So here we are, my boy – your days at primary school are coming to an end, and so too is the school run through the woods. I knew it would come, but I still can’t quite believe it. It’s something all parents say, but it’s true: that it seems only yesterday that we set … Continue reading The School Run →

The track through the tunnel of hawthorn, strewn with spent blossom, is a church path after a wedding. Furry willow catkins lie on mossed walls like snagged fleece. A treecreeper sings into the hushed woods, tentative, uncertain. Just as furtive, wood smoke sifts through the rhododendron, up from Wood Farm. In the full flush of … Continue reading From Meadow to Moor →

Hawthorns hoar-frosted with blossom. Erringden Moor sheened with cotton grass. The Craggs' northern hairy wood ants' nests seething with solar-powered labour. Campers cluster at Old Chamber. Horses graze in the wooded folds of Foster Clough. Cries of Howzat! ringing from the neat green pitches of Booth, Old Town, Luddenden Foot, carrying across the valleys in … Continue reading A Gilded Spring →

It’s May. It's time for a dawn chorus. But this year, we don’t just slip out the back, listen, then crawl back to bed. This year, we walk through it – and on into the morning. After all, the singers don’t slink back to sleep. At five past four, when we quietly close the front … Continue reading What Remains →

A stonechat’s dry pebble-clack from the rushes, a linnet’s song – all ricochets and sparks – from a willow. Reed buntings, dapper white collars, smart black caps, pose on a lurching wall. A cuckoo calls – rich, mellow, a pipe organ in a hilltop Methodist chapel. It’s brazenly perched on a telegraph pole. A foot … Continue reading Shifting Ground →

A Sunday morning round of our favourite loop. Up through meadows, growing despite the dry. Down through pastures of plump slumped sheep. Back over the shoulder of the hill into the sun, where we found David, fettling a fence. Curlews coasted on the still-cool breeze while he talked of the nearly six decades he has … Continue reading Land Keepers →

The gate is looking worse for wear. Clinging to its hinges for dear life with a lean, its top bar lost, its others loose. Stone gate stoops as big as megaliths shoulder it upright on either side, like friends at the end of a long night out, for now. I'm fond of this gate – … Continue reading On the Green Hill →

I accidentally wrote a poem. ‘Would you like to contribute something to an art exhibition on ancient grassland fungi that I’m organizing?’, asked Katie. I demurred. ‘I’m no artist, I just write. No one wants to stand in an exhibition and read an essay.’ ‘Have a think’, she encouraged. So I did. I knew what I … Continue reading Hidden Harvest →

By Paul Knights (read about my work here). If you have any comments, please email me at pauljamesknights@gmail.com or post at the bottom of the page. The Upper Calder Valley is a landscape deeply shaped by its farming history. The terrain, climate and soils create a character distinct from the lower valley, and this uniqueness … Continue reading A History of Farming in the Upper Calder Valley →

My favourite days are dawn-to-dusk exploratory meanders with my son, on paths that are seldom trodden in unheralded corners of the landscape. On one such shining day, at the beginning of this month, we found hidden, unnamed waterfalls in deep-shadowed ravines, gushing springs that once fed farmhouses now long vanished, traced a mile-long stream from … Continue reading A Shining Day →