Boathouse Cafe, Newmillerdam, 11.20am, hazy sky alto-stratus, a few small spots of drizzle in a coolish breeze
A gulls gets the better of a crow, which stops to preen on the ridge tiles of the boathouse roof.
A juvenile cormorant – brown with a light breast – splashes its wings as it makes its way down the lake in what I presume is some kind of preening routine. It then takes off, skimming low over the water to join seven adult cormorants on their favourite resting place, the boughs of a half-submerged fallen tree.
Sketchbook page, attempting to draw black-headed gulls as the wheel past the Boathouse Cafe balcony at eye level.
Up on the balcony at the Boathouse café with a panorama of the lower end of the lake at Newmillerdam on a fine autumn morning with black-headed gulls swooshing by was like being on a mini cruise, especially when accompanied by a pumpkin latte (well, you’ve got to try it once at this time of year).
There were 25 tufted ducks in a scattered group, mostly just resting, although I did see one tackling a medium-sized freshwater mussel.
Many of the gulls were in halfway, teenage, plumage with a shallow inverted ‘V’ on each wing.
The three cygnets of the resident mute swan family were at that halfway stage too, with bands of brown on wings and across the tail covets.
The lone great-crested grebe was probably one of this year’s young, or possibly an adult moulting into dull winter plumage.
Yesterday morning I followed a woodland path alongside Bushcliff Beck up beyond the top end of the lake at Newmillerdam but a tree had fallen and I diverted through the undergrowth, dodging between some old elder bushes.
Ordnance Survey 25 inch, surveyed 1891, published 1893. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland, maps.nls.uk
I’d walked into an area of ruined buildings marked as The Menagerie on Victorian maps.
I came across the remnants of this structure; perhaps these are the walls of two outbuildings built against the estate boundary wall. They’re not indicated on the 1891 map.
This hatch, which is a little over 2ft square, gives access from the outside. Beyond the vegetation is an arable field.
On inside edge of the slab at the base of the opening you can see the remnants of a layer of plaster or cement.
From the outside it appears that the opening originally had a stone lintel.
I couldn’t see any trace of where a frame for a door might have been fitted, but presumably there was originally some way of closing the gap. Perhaps the opening was used when mucking out the animals kept in the Menagerie enclosures.
Ruined building alongside the track that leads into the woods. This is the northern end of the largest building shown on the 1891 map.
I’d always thought that these ruins were the remains of an entrance lodge to the Chevet Estate but the map from 1893 shows what look like animal enclosures – kennels perhaps – alongside a small reservoir.
Birds and Bulldogs
Twenty years after the map was published, in 1913, a visitor wrote that Lady Kathleen Pilkington of Chevet Hall was ‘a fearless rider’ with the Badsworth Hunt and ‘a splendid rifle shot’.
She is fond of racing and is specially devoted to birds and her collection of foreign birds is one of best in England”
Charlton Jemmett-Browne, writing in ‘The French Bulldog’, USA, September 1913
Lady Kathleen’s favourite breed of dog was the French Bulldog. I’m guessing that she kept them closer to Chevet Hall but perhaps at that time she kept foxhounds or even some of her foreign birds at the Menagerie. The Menagerie was marked on an earlier Ordnance Survey map in 1841.
When did the last St Pancras* to Dewsbury train pass under this bridge?
It’s at the southern corner of Newmillerdam Country Park, as you follow the old railway out of the park, along the Chevet Branch Line nature reserve, heading south east towards Notton and Royston.
Find My Past, British Newspaper Archive
The first scheduled train on the line must have passed beneath it at about 6.30 a.m. on Thursday, 1 March, 1906.
Find My Past, British Newspaper Archive
Despite the crowd and officials greeting the train at Dewsbury Station, I get the impression that the Midland Railway was keen to emphasise the goods side of things rather than passenger traffic, preparing to deal with ‘all descriptions of merchandise, live stock and mineral traffic’ at their new stations at Crigglestone and ‘Middlestown-for-Horbury’, further up the Calder Valley to the west of Newmillerdam.
According to the website Lost Railways of West Yorkshire, the line closed on Monday 18 December 1950.
