Yorkshire – Page 9 – From Pyrenees to Pennines

Loafing around in Harrogate

Up betimes, in order to be at Harrogate Hospital by 7.30 a.m. Yesterday was a day of white-coat-syndrome-induced high blood pressure, insensibility whilst under the knife, and not a little discomfort for Malcolm. He’s been waiting for months for some minor surgery, and now he’s had it, his life should get a lot more comfortable.

I, meanwhile, had to spend the day in Harrogate waiting for the call to go and collect him. I had quite a few errands to run in any case, and after that it wouldn’t have been worth traipsing back and forth from North Stainley.

So I did my jobs, and then had plenty of chance to loaf about. I’m not the world’s keenest shopper, but I do have a favourite charity shop in Cold Bath Road. Our friend Jonet volunteers there, sifting through and sorting donated books. I love the serendipity of looking along the shelves crowded with fiction old, new, English and foreign, next to an eclectic collection of non-fiction. As usual I left the shop with a satisfyingly large pile of reading, and this time, a new-to-me summer dress.

Then I headed for green space. What makes Harrogate a special town is its area of open parkland in the centre of the town – the Stray. It was created from common pastureland in 1778 to link most of Harrogate’s springs (it’s a spa town after all) and an Act of Parliament preserved its size at 200 acres. Even now, if part of its area is lost due to, for example, road widening, it must be replaced elsewhere. It’s pretty unique to be able to step directly from busy shopping streets straight onto a vast green area unbounded by railings or fences. Paths and roads will lead you through this green space to other parts of town. Like me, you could walk across the Stray to get to the hospital, or to reach the community round Cold Bath Road with its neighbourhood shops and Victorian housing. And yesterday, you could enjoy, as I did, the crocuses which have burst forth in their hundreds and thousands in glorious lakes of colour – purple, mauve, sunshine yellow and white. They’ll be followed in a week or so by an equal multitude of daffodils, and then avenues of cherries will blossom in all their pink finery. Here’s a few shots of Harrogate Stray on the warmest day of the year so far.

I know grey squirrels are no better than rats with tails, but they still cheer me up as they scurry up and down trees.

Easter eggs on display at Betty’s, Harrogate’s Top Caff.

Walking on the Stray

View from the Stray to Harrogate.

Haulage logistics, 18th century style

A sunny morning on the River Ure, just before we reached the Canal.

We went for a walk along the Ripon Canal the other day, starting from the point where it meets the River Ure. Back in its heyday during the Industrial Revolution, busy as it was then, the rural towpath we walked along might not have looked so very different. Back in its heyday, keels would have hauled coal northwards from the Yorkshire coalfields, and lead and agricultural products southwards. The canals were the freight-haulage routes of their age, and even though they were busy thoroughfares, the whole business of passing vessels through the three locks in one direction at a time limited the flow traffic to levels well below what those of us who’ve ever been stuck in a bad-tempered rush hour traffic jam on the M1 have experienced.

Ripon Canal is not one of the country’s great canals. There are water super-highways such as the Grand Union Canal linking London with Birmingham. That’s 137 miles long. There’s the Leeds-Liverpool Canal. That’s 127 miles long. The Ripon Canal runs for just two miles, from Ripon to Oxclose Lock, where it links with the River Ure. Like many of the country’s canals, it was built in the latter part of the 18th century, between 1767 and 1783, opening up water traffic between Ripon and York, and it eventually put the products of the Durham coalfields within Ripon’s reach.

The railways proved to be the death of canals all over England. Ripon’s withstood the opening of the Darlington to York railway in 1841, but the Leeds and Thirsk Railway finished it off. The railway company actually bought the waterway, to ensure local support , but they then neglected it, failing to dredge it, so that it became less and less useable. The canal was abandoned as a waterway in 1906.

But its fortunes have changed again. No longer a tool of the industrial revolution, the canal has become a playground for people who like ‘messing about in boats‘*. The Ripon Canal Trust spearheaded its restoration from the 1960s, and now the whole thing is managed by the Canal and River Trust. So whether you like boats, barges, or a stroll along a quiet backwater near town, Ripon Canal’s worth a visit.

Walking the towpath

One of the canal bridges.

The towpath again.

Barges on the canal.

*That’s what Ratty used to like to do in Kenneth Grahame’s ‘The Wind in the Willows’

An afternoon with Barbara Hepworth

I lived in Wakefield for a few years, in the 1970s. Back then, it was a gritty industrial town, surrounded by pit villages such as Crofton, Sharlston and Lofthouse. It was the home of Double Two shirts, and the administrative capital of the now-defunct West Riding. You’ll still find Wakefield Prison here, the largest high-security prison in Western Europe. And Wakefield is still part of the unique ‘Rhubarb Triangle’, an area between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell where, in the cold early months of every year, delicate pink forced rhubarb is grown in darkened sheds for a public still eager to buy.

