March began with a dusk snowfall, but it only reached down from the moorland edge to the high pastures and no further, with the deep valley’s woods, wreathed in a slow drifting fog, oblivious to what was happening above them. But we stayed attentive, our month one of watching and listening and hunting for signs of spring’s arrival. On the canal towpath we stood in shadow and gazed up at a robin whose breast was all the redder for being emblazoned in the low afternoon sun, and song was all the sweeter for drifting on air which carried a hint of warmth. From the kitchen window we were transfixed in hushed awe at a roe buck in the garden, the new season’s velvet on its antlers looking as soft as the cat’s paw catkins furring the male goat willows. On an after-school walk above Old Town, we were thrilled by the aerobatics of the just-arrived lapwings, their wide wings audibly slicing and sawing the still air as they arced and rolled and pivoted, and then plunged at the rushy pastures only to audaciously pull up at the last possible second and accelerate back up into the white sky. All his observant vigilance was at its keenest, however, for this year’s Easter egg hunt. Among a troupe of his fellow neighbourhood children, he probed with the greatest scrutiny the village green’s every root nook, bramble tangle, mossy hollow and willow cradle, and afterwards, in the sun that emerged during the search, we parents proudly watched them all make sure that the assortment of be-ribboned wicker baskets, sandcastle buckets and carrier bags each contained a fair distribution of the recovered treasures.
At the council’s new wetland reserve at Brearley, we joined the Calderdale Bird Conservation Group on a dank day to complete a new artificial sand martin nest wall. Having watched in previous years the little colony swirl in and out of their burrows at the nearby eroded bank of the Calder, and hearing of how they had been flooded out of them multiple times, we were keen to assist. We wheelbarrowed sand across the reserve, helped fill some of the 48 holes for the martins to excavate, and dug a moat to protect it from predators. All good muddy fun – he was uniformly caked up to his neck, much to the mute horror of the bus driver on the way home. I joined Cath Baker of the Halifax Scientific Society for a tour of some local badger setts high on the open moor; we searched for their prints in the freshly-dug earth, scoured for their fine hairs among the rushes, and even found a complete, bleached skull. Later in the month, we helped our friend coppice some hazel in our neighbour’s woods; in warm spring sunshine we stacked the long straight poles, before poking around in the 19th-century quarry that the coppice swaddles, finding a deep, cool cave among the blocks of gritstone that escaped extraction.
As last month, Steve Blacksmith was once again our guide on another Halifax Scientific Society expedition, this time to the source of the River Calder. We had believed we found it high on Heald Moor at the head of Ratten Clough years ago, but Steve showed us how on the earliest Ordnance Survey map, the source is labelled on the valley floor just a little way above where Ratten Clough tumbles down to meet it. The railway confuses matters hereabouts, obliterating the infant river’s original course, but one can still see its beginnings in a rushy depression, the start of its 53-mile journey to Castleford to join the Aire. A driven bitter rain fell that day, but we made the best of it, taking in the source of the Lancashire Calder just the other side of the watershed, and a giant redwood tree, a rarity in Calderdale. Other, after-school walks took us on sodden tracks up to May’s Shop for a bag of sweets and a scan of the moorland horizons, and up over the shoulder of Erringden, where a skein of 55 whooper swans trumpeted over our heads, appearing briefly through the dun gloom of low cloud, heading north to their reservoir roosts, but in just a few weeks onwards for the Icelandic summer.
Landscape Story 