This morning our pond had frozen over but a month from today the days will start getting longer.
On the little roof terrace at the Boathouse Cafe, Newmillerdam, black-headed gulls glide past the castellated balustrade a few feet away from me at eye level, a fluid, effortlessly elegant flight. A grebe preens out on the lake, a male goosander swims by, crisply black and white in the low winter sun.
A coot calls tetchily, mallards quack and the smell of fresh coffee drifts up from the kitchen below.
As we walked along the beach between Sandsend and Whitby on Friday morning, I spotted this ammonite fossil embedded in the boulder clay cliff. The closely spaced ribs are almost straight, so that it reminded me of a section of reinforced hosepipe.
Dactylioceras was a slow swimming ammonite from the Early Jurassic. This looks like a fragment of the shell of Dactylioceras tenuicostatum, a common fossil found in the Whitby Mudstone Formation at locations such as Port Mulgrave.
The hollow chamber inside the shell has been filled with calcite crystals.
Hildoceras
Hildoceras, also from the Early Jurassic has sickle-shaped ribs and a groove along the triple-keeled groove along the outer edge of the shell.
Triple-keeled groove of Hildoceras
Hildoceras features on the title page of my book Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time, which was published 25 years ago by the British Geological Survey (see link below).
There’s a folktale that they’re the fossilised remains of serpents, driven from the cliff top at Whitby by Abbess St Hilda.
We had seven or eight Howgate Wonder cooking apples from our double cordon by the patio this year, enough to stew to add to our porridge for a week or two.
I’ve done so much black and white work recently that I thought it was time to return to base and go back to brown Lamy pen and my Bijou watercolours to draw this rowan leaf from the front garden. Unfortunately my Pentel Water Brush is all but clogged up now, so the watercolour wash is a bit limited.
When you look closely at this fungus growing on a stump by the lake at Newmillerdam you can see that the cap is dotted with scales and the stem looks rather shaggy.
The nearest that I can get to it in the field guide is honey fungus, but I hadn’t realised that the stems could be so shaggy.
On a felled log, water had gathered in a hole in the bark, creating a temporary habitat.
On our errands this afternoon, I drew one of the carved heads on one of the former banks in Ossett and the door in the Carnegie Free Library in Horbury.