Wakefield had its elegant quarters too, largely built round the Georgian St. John’s Church, and there was a decent market as well, and a good Art Gallery and Museum.

What it didn’t have in those days was the Hepworth Gallery. So we paid it a visit on Sunday. It’s on an unpromising site by a fairly unlovely stretch of the River Calder, alongside a busy dual carriageway and various semi-industrial sites. But with its austere pigmented concrete facade, the building itself rises energetically and imaginatively from the midst of the industrial landscape in which it’s situated. We went inside, to a cool, clean and calm space. With an excellent café. This did seem promising.

Houseboats on the river.

A worker’s cottage? Or trompe-l’œil?

Rain on the outside walls.

Neither of us liked the current exhibition showcasing Lynda Benglis. But we’d really come to see Barbara Hepworth’s work. She was a Wakefield lass, a contemporary, friend and colleague of Henry Moore. I’ve known and admired her work for much of my life, but most enjoyed it when visiting St. Ives some years ago. Hepworth lived there from the 1950s till her death, and much of her work is exhibited at the Tate Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. It was the sculpture garden that did it for us then: plants and sculpture co-exist in intimate harmony, each enhancing the other in ways that have stayed with us in the years since we were able to spend time there.

The time we spent with her work in the Gallery was enhanced by glimpses of her working life: the tough and workmanlike bench with its tools laid ready for use; the videos showing her working, or her pieces being prepared for casting in bronze in busy foundries.

Hepworth's workbench. — Hepworth’s workbench.

What makes this exhibition interesting is that most of these works are full-size prototypes, in plaster or aluminium of works that would later be realised in bronze. It’s clear that she needed to work even at an early stage on the same scale as she would on the finished article. What could she gain by trying her ideas out in miniature?

These pieces are reminiscent of the rolling character of the Yorkshire landscape round Wakefield. To achieve them, Hepworth chipped, carved, smoothed and worked away at her pieces: it was solid manual labour, not so very far removed from the labour of the miners and workers who also lived in the community where she grew up. It’s a man’s world, and Hepworth was extraordinary not only for being a woman studying sculpture, but for reviving the art of carving her own work. In the Edwardian age, sculptors had merely moulded their maquettes and left masons to do the hard graft.

I love this juxtaposition of the Hepworth sculpture with the Euan Uglow portrait behind.

Yet her work is sensual and invites contemplation. I relished the chance to do so in this light and airy gallery, with its backdrop of the city of Wakefield seen through the vast windows, allowing the daylight to illuminate her work.

Wakefield from the windows of the Hepworth Gallery.

Only sky

The days are short
The sun a spark
Hung thin between
The dark and dark.
John Updike, “January,”A Child’s Calendar

A bright winter’s afternoon. Just time, before the evening cold sets in, to get out for a couple of hours of brisk walking: 5 miles or so along familiar paths. So familiar that this time, I focus on the sky: changeable, unpredictable.

Sometimes it’s moody, sometimes cheerful, sometimes simply rather grey and colourless, at other times dramatic, particularly towards sunset. Come and walk with me to watch the clouds.

The satisfactions of an unsatisfactory walk

I haven’t been on a ‘proper’ walk yet this year. First it was the ‘flu, and its aftermath. Then it was rain or snow on the days when I might have been free to get out for a blow in the breezy cold. And finally it’s the mud. Mud’s the one that gets me every time, despite having been given a wonderfully efficient pair of walking gaiters among my Christmas presents. I find it frustrating, pulling my boots from an oozing, slippery, sticky slick of mud only as a preparation for sliding into the next soupy puddle . It makes for slow walking on days when briskly striding out is what’s needed to combat the cold.

So today, keen to get out for at least an hour or so, and equally keen to avoid That Mud, I ended up on a star-shaped walk. I turned back down every path I started, and ended up doing a zig-zag circuit beyond the edges of the village.

I started off by looking for the young kestrel I’ve come across on a couple of days this week. I had first spotted him in a field near our house, dismembering and eating some small creature just 6 feet away from where I stood staring at him. He flapped off crossly to a nearby wall when he considered I’d got too close, and it was on this wall I saw him the next day too. Today he wasn’t there. I think there were too many dogs out walking their owners.

Then I went down into Beatswell Woods. I hoped for buds on the trees, or a few early flowers, but it was wet and wintry still. Then I walked to the fields, thinking I’d choose one of the paths there to take me in a big sweep round the edge of the village. No go. All the paths were muddy, and the horse I stopped to chat to had pretty filthy socks too. Though there was this rowan, with golden honey coloured berries instead of the more usual red.

