It’s been a busy week, and I’ve a feeling I shan’t be blogging again before Christmas, but I just had to have a go at posting a few photos for Ann-Christine’s Lens-Artists Challenge this week : Perfect Patterns. I’m going to let the images speak for themselves this time. We’ll have two galleries: man-made patterns, every one of them from Spain …
And now the natural world, not one of them from Spain, or indeed from outside the UK:
Click on any image to get its label: and only a label this time: no stories, no history, no nothing. Sorry!
The featured image is a ceiling in the Palau de la Musica, Barcelona.
Just look at that. Twelve words. I have to weave those twelve random words into a single poem.
Our U3A writing group is one of the few things that’s continued throughout lockdown. It’s a positive activity at a somewhat negative time. But what CAN you do with a list like that? This, it turns out. I’m not too displeased. And here too are a few photos to illustrate the day.
We went to Colsterdale on Sunday. It’s nearby, but feels remote and isolated, because the only road through leads nowhere very much and so it remains one of North Yorkshire’s best kept secrets. Perfect for a Day Out whilst maintaining that all-important Social Distance.
Edged by the pastoral views of farming country, it climbs to become stark, treeless, commanding views to the distant North York Moors, and to the higher parts of the Pennines. Its ascetic bleakness is what appeals to me.
Scar House Reservoir in the distance
We’d almost reached the area where we planned to park and begin our walk, when I saw them. There! There on the roadside! Look! Two curlews, almost within touching distance. These are shy, beautifully camouflaged birds normally only seen and heard as they quarter the sky, calling the evocative plaintive sound – ‘cur-lee, cur-lee’ – which gives them their name. These two were probably drawing a would-be predator away from the nest.
Whatever the reason, it was such a privilege to watch these birds at close quarters, with their mottled, camouflaging plumage, and their distinctive long downward-curving beaks.
YouTube RSPB video
They flew away after a couple of minutes, and we began our walk, relishing the space, the wild emptiness and the only sounds those of distant curlews.
Addendum: several commenters have expressed surprise about the curlew frequenting moorland. Just to show how very much at home the bird is in these surroundings, here is proof. It is the symbol for the nearby long distance walk, the Nidderdale Way. FAO Jude, Agnes
As you walk the fells, moors and dales of northern England, this is what you’ll see.
Masham Moor from Slipstone Crags.
Miles and miles of drystone wall. In the Yorkshire Dales alone, there are some 8000 km. of wall, compared with only 990 km. of hedgerow, and 250 km. of fencing. These walls keep flocks of sheep contained upon a single fell. They provide a boundary between moorland heather and bracken, and more productive farmland. They divide one farmer’s plot into more manageable fields.
Off they march down the fellside, turning a corner and skirting the valley bottom, before cornering again to march back up. Or they’ll make snug little criss-cross squares in an ancient family farm. Well maintained or slightly ramshackle, they make Yorkshire and the Pennine counties instantly recognisable. Here’s a selection:
The Earth. It’s tempting, for this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge, to choose lush woodland, productive farmland, dramatic peaks, crashing ocean breakers, or a charming cottage garden crammed with colourful flowers, and on Earth Day, show it at its striking best.
The welcome committee greets us on the path to Ellingstring.
Instead, I want to take you to Colsterdale in Yorkshire. The soil is thin, acid, peaty. Bitter winds scythe across the hilltops, bending to their will those hardy trees that make it to maturity. Brackish ditches lurk below the juncus grass to catch out the unwary hiker. The hills, though beautiful, can look barren, apart from the heather which blushes an extravagant purple every August.
But Earth is clever. This unpromising countryside nurtures thousands of sheep and lambs. Curlews, plover and geese wheel through the sky. Songbirds spring from the heather. There is so much hidden wildlife that much of the area is a Site of Special Scientific Interest.
The road we could have taken to Scar House Reservoir
I love Colsterdale. It may be my favourite Yorkshire dale. It’s an isolated area, tucked away, north-west of Masham. Not a single main road goes through it. There are no traffic jams here, just local cars (4x4s are useful), vans and tractors.
Walking these tracks, be prepared to share your route with a few sheep.
