I’ve got a stack of Dalesman magazines in the attic, a run of them from January 2013 (with a few breaks) when the editor, Adrian Braddy, invited me to start writing my Wild Yorkshire nature diary for the magazine.
Since then I’ve worked with Adrian’s successors, Jon Stokoe, briefly with Dan Clare and, for the last three years with the current editor Mick Smith.
I’ve completed more than 250 nature diary pages so far.
1991: Malham in Winter
In January 1991, when David Joy was the editor, I’d written an article for them on Malham. There were just two pages of full colour in the magazine, so it was an honour to have my pen and watercolour sketch of Malham in the snow included.
Adrian Braddy
That venerable chronicle of Paradise on Earth, the Dalesman, has appointed a new editor, only the sixth since it was founded in 1939.
The man now sliding his feet under a desk made most famous by Bill Mitchell is Adrian Braddy, who at 34 has plenty of time and energy to steer the magazine through current challenging times.
It may be less challenged than many rivals, as possessor of a formula which sees it sell 36,500 copies a month at £2.60, nearly three times as many as its stablemate Cumbria and top of the remaining regional magazines in the UK.
Martin Wainwright, The Guardian, 14th November, 2012
2013: Pennine Peat
Adrian got in touch because he’d spotted my Wild Yorkshire blog, which I’d been writing for 15 years since 1998, and he thought that the magazine could include a regular nature diary. I got to work immediately and made the deadline for the January edition.
For the first year the focus was on my local patch – the garden, the river and Coxley Valley – with a few articles going further afield, to the coast and up onto the Pennine Moors at Holme Moss.
2014: Summer Visitors
With the Tour de France opening stages bringing a lot of attention to the most gruelling Pennine hill-climbs, I made a point of exploring the moors above Haworth and Ilkley. Back home, took a closer look at garden wildlife with my new camera with its 30x zoom lens, a 200x digital microscope and a UV moth trap.
2015: On the Reserve
I like flowers, fungi and landscapes because I can settle down to draw them without the frustration of them moving away before I’m finished, so to include a few birds in my nature diary I headed to RSPB Old Moor where you’re guaranteed to see wildfowl and waders loafing around for long enough to draw them. It’s also a great place to get close to marsh orchids.
Adrian had the idea of incorporating mugshots of the regular writers. My thanks to James Garlick of Pink Pig sketchbooks who photographed me at Cannon Hall, Pink Pig sketchbook in hand, as the cover star their 2015 Trade Catalogue (and, as a thank you presented me with a handful of their sketchbooks).
2016: Three Peaks
Despite its name, the Dalesman includes stories from the length and breadth of Yorkshire so Adrian was quite happy for me to include our go-to escape to the hills, Langsett, on the edge of the Peak District National Park, which straddles the border with Derbyshire.
2017: The Squirrels of Snaizeholme
This is the first of a series of sketchbook format Wild Yorkshire nature diaries, suggested by Adrian, which I enjoyed putting together. I photographed a blank spread of my A5 portrait Pink Pig sketchbook on a mossy background at Aysgarth and added my sketches and hand lettering in Photoshop.
2018: Hips, Haws and Yams
For the whole of 2018 I enjoyed concocting the sketchbook format spreads as they gave my drawings room to breathe, but this is for the Dalesman and Adrian started to get comments from readers that there wasn’t actually a lot to read here . . .
2019: Summer Meadow
Here’s one solution we tried, weaving the text into a spread. Adrian said this was the most difficult spread he’d ever dealt with as he had to set the length of each line individually to flow around the insects.
2020: Bolton Abbey Woods
A new editor at the Dalesman, Jon Stokoe.
In June our friends Clive and Jenny from Sussex were visiting and keen to see pied flycatchers so we set off for Bolton Abbey Woods. No pied flycatchers unfortunately but our walk through the woods gave me plenty of material for this nature diary spread.
2021: The Lockdown Naturalist
My May 2021 diary featured my friend Roger as the Lockdown Naturalist, from a homemade birthday card I’d drawn for him when non-essential shops were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. For a while we couldn’t roam far and wide in Yorkshire but on the one-hour exercise walk we were allowed each day, we saw species such as brown hare and skylark on our local patch in places that we hadn’t spotted them before.
2022: Animated Nature
Drawing ducks and gulls at Newmillerdam inspires me to make a short animated film.
2023: Winter’s Afternoon
I’ve chosen so many spreads from the summer and from further afield but my January 2023 spread featured part of my local patch that I’d known since I ran the school cross country (or walked, finding some interesting short cuts, once we were out of sight of the school).
Those rusty trackside junction boxes, daubed with a bit of graffiti, in the photograph aren’t the real thing: they’re part of a huge model railway layout, 200 feet long, which depicts the Dewsbury to Healey Mills line as it was about the time that my friend John and I ambled around the cross country route.
2024: Morels and Scurvygrass
Roadside flowers and fungi from March 2024.
2025: Fascinating Ferns
Last month’s page inspired me to do a short talk on the ferns of Wakefield for this month’s members’ night at the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society, with a bit of help from my friend Sue Gaynor on the biographical details of Thomas Gissing.
