We step off the Pennine Way – trodden by untold numbers of feet every year – and onto a favourite right of way of ours. It’s a right of way, but there is no path; it is wholly unfrequented, and carries no trace of passage. My son and I slip with it into the rushes, … Continue reading Into the Rushes
This article is an edited version of a talk I gave, in collaboration with David Cant, to the Cragg Vale History Group on 17th April 2025 at St John's in the Wilderness Church. In the first half of our talk, David gave an overview of the history of hill farming in the Calder Valley and … Continue reading Cragg Vale’s Little Hill Farms
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
Landscape Story 