There are routes though. Ancient routes forged as long ago as the 14th century, when there was a long-gone coal mine here, or more recently by stockmen driving their flocks over the harsh moorland landscape. These days, it’s hikers and ramblers who are more likely to use these tracks. Perhaps they’re completing the Six Dales Trail, or finding out the history of the Leeds Pals. Perhaps, like us, they’re enjoying a walk from Leighton Reservoir, and enjoying long distance views of Scar House Reservoir.
At the outbreak of the First World War, a top-level decision was made to recruit men to the Army by encouraging friends, neighbours and colleagues to volunteer together as locals, to fight shoulder to shoulder for the honour of Britain and the credit of their home town.
The men of Leeds answered the call. Carpenters, foundrymen, businessmen, men from the crowded streets of back-to-backs, men from the suburbs all joined up, bringing with them their brothers, their cousins, their neighbours and the men who worked alongside them .
They became the 15th Batallion of the West Yorkshire Regiment, commonly known as the Leeds Pals.
And they were sent up here to Colsterdale to train. There was a whole village waiting for them: a village that had been hastily built at the turn of the century to house the workers who’d been hired to construct the Colsterdale and Leighton Reservoirs, together with their families. At Breary Banks there were huts, shops, chapels – everything they needed for day-to-day life. Although the Colsterdale Reservoir had been abandoned in 1911, workers were still employed at Leighton and at first labourers and soldiers lived side-by-side.
Briggate Leeds in the early 1900s (Leodis.net)
Leeds was a vast industrial conurbation. It was noisy, dirty, grimy, smoggy. Trams and those new-fangled trolley buses clanked and clattered their way round the streets. Arriving by train in Masham, the new recruits had no alternative but to march the six miles to Breary Banks, passing nothing but clean quiet villages, stock-filled fields with woodland, then heathery moorside beyond.
Sheep in Colsterdale
For many of these recruits, the time that they spent at Breary Banks was the best time of their lives. They had a regular routine, good food, good company and decent accommodation. They dug trenches and learned the weaponry skills it was thought they’d need when finally deployed in France.
Colsterdale
In fact they first saw active service in 1915 and 1916 in Egypt and Gallipolli. Few of them were involved in direct action, and by early 1916, most of them embarked on troopships to the real focus of the war, France.
After further training behind the lines they were sent to the front, in readiness for the battle that was intended to change Allied fortunes, the Battle of the Somme.
And that is when parents, children, neighbours and work mates left behind in Leeds discovered what a truly terrible idea it had been to send whole communities into the same battle at the same moment.
‘It was the most ambitious attack of the war and they were among hundreds of thousands of Allied troops massed for the battle.
Their coats were mud-sodden, their legs were protected only by the inadequate cloth wrappings of the soldier’s uniform. In their hands they clutched rifles they would never use, for in moments a storm of bullets had cut through their soft clothes and weary bodies, and they were dead.
Going over the top, Battle of the Somme (Ivor Castle, Imperial War Museum, via Wikimedia Commons)
Our young Leeds men were not so much beaten as wiped out. At 7.20 am with fearful, pounding hearts, they began to run blindly at their enemy. By 7.30 am a city of mothers had lost their sons, wives were widows and children fatherless.
It was one of the bloodiest battles of the First World War. As the men surged over the top into no-man’s land they faced a murderous storm of artillery and machine gun fire directed against them with pitiless accuracy by German guns. It cut through them, they fell into the mud in waves.
Yet those in charge had expected it to be easy. In the days before the battle of the Somme, more than a million rounds had rained down on the German positions all the way along the front.
By the time it was over, the Allies believed that no-one could have survived such a bombardment. The men from Leeds, and all the places beyond, were meant to stroll across no-man’s land.
Not only did that not happen but the casualties are so great as to not really make sense. The first day’s slaughter claimed around 20,000 English and French lives, and almost 40,00 were wounded.
Yet the carnage was repeated the next day, and the next, and for every day after that until four mad months had passed.
The cost in lives has never been fully accounted, but of the more than 900 men recruited from Leeds, it is believed 750 died that day.’
Jayne Dawson, Yorkshire Evening Post, 11th November 2013
This is Private Pearson of the Leeds Pals’ own epitaph for his friends and colleagues:
‘We were two years in the making and ten minutes in the destroying.’
Poppies, always poppies at the foot of the memorial to Leeds Pals at Breary Banks, Colsterdale.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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