gave me an opportunity to draw the landscape, and add some watercolour.

Hills to the north east of Ambleside

Western shore of Windermere, Ambleside to Bowness.

 

Amelia

WE JOINED my sister and her family (including her latest grandchild, Ivy, left) at their holiday cottage, a barn conversion, at Applethwaite near Keswick. The barn is built into the hillside so Amelia, one of two sows that live in the adjoining field, can poke her snout into the sitting room window, at ground level on her side, windowsill level on ours.

Seeing her from this angle, I immediately guessed that she was a Pot-bellied pig, which she isn’t, then seeing her lying down in the field Gloucester Old Spot came to mind but looking at a book on pig breeds which the owners of the cottage have helpfully left for the use of guests I realised that wasn’t likely to be her breed either. And she could be a cross-breed.

It might have helped if I could have drawn Amelia’s porcine companion, Wilma. Don’t tell Amelia that I said this but Wilma is actually better looking, however she’s also less sociable. She won’t come over for a chat and instead she sat herself down out of view behind a water-tank in the field.

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Travel Booklet

Bowness on Windermere, Cumbria, 5.35 pm 1/7/12 OS REF. SD 402967

VIEW FROM our 2nd floor room at the Belsfield, looking south to Storrs (108 metres above sea level), the little knoll below the Jackdaw to the left of centre of my sketch, two miles (3km) away, on the eastern shore of Lake Windermere. I’ve heard it said that Storrs means ‘the stony place’ but the Old Norse storõ refers to a young plantation or wood, a common element in Pennine hill-country. It makes sense here because this Storrs is flanked by Birk Head wood on it’s eastern (here left) shoulder, Black Beck wood on its western (lake) side slope.

A Jackdaw flying over the flat roofs of the apartments doubles back and drops down to join two more Jackdaws on the top branches of a sliced-off conifer. One of them turns to it in begging pose, lowering its head and wing-flapping. This begging bird appears from this distance to be an adult so perhaps this is a female demanding food from her mate.

Gargrave & Grasmere

We stopped at Gargrave (left) for lunch where I drew the view towards the river from the Dalesman Cafe. I was just starting to add colour when I noticed the ink ran immediately as I started adding the grey wash for the sky. I realised, luckily before I washed any of the pen and ink away, that I’d drawn with the ArtPen I keep loaded with ArtPen ink (water soluble) cartridges, not the one I keep filled with waterproof Noodler’s ink.

 

We stopped at Grasmere in the afternoon where I bought a couple of Hahnemüehle Travel Booklets from the Heaton Cooper Studio. These are to fit in my latest, and smallest ever, art bag; a small format camera case-sized Lifeventure Passport wallet. Even so, one of these 9x14cm stitched booklets only just zips into the case.

You can see in this wobbly first sketch, of the chimney of the Lamb Inn, drawn from the shelter of the Miller Howe tearoom, Grasmere village, that the ‘High Quality Sketch Paper, 140 gsm’, isn’t as white as the cartridge in the Pink Pig sketchbooks that I normally use. A suitably mellow background for my holiday sketches.

 These booklets are an indispensable companion for retaining notes, thoughts, stories, impressions, sketches and anything unusual that comes your way.

Says the label. It makes you want to pop one in your pocket and set off on your travels.

This is the view from our table in the dining room at the Belsfield, overlooking the landing stage at Bowness. You can see why we keep coming back!

Links; Hahnemuehle sketchbooks, Belsfield Hotel, Heaton Cooper Studio.

Flock to Ossett

THE LAST NUMBER that Drighillton Band play at the Flock to Ossett carnival is Singing in the Rain. Fortunately it stays fine until the grand parade that rounds up the proceedings when papiere mache sheep are paraded around the market square. At Halifax at the Diamond Jubilee celebrations a few weeks ago, heavy rain turned a papiere mache spit roast ox soggy and it fell into the flames and caught fire. No such disasters today.

Monoprint

IT RARE for me to produce any kind of print so I took the opportunity of joining the children who were making monoprints from thin sheets of expanded polystyrene in the Faceless theatre company tent at today’s Horbury Show. My friend John Welding has designed the artwork on the tent, which is a cross between a bouncy castle and a large igloo so I decided to draw that as simply as I could on paper (along with the Faceless 9ft tall Heron and accompanying Ornithologist, who had just made a tour of the showground), then traced it through to the other side of the paper to get a reversed image, before scoring the lines through onto the polystyrene.

I’d greatly overestimated the ability of the bobbly textured polystyrene to produce a fine line so John’s design of interlinked hands doesn’t show at all but, there you are, a finished print in 30 minutes or so.

The Boathouse

We took a walk around Newmillerdam this afternoon and discovered that the Friends of Newmillerdam were serving hot drinks and cakes so I was able to sit and sketch an oak tree from a cafe table at the lakeside.

Cluntergate

THE NAME of Cluntergate is thought to come from the Viking klunter meaning logs or blocks and gata meaning a path or road.

The dialect word clunter is either a big lump or a clattering noise. I can picture Cluntergate being a muddy thoroughfare up the slope into Horbury with logs laid down along the boggier parts. Any cart approaching this way would clatter as it negotiated the logs.

This little Jack Russel terrier was tethered outside a shoe shop on Horbury High Street. It gave such a friendly greeting to each passer by that I wondered if one of them was going to prove to be its owner, but as we went off to our next port of call it was still there, patiently waiting.

A Walk in Wharfedale

THIS SUMMER we’ve had so much cool rainy weather and few mornings like this; warm but not sultry; clear, bright sunlight and intensely blue skies with fair weather cumulus. With trees in full leaf and verges frothing with Cow Parsley the countryside now has the fullness of summer but grasses, flowers and foliage still have the un-nibbled freshness of spring.

