Tag: 1973

Sutton-cum-Lound Gravel Pits, 1973

gravel lorry sketch

From my sketchbook (and diary) from 50 years ago today, Thursday, 23 August, 1973:

Mother and I visited Grandma (in excellent form). Such a fine afternoon that I took a walk out to the Gravel Pits that I haven’t visited since I was so high (well a little higher than that perhaps).

sketchbook page

A rich hedgerow was suffering from the dust of gravel lorries.

81 coots (mainly & a few tufted)
15 lapwing

sketchbook page

Common Persicaria, Pollygonum persicaria, is typical of disturbed and damp ground such as there was about the gravel workings. The leaves often have a dark blotch. Also known as Redshank.

One explanation of the dark patch is that the Devil once pinched the leaves and made them useless as they lack the fiery flavour of water-pepper.

Shetlanders used to extract a yellow dye from it.

Yes, this was a potato – the gravel pit seems to have been partly filled by rubbish.

In Search of a Lost Museum

Mother and I stopped off in Barnsley on our way to Grandma’s. According to The Naturalist’s Handbook there is a museum there.

comic strip search for the museum

“This building was the Harvey Institute, many years ago, and there was a museum here, which was in what is now the Junior Library.”

Notes from a Nervous Student

still life

A few more sketches from 1973. I’d been hand lettering my Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield and I was worried about my shaky hands:

Fell boot

. . . `I didn’t get very much work done on the book. It’s the energy flow chart I’m doing. But my hands are so shaky when I try to do letter forms. I have to practice quite a bit to get it right, but it’s so maddening; a real curse. Depending on how this book goes I think that I shall have to give up hand lettering for good; or have the operation for Parkinson’s Disease . . . or try a different pen or pen nib.

When I’ve calmed down and don’t worry too much about each letter and curve I can produce readable lettering . . . it’s like walking – if you start thinking about each step you soon trip up

My diary for Wednesday, 15th August, 1973
haversack

Fifty years later I’m still hand lettering and still worrying about my shaky hands, although it’s nothing to do with Parkinson’s Disease, it’s just the regular Essential or Familial Tremor (which can be controlled by drinking red wine!)

It wasn’t all agonising about artwork though: I recorded ‘!! SEVEN REDSHANK !!’ on the Wyke and 3 sandpipers on the river.

Operation Osprey, 1973

Osprey sketchbook

Fifty years ago today I was halfway through a 3-week stint as a volunteer warden for the RSPB’s Operation Osprey at Loch Garten.

osprey sketchbook page

A squirrel came down from the shutters into the hide and ran off with an entire Rich Abernethy biscuit.

The female osprey seemed considering an extension to the nest . . .

  1. Because the young are growing and knock her out of the nest every time they exercize
  2. the nest slipped over the other day.
sketchbook

WEDNESDAY 1st of AUGUST

Up Cairngorm with Linda & Bill . . . by chairlift to the middle station: the top section was closed because of high winds. Just beyond the Ptarmigan Restaurant a noise like a motor starting or one of the snow fences creaking in a the wind . . . a ptarmigan, no 3, no 10 . . . we walked towards them when they started moving we counted thirty but when they were still their plumage looked like granite only the white wings showed. Cairngorm had his head in the clouds. We turned back down.

Newmillerdam, 1973

It’s hard to believe that the top end of Newmillerdam Country Park was ever as open as this. Richard Brook photographed the upper end of the lake from the end of the Causeway on Sunday, 9 September, 1973. He describes this as the ‘fish hatchery and cleared area’. I remember the slope on the right being birch woodland before it was clear-felled and, like Richard, I took photographs here, in my case before the felling started, so I must set about archiving those too.

But for the time being, I’m taking a break as I’ve now finished the first two boxes of Richard’s slides; there are three still to go. I’m looking forward to more glimpses of familiar habitats as they once were.

As with the Stanley Ferry Flash photograph, Richard returned to the scene, in this case seven years later, on Monday, 26 May, 1980, but this time he’s looking down the lake across what he calls the willow swamp with the Causeway in the background (to me it looks like the lake-shore path in the distance, rather than the Causeway).

Again there’s a bare slope which I believe was as a result of felling conifers which had been planted in the 1960s after the original deciduous woodland had been felled.

Very different from the dense woodland of today.

Stanley Ferry Flash

The same view of Stanley Ferry Flash, near Wakefield, taken by Richard Brook on Sunday, 9 September, 1973 (above), and on Friday, 24 January, 1986 (below). The colliery spoil heap in the background, from one of the Stanley Collieries, perhaps Stanley Deep Drop, has grown, or at least been reshaped in the intervening years.

Part of the spoil heap area became Stanley Marsh Nature Reserve.

Common Reed, Phragmites, has colonised the area, although some reedmace remains. The rough grasses, greater willowherb and water plantain seem to have been drowned out, so I wonder if the whole site subsided, or whether water levels stayed about the same but the reed out-competed the other plants.

Greater willowherb, reedmace and water plantain, 1973.

 

 

Grand Arcade

Grand ArcadeLooking for some old slides I came across this Leeds street scene from the early 1970s. It’s the sort of everyday view that it would never normally occur to me to photograph. Martin Salisbury, one of our tutors in graphic design at Leeds Polytechnic, suggested that I should go out and photograph the city to bring a bit of contrast to a project on prehistoric Yorkshire that I was working on.

busThe streets that I walked through are already part of history and I wish that I’d taken more shots.

When I see archive film of events such as the miners strike of 1974 (there was another ten years later) it’s hard to believe that the environment looked so  monochromatic and dismal.

Today television dramas set this period are usually shot in low key colour. My Agfa Gavaert colour slides show that that’s not artistic license; it really was like that.

miniIt’s so long ago that even the minis were half-timbered. In every photograph that I’ve looked at so far, all the vehicles that I can identify are British-made. Those look like Rovers in the background.

And would you believe that there are no parking restrictions so near the centre of the Leeds?!