Rowan berries against a chilly blue sky.

At the village ponds, the drakes and ducks ran fussily up to greet me, hoping for crusts. When they saw I had nothing, the drakes returned, like a bunch of fourth formers, to teasing and irritating the only couple of females in the group.

But it was near the ponds that I had my second sighting of daffodils this year, so very early. Surely they should wait until the crocuses have put themselves about? But the crocuses are only just poking the tips of their leaves above the soil, and don’t plan on coming out yet.

Returning to the woods, I saw the snowdrops. Isolated patches a couple of weeks ago, now they’re in magnificent great white drifts climbing the hillsides, nestling under trees, even risking everything by straggling across the (muddy) paths.

A bit of a curate’s egg of a walk then. A few frustrations, quite a few pleasures, but a healthy glow on my cheeks, and, just before I came into the house, another treat. All these aconites, pushing up their bright yellow faces through the soil, bringing with them hopes of Spring.

In the bleak midwinter….

Winter has arrived. It’s taken its time. We’ve been accustomed to mildness, and lots of mud. Suddenly though, sunrise has been that rich blazing orangey-red, with vibrant yellow, that seems to arrive only on very cold days. And Jack Frost has been amusing himself by designing complicated patterns on car windscreens, making sure they’re good and hard to scrape off by a would-be early driver.

Last Friday, we travelled over the Pennines to Bolton. The hills were, for the first time this year, covered with snow. We even had the mini-adventure of battling through a mini-blizzard. And the next day, we travelled back. Cars slithering and careering wildly, or worse, along icy roads, closed our usual road home: instead we diverted across bleak moorland via Todmorden, Mytholmroyd, Hebden Bridge, Howarth and Keighley – a real Wuthering Heights landscape, meeting only very hardy sheep for much of the way. These were the views.

Pub grub

I’ve never been one for an evening down at the pub. When I was younger, I hated going out to meet friends there, for all it was a rite of passage and part of growing up. The smell of cigarette smoke, mixed with that of alcohol and under-ventilated space was the first downer, and then there was the problem that I didn’t – and still don’t – like beer. If weaker, to me it tastes of soap, and if stronger, of iron filings. What, really, was the point?

Over the last few years, pubs have had to re-invent themselves. Now that beer is cheap(ish) and cheerful at the supermarket, and now that people can relax at home in front of ever larger TV screens, fewer and fewer people want to dig themselves out of their cosy homes simply to go to their ‘local’ and have a drink with friends. So some offer Quiz Nights, or the chance to watch the Big Match on the Big Screen. Many many more have given up the unequal struggle and simply closed for ever.

Some though are doing well because they’ve chosen to offer good food, and those are the ones we like these days. The area we’ve chosen to live has more great pubs than seems entirely necessary. There are at least four within very easy reach. Get talking about matters of food when you’re out with your friends, and everyone will have yet another favourite haunt which they’ll insist you should try. What all these pubs have in common is cosiness. They’re warm and welcoming: muted colours and old oak furnishings, and often a slightly idiosyncratic lay-out which guarantees you a degree of privacy whilst also enabling you to people-watch . At this time of year, there’s sure to be a log fire flickering in the corner. Cheerful young staff will whisk you to a table as you arrive and summarise the ‘daily specials’. These pubs tend to have a limited range of dishes on offer, but that’s because the menu is designed round what’s available on the day, for that day.

There’s beer to drink – of course there is, it’s a pub after all – but these days there’s a decent wine list too, although the mark-up’s way beyond what we got used to in France.

So we’ve traded treating ourselves to a ‘formule’ at some local French restaurant, sitting outside and relaxing under the welcome shade of a large umbrella in favour of a cosy hour or two over a meal in front of the fire in an English pub. And do you know – they both have their special charms.

Here we are today at the Freemasons Arms in Nosterfield. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday.

A quiet drink, watching others having …. a quiet drink

The end of a good pud.

…and we were the last to leave.

What a difference three hours make……

Since we Yorkshire folk are from the Pennines rather than the Pyrenees, we’re inclined to make more of a fuss about steeply climbing roads. The main road from Thirsk to Helmsley is the notorious A70 via Sutton Bank, and no sooner have you left Thirsk than the warnings start:

25% gradient ahead.
This way for the alternative route for caravans.
Last year, 74 HGVs marooned themselves on the slopes… and so on, and so on.

Certainly, it is a dizzying climb, with the patchwork fields of the Vale of York laid out far below. Then suddenly, you’re at the top. You’d have to be in a real hurry not to park and get out for a while to enjoy the view, as we did twice today, once on the way out, and once on the way back. It’s winter now – not long to the shortest day – so these sunset scenes were taken at just after 3.00 p.m., a mere three hours after we’d climbed upwards, only shortly before midday.

