Sketches from our lunch stop at the Rose Cottage Tea Rooms, Castleton, yesterday.
The Whodunnit Reader
Tag: Castleton
Pellucid Fly
This pellucid fly, also known as the pellucid hoverfly, obligingly sat on an umbel of hogweed as we photographed it. It’s one of Britain’s largest flies so although I hadn’t brought my DSLR and macro lens, it still made a good subject for my iPhone.
It’s larval stage lives in the nests of bees and wasps, scavenging its way through waste products but also turning carnivore eating the larvae of its hosts.
This is our first visit to the High Peak since before lockdown and we’re on our regular circular walk between Hope and Castleton.
We see are a couple of fresh-looking red admirals, half a dozen meadow browns and a blue dragonfly with a greenish thorax hawking back a forth over a little backwater pool on the bend of this stream, Peakshole Water, downstream from Castleton.
But it wasn’t just us watching insects, unknown to me as a photographed this valerian further downstream at Hope, the insects were watching us. When I downloaded the photograph I spotted this wasp, which must have been hovering within a couple of feet of me, with a ‘what are you doing?’ expression on its face. So rather like the lamb I attempted to photograph stealthily earlier on.
We’re walking rather than sitting and sketching, but I do get a chance to try out my new pen, a Lamy nexx an EF nib, as we wait for lunch at the Castle Inn.
Ernest Bowler, Castleton
Does this moorland scene look familiar to you? I’m guessing that it’s somewhere near Castleton in the Peak District but I’ve never been able to pinpoint the exact location. Please let me know if you have any ideas.
My grandad Maurice Swift, a cabinet maker and funeral director from Sheffield, bought this painting and a another of Peveril Castle from Castleton artist Ernest Bowler in the 1920s.
My mum inherited both pictures in the 1960s so I’d long been familiar with them, although I didn’t get to visit the area until the spring of 2006 when I drew my High Peak Drifter sketchbook. I’d always wondered if Bowler had romanticised the view of the Castle but no, when I drew in Cavedale, I discovered that is pretty much the way it is.
The Secret Life of Paintings
I re-hung the moorland scene today, which gave me a chance to take another look at the back of the painting.
A few years ago, Robin Taylor (see link below) cleaned the painting and revarnished it, bringing back colour to a moorland scene that had always looked rather dour and brownish. You can see from this back view of the canvas that it has been around for a while, but that’s understandable because we’re pretty sure that the painting was hanging in grandad’s house during Sheffield Blitz, 80 years ago last Saturday. The house was damaged beyond repair but grandad managed to salvage some of his possessions, including a boyhood portrait of his father George. This was also oil on canvas and was damaged in the raid but grandad repaired it using a puncture repair kit. The rubber patch is still in place on the back of the canvas.
The ‘fine art restorer’ George Wilkinson, who either framed the picture or repaired it after the bombing raid, was to crop up in grandad’s life a few years later in a rather dramatic fashion.
Sarah Ann
This is my great-grandma, Sarah Ann Swift (nee Truelove), doing her bit for the war effort by making dolls for the Penny-a-Week fund which raised money for hospitals. She lived next door to grandad in a substantial stone-built semi-detached house on Nether Edge Road.
As the Dorniers and Heinkels of the Luftwaffe flew over, my grandma and grandad and my mum sheltered in their air-raid shelter in the back garden but my great-grandma Sarah preferred to head for the shelter of her cellar, along with Queenie the Pomeranian and her pet bird. Great-grandma’s side of the house was so badly damaged that rescuers had to bring her, along with Queenie and the bird, out through the coal chute.
After the raid, grandad and grandma and my mum relocated to Bradway Road, while Sarah Ann not only bought her own house elsewhere in Sheffield but also another house to rent out as a source of income. This didn’t go down well with her only son, my grandad Maurice. He thought it was ridiculous for her to saddle herself with a mortgage at her age, so he bought the house for her.
