Tag: Waterton Park

Waterton’s Park

Walton Park spread
A camera-shy Waterton with his friend Dr Hobson

We’ve been out on location researching my September article for the ‘Dalesman’ magazine and I thought I’d go for an IMAX-style panorama of Charles Waterton’s nature reserve at Walton Hall, Wakefield, which, as you can see from the 1865 engraving, has now been restored to its former glory, thanks to extensive tree-planting and landscaping by the Waterton Park Golf Club.

cayman
Charles Waterton wrangling a cayman on the River Essequibo, Guyana.

I’ve dropped in contemporary engravings of Waterton’s adventures – a bit of a comic-strip version of the life of a complex character, imagining it as if it was a magic lantern show of his exploits.

Waterton getting a closer view of the Bempton Cliffs seabird colony.

As a graphic designer/illustrator, I’ve gone for layout first, text to follow. The placeholder text is a corrupted version of a text by Cicero, which I feel that Waterton might approve of as he had a habit of dropping Latin quotes into his natural history essays.

A cool-headed Waterton returns an escaped rattlesnake to its cabinet at a scientific meeting at Dr Hobson’s house at Park Square, Leeds.

Charles Waterton at Home

Figures on the island at Walton Hall

I’ve been reformatting my Waterton’s Park booklet and this detail of three figures is the final illustration. Could this be a photograph of the camera-shy Waterton? Taken around 1860, it may show his Charles Waterton’s son Edmund on the left, one of Waterton’s sisters in law, (so a Miss Edmondstone) and Waterton himself.

Dr Hobson and friend at the farm, Walton Hall, c.1860.

But looking at it again, it does look more like Waterton’s friend Dr Hobson, who had a series of photographs taken of Walton Park at the time. There’s the cane, as in the Hobson photograph, the top hat and light-coloured trousers and there’s even a hint of those Victorian whiskers around his face.

Hobson and Waterton
Hobson keeping Waterton talking while his photographer takes a photograph

Hobson himself says that this back view of Waterton was the nearest that he came to capturing Waterton on camera.

A Waterton Mystery

Walton Park

Here’s a story that I was told at a wedding reception in Thorpe on 4 September, 1982:

‘Graham Smithson and David Jones who were fishing at Walton Hall some ten years ago (so about 1972) found a log at the side of the lake. It was hollow and inside they found an old parchment and a diary. Yorkshire Television were doing a feature on Waterton at that time. They sent the material through the post and heard no more of it.’

From my pocket sketch/notebook, 1982
Graham
Graham was David’s best man at the wedding

An additional detail which I remember but didn’t add to the note is that the parchment referred to a land transaction. I have a vague idea that the documents might have been hidden in a compartment in an old tin, but I’m not sure on that one.

Owl house, c.1920, a photograph in the collection at Wakefield Museum, reproduced in Brian Edginton’s ‘Charles Waterton, A Biography’ and in my booklet on ‘Waterton’s Park’

What they’d found was probably one of Waterton’s bird habitat hollow trees. He had one enormous tree trunk moved to the lakeside and converted it into a combined nesting box and hide. Perhaps Waterton was in the habit of spending time there and for some reason kept a diary and a particular document there.

I’d love to know more. So, if you’ve been clearing out a cupboard at Yorkshire Television and you’ve come across an old notebook . . .