Eeh bah gum, it were grand.

‘One misty-moisty morning, when cloudy was the weather…..’

Today was indeed a misty morning. Ripon has no fewer than three rivers in town, and a canal too, and one of those three rivers, the Ure, passes our back door. So it’s no surprise that we do ‘misty-moisty’ mornings, evenings and nights on a regular basis.

But mistiness is no excuse not to walk the mile and a half along the Ure to visit the village shop at West Tanfield to buy a Sunday paper. Here’s my journey:

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This is how the old nursery rhyme goes:

One misty, moisty morning,

When cloudy was the weather,

I chanced to meet an old man clothed all in leather.

He began to compliment, and I began to grin,

How do you do, and how do you do?

And how do you do again?

Though I didn’t meet any old men clothed all in leather, I did meet quite a few dog-walkers. And quite pleasant chats were had with nearly all of them

Murder at Nosterfield

A comfortable hide at Nosterfield: sheepskin covered seats, and lots of birdbooks to refer to come as standard

We spent yesterday at Nosterfield Nature Reserve , a mere couple of miles from here. There’s no point in having a bird reserve almost in your back garden if you don’t know a wigeon from a pochard, or if you confuse a rail with a dunlin. It’s even worse if you’ve heard of none of the above. We signed up to ‘Start Birding’, and birding’s what we did, for the whole of a bright and sunny Friday.

Pochard

Water rail

Dunlin

Linda, our teacher, was infectiously enthusiastic. She lent out decent pairs of binoculars, and made sure we knew how to use them. She helped us observe birds for their silhouettes, colouring, flight patterns, so we could begin to identify the hundreds of birds who regard Nosterfield as home, a holiday resort, or a stop-over on a long voyage from the Arctic to – who knows? Southern Europe or even Africa.

And we hadn’t been there long before she saw drama begin to unfold. We saw no drama. Oh yes, we could see that birds who had been feeding in scrubland, and waterfowl who’d been serenely gliding in the shallows all flew skywards, all started wheeling and turning, circling the area they’d come from time and time again, in some agitation. But, well, birds do that, don’t they?

Linda knew better. She knew they’d all spotted something we couldn’t see. We all used our binoculars and her super-powerful telescope to scan the sky. It was more than 5 minutes before she saw, high above, a peregrine falcon. He rose high on the thermals, looking down on all his possible prey, all flying close together for their mutual protection.

And suddenly, talons extended, he dropped. Only Linda and Dianne spotted the moment when he scooped up a lapwing, and plummeted swiftly to earth to despatch the bird and inspect his catch. He didn’t get much chance. A small gang of carrion crows moved in. They wanted the falcon to open his prey up, then they planned to steal it.

The peregrine wasn’t having that. He grabbed his lapwing, flew off, and came down again, this time where Linda was able to train her telescope so we could get grandstand views of what happened next. The crows reappeared too, but knew there was no food for them while the lapwing’s corpse remained intact: their beaks are not designed to pierce outer skin. By determined, measured stabbing, the falcon started to open his prey up. White downy chest feathers flew, as he discarded these in search of the flesh beneath. The crows pranced round. They snapped at the falcon’s tail, they tried to provoke and hustle him into abandoning his catch. They even ventured to pluck at the lapwing feathers themselves. But though irritated, the falcon carried on, ripping away at the flesh with his super-strong beak. As the crows took occasional chances to dart close and grab a mouthful, they were rebuffed by the falcon’s impressive skills as a sentry: and no doubt from the fear of that beak too.

Little by little, the falcon ingested his meal. That may be his diet sorted for the next day or two. He even left the carrion crows the bones to pick clean. They too wouldn’t have gone away entirely hungry.

Those are lapwings in the foreground. Behind are golden plovers.

And after that, we had a day of lapwings and golden plovers, and cormorants, and rails and wigeons and pochards and shovellers and Barnacle geese and Canada geese, a kestrel or two, and goldfinch and twites and great tits, and many many more. We can confidently identify many of them, and now have the tools to gain in confidence and knowledge every time we go out with our eyes wide open and our senses tuned in. Even without the blockbuster tale of savage death at the lakeside, Friday would have been a fantastic day.

If you live in Yorkshire, within reach of Leeds, and would like to know more about birds, do follow the link to the ‘Start Birding’ site and see what’s on offer. This is an unsolicited testimonial to Linda Jenkinson, Top Twitcher!

Linda focussing one just one of those birds.

I was too busy on Friday to take many photos, so the ‘bird portraits’ are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.