We’ve missed out on this, a favourite spring walk through Wharfedale, in the last two or three years and when we arrive at Skipton we discover that we can’t get to our starting point at Bolton Abbey by bus because the county council has been cutting back on rural services (except at weekends), so we opt for a taxi. But we start our walk from the bus stop and just over the wall, down in a culverted water course, the first bird that we see is a Dipper flying low just above the water under a old stone bridge, which I guess is where it has its nest.

‘Have you seen any Kingfishers?’ a couple ask us later on the walk. No Kingfishers but we’re pleased that despite the recent heavy rains there’s a lot of activity around a Sand Martins colony in the riverbank at Gibson’s Mill, where a pair of Oystercatchers are standing on the sand below and a Grey Heron stalking in the pasture beyond.

Whenever I see Bolton Abbey, whether its on television or on a calendar, I always think that it’s about time we visited it again and at last here we are. Some day I’ll buy the guide book and study the ruins but today we’re here for a riverside walk, so we backtrack along the Dales Way to its official starting point in Ilkley.

Addingham is perfectly placed for a coffee stop and when we reach Ilkley we take a break on a bench in the shade of riverside trees overlooking the Old Bridge where the sign ‘Bowness 82 miles’ marks the start of the Dales Way.

A Kind of Loving

ONE OF THE OPENING events in the Flock to Ossett arts and crafts festival is a rehearsed reading in Holy Trinity church of John Godber’s new adaptation of Stan Barstow’s novel A Kind of Loving. It works well with just six actors – two playing Vic and Ingrid and the other four taking all the other roles; a dozen or more characters.

As with the novel, the story is told from Vic’s point of view; he’s the only character who can break into a scene and tell the audience how he feels about the way things are going. That’s something that you miss out on in John Schlesinger’s film version and in the television adaptation that Stan himself made in the 1980s. The dramatic device of talking directly to the audience doesn’t fit well with the kind of everyday realism that a director needs to create as a believable setting for the the story in a screen version but on stage you’re not in the actual locations, so the audience is already having to use its imagination to picture the characters on a bus, in a drawing office, in the park and so on, so there isn’t the same jolt that you might get if a character turned to the camera and explained how they felt in a gritty northern drama.

This limitation must have occurred to Schlesinger because his next film was about another young man working in a northern city, Billy Liar, but in that we keep drifting into the alternative reality, a minor European principality, that the hero keeps escaping to in his imagination.

Introducing the read-through, Godber explains that he took all the dialogue he needed directly from the novel, adding only a handful of words of his own, but there’s a Godber feel to this adaptation in the pace, the ensemble playing, the vividly sketched characters and the humour.

But really that’s all in the original novel too. I think that the reason that I hadn’t realised, for example, that there was so much humour in the novel, humour that comes from observation of character, was that I read it when I was Vic’s age -about 21. The main thing that I took away then was how easily Vic went from being free and independent, with all sorts of ambitions in his life, to seeing control of his life slipping away as others, particularly to his mother-in-law who is truly scary but not in a pantomime villain kind of way.

At twenty one, just starting at the Royal College of Art and with no clue as to how I’d support myself through my work, let alone a surprise instant family and mortgage, it read like a cautionary horror story.

I can see the wider picture now and smile, even while I’m sympathising with Vic and Ingrid’s dilemma.

Links; Theatre Royal, Wakefield; John Godber Company; Flock to Ossett

Ackworth School

A QUAKER SCHOOL since 1779, the main buildings of Ackworth date from 1757 and were originally built as a Foundling Hospital, taking in homeless children from London. Two decades later the Society of Friends bought the then empty Hospital and 84 acres of land surrounding it for £7000.

We’re here on a Wakefield Naturalists’ summer field meeting to explore the grounds, which originally included 5 acres of garden and orchard in addition to the the 1¼ acre quadrangle.

Gold Spot

Francis Higginbottom, science teacher at Ackworth School, our guide this morning has left a moth trap on overnight. Perhaps because of the recent unsettled weather there are only half a dozen moths in it, including this Gold Spot, Plusia festucae. This moth is found in damp habitats, such as water meadows and riverbanks. The trap was set up a hundred yards or so from the River Went. Those gold spots have a metallic sheen to them.

Bird Life

A pair of Sparrowhawks is nesting in a sycamore by the cricket pitch and Long-tailed Tit had built, and now abandoned, having reared a brood, this nest, which incorporates spiders’ webs and lichen.

Nearby on the ground there’s turquoise blue Starling’s egg.

Bird Count

THE BIRDS looked so miserable in the non-stop rain yesterday that we decided to postpone doing the RSPB garden bird survey until today. A shame; if we’d stuck to the hour that we’d originally planned we’d have been able to include a young Grey Heron that flew down to the raised bed behind the pond, then flew off again when I opened the studio window to shoo it off, as I don’t want it to eat our frogs and Smooth Newts.

We also missed out on the Nuthatch which has been a regular visitor but the survey is supposed to be a snapshot of what turned up during a particular hour and, as you can see from my sketches (above), we saw most of our regulars, for instance the Blue Tits, which are looking dull and bedraggled after all the work they’ve put in feeding their young recently. We didn’t see the fledglings leave the nestbox, as this usually happens early in the morning, but we noticed that the parents were coming to the feeders then heading straight back to the wood, so presumably they’ve taken the youngsters there.

Also putting in appearance during the hour, as you can see from my sketches, were Great Tit, Wood Pigeon, Chaffinch, Bullfinch, Dunnock and Greenfinch.