A few years later when Sarah died, he might well have assumed that she would have left the houses to him. It didn’t turn out like that.
As the funeral cortege drove through the streets of Sheffield, it started snowing. Maurice’s driver, Billy Elliot, pulled in:
“We’ve lost the rest of the party Mr Swift, would you like me to wait for them.”
“Let the b*****s find their own way!” snorted grandad.
After the funeral, organised by my grandad (he was an undertaker, as I’ve said), family and friends gathered for a funeral tea.
A rather nervous solicitor got up and read Sarah’s will. Sarah had left a small savings book to Maurice, which probably didn’t cover his expenses in organising her funeral, but she had left her houses to two young ladies (but that’s another story).
“Does anybody have any questions?” the solicitor asked.
Grandad stood up: “Yes, I’ve got some questions!”
“This should be interesting!” my mum whispered to her friend.
So, the connection with Geo. Wilkinson, ‘fine art restorer’? He acted as one of Sarah’s executors. A brave man to face up to my grandad!
Ten or fifteen years ago, when my mum and I were researching the family tree, we ordered a copy of the will. In the family archive we’ve a letter to Maurice from his solicitors, explaining that although there were defects in the way his mum’s will was worded, it was a valid document.
Further Reading
High Peak Drifter Richard Bell, available from Willow Island Editions, ISBN 1-902467-16-7
Nether Edge in the Second World War compiled by the Nether Edge History Group, Second World War Research team, ISBN 09514003-2, paperback. You can order a copy, £10 plus postage, from the group via this e-mail: nenghistory@gmail.com
My thanks to Andy Beezer, member of the Nether Edge History Group, who a week ago, on the 80th anniversary of Sheffield Blitz, hosted an online Zoom tour of the air-raid shelter for my brother and sister and I. Grandad’s house may be long gone but the robustly-built concrete air-raid shelter survived.
Link
Robin Taylor, Bespoke framing and oil painting restoration services covering Wakefield, Leeds and Dewsbury.
Winnats Pass
11.50 a.m, 60ºF, 15ºC: It reminds me of being in Austria or Switzerland, sitting here with a coffee in the beer garden of the Castle Inn and drawing craggy summits. An energetic group of school children climbs the zig-zag path to Peveril Castle.
1.15 p.m., 52ºF, 11ºC: We’re back at the Rose Cottage Tearooms for lunch, as we were a week ago on our book delivery trip. Then I sketched the upper branches of an ash which seems to have a weeping habit; today I drew its trunk.
Mist over Mam Tor
Losehill has its head in the clouds as we walk along Hollowford Road, the old route between Castleton and Edale. The verges are lush of meadow crane’s-bill, yellow vetchling and meadowsweet.
A male bullfinch investigates a blackthorn by an old field barn then joins his mate as they make their way along the tall hedgerow.
Calf number 500196 takes a passing interest in us as I photograph him through the fence with Mam Tor in the background.
It still amazes me that we can reach this horseshoe shaped valley in just over an hour’s drive from home. We’re delivering books today, so we’ve come the long way around via Sheffield. On what’s become a regular run for us, I find it impressive that such a busy, and what I’d call vibrant city – with galleries, theatres, museums and a botanic garden so close to lonely gritstone moors and green limestone dales.
In the Hope Valley we’re right on the border of these two Peak District landscapes, where tropical limestone seas gave way to the river deltas of where the millstone grit was deposited. Between the two, looming behind calf number 500186, we have a great pile of Mam Tor sandstones and Edale Shales. Which are notoriously unstable. Beyond 500196’s hindquarters, you can see that landslip that closed the A625 Sheffield to Stockport road in 1974.
There’s more lush vegetation by the stream in Castleton including an umbellifer (hogweed?); a garden escape, yellow loosestrife and a clump of reed canary grass, Phalaris arundinacea.
Hope we’ll be back in the Peak District again before too long.