*Oh! Mr Porter
I’d originally suggested that Euston would be the starting point of the line to Dewsbury via Newmillerdam so thank you to John Farline on the Wakefield Historical Appreciation Site on Facebook, who put me right:
The Midland Railway ran north from St. Pancras, not Euston. Your date for the line’s closure is likely to be the date when the passenger service was withdrawn. The line continued with goods services through to 1968 when Criggleston and Middlestown (goods only) stations were closed. I certainly remember seeing goods trains going onto and coming off the branch line in the 1950s.”
My grandad Robert Bell who for just one week worked as a porter at Sheffield Midland Station.
I should have realised that the line must have started at St Pancras because that’s the route that goes via Sheffield Midland Station.
My grandad briefly worked as a porter, before going for a job with the then horse-drawn trams at the big tram company stables across the road. He’d worked with horses as a groom and he told me that, as a country lad, he found walking all day on the hard surfaces too demanding.
When we ran the Ossett Grammar School cross country in the 1960s (well, ran until out of sight of the school, then sauntered around exploring) I remember occasionally seeing coal trucks on the line from the bridge near Thornhill Hall farm.
Google Maps, Street view.
‘DEWSBURY’ is one of the stations with its name carved into one of the cornerstones of this entrance lodge at Euston Station, now The Euston Tap, a ‘dedicated cider bar with cask ales and draught beers, in a Victorian gatehouse with beer garden.’
Euston was the headquarters of the London and North Western Railway, so their route to Dewsbury would be via Birmingham, changing at Crewe for Dewsbury, a route celebrated in the Marie Lloyd music hall song Oh! Mr Porter:
Oh! Mr Porter, what shall I do? I want to go to Birmingham And they’ve taken me on to Crewe, Take me back to London quickly as you can. Oh Mr Porter, what a silly girl I am!”
As I sat drawing this alder at the lakeside at Newmillerdam I felt something drop on my back. An alder cone? No. My shirt needed to go in the wash. Not sure who was responsible but I’m guessing that the wood pigeon is the first one that I need to rule out of my enquiries.
They’re restoring the old water mill at Newmillerdam, re-using the flagstone roof tiles, a job that involves a lot of work with power tools so I’ve made my way along the lakeside to draw this multi-stemmed alder.
Sketching the ducks, cormorant, Canada geese and in-between black-headed gulls, some juveniles, some adults beginning to lose their black heads. We were surprised how few – if any – there were at the black-headed gull colony at St Aidan’s last week. They’d been so noisy in the spring and early summer. Now I guess they’ve dispersed with a hundred or more – perhaps St Aidan’s birds – turning up at Newmillerdam, where they can perch on fallen willows on the quieter bank of the lake and keep an eye out for hand-outs on the war memorial side.
And yes, I might have drawn more of them if I hadn’t been sidetracked by a Danish cinnamon pastry at the Boathouse.
These coots have raised a brood at the nest site I drew last year near in the corner by the outlet of the lake.
Thanks to instant communication, I was able to message my photograph of the Danish pastry to the far end of the lake as a warning to Barbara that I’d got tied up on essential business, however I beat her and her brother back to the car park and had time to draw two of the chimney stacks of the Fox and Hounds, adding the colour later from a photograph.
Hemlock water-dropwort grows amongst curled dock and nettle alongside the car park at Newmillerdam. A holly blue butterfly rests on the hemlock while hoverflies visit the flowers of creeping buttercup, occasionally chasing each other around. A micro moth resting on a buttercup looks, at first glance, like a tiny fragment of plant debris.
For my brother-in-law John’s big birthday plus one, a cartoon of our regular walk around Newmillerdam, which would be a quiet place if it wasn’t for all that birdsong and – on her My Yorkshire show last week – Jane McDonald singing Jessie Ware’s Remember Where You Are on the slope behind the Boathouse.
The Wakefield Naturalists’ Society had their first AGM since the pandemic on Monday but it was a case of blink and you’ll miss it, as the main event of the evening was Ron Marshall talking about Ardnamurchan, the Outer Hebrides and the Shetlands.
These sketches were drawn with a Lamy nexx with a B – bold – nib. I’m getting towards the end of my bottle of De Atramentis, an ink which soon dries, allowing me to add watercolour.
