Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
One last snapshot from our 16 July 1965 third form trip to Swaledale. Sorting through the old gang (‘gangue’ = waste) near Hurst, Swaledale are my two school friends Derek Stefaniw examining a chunk of mineral – perhaps fluorite or galena? – alongside cool dude Paul Copley.
My thanks to James Alderson and Farming Lass on Instagram for identifying yesterday’s lime lorry incident from summer 1965 as being on the Hurst road at the Reeth end of Swaledale. I’m guessing that the cottages and lead smelting chimney are at Hurst or nearby.
I’ve gone with the daguerreotype vibe for this gallery of colourised photographs from our walk, which include my friend Stef making friends with a Dales pony.
In addition to the scratches and blobs my inept film development has also resulted in some solarisation. The shot of our party negotiating an area of mining spoil (possibly above Langthwaite?) would have made a good cover for an Alan Garner novel.
Summer 1965 and there’s been a delay in a delivery of lime in Swaledale. Perhaps you recognise the delivery man or the guys he’s talking to – the local farmer perhaps?
This colourised image is from one of my badly developed black and white negatives from 1965. There are dozens from a school trip of Richmond Castle, which Iooks pretty much the same today, so it’s the few which feature vehicles that particularly interest me.
No, this isn’t a maze for Swaledale sheep, it’s a cut-away view of the smelting flues used by lead mines in Swaledale: hearth for the smashed up ore on the right, outlet chimney centre and the maze of corridors in between where various minerals settled out from the vapours as they precipitated out.
I suspect that this drawing was a rough for my book Yorkshire Rock, a Journey through Time published by the British Geological Survey in 1996 but still in print today (see link below).
If it was intended for the book, it didn’t make it into the final cut, which instead featured the less technical but more dramatic process of hushing.
Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time at the BGS shop, £6.50.
Despite the stringent security, the sheep in the beet field have finally staged an escape and half a dozen of the more adventurous of them are enjoying the lush grass in the back garden of the end terrace house on the other side of the fence.
“What variety are they?” I ask the shepherd (I knew he was the shepherd because his 4×4 had an ‘EWE’ registration).
“They’re Swaledales with a few Texel, but they’re mainly mules. These came from Horton-in-Ribblesdale.”
So none of them are Beulah Speckleface, as I’d guessed the other day.
A few weeks ago in Hawes we saw Swaledales being rounded up from the moors. That morning we’d seen people gathering up at Bardale Head two miles south of the town, so I guess the sheep had been driven up Bardale and Raydale onto the moor then turned back down Beggarmans Road and through Gayle into Hawes. There were certainly hundreds, if not thousands of them.