Meadow | What a delight to spend more time at High Hirst Woodmeadow at their meadows activity day, and especially to learn more from grassland ecologist Steve Hindle. I was sorry to not be able to fit in seeing Francesca's exhibition of haymaking tools and texts at the Birchcliffe Centre, but was pleased to be … Continue reading Field Studies #09 →

Blackcurrants | Despite the hammering it took from last week's buck and boys, the blackcurrant harvest was a bumper one. Being our son's favourite jam, this was important. My wife declared, though, that it was in desperate need of a prune. So too is the St John's wort (yellow flowers at the left of the … Continue reading Field Studies #08 →

Wensleydale | I am reading Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley's 1936 book Wensleydale, a delightful and pioneering combination of guide, history and wistful descriptions of fleeting moments in the life of the valley. Wensleydale is a special place for me; my dad took me camping at Hawes when I was 11, introducing me to the … Continue reading Field Studies #07 →

Is the landscape our ancestors handed down to us fit for a climate-changed future? Can we preserve the inheritance from our predecessors of a traditional farmed environment while meeting the momentous challenges ahead? Or to do well by our descendants must our familiar countryside be radically transformed to lock up carbon and restore wildlife to … Continue reading Past and Future Landscape Stories →

A sharp, shrill 'chee-wick' alerts us to the return of the woodcock. Its silhouette traverses the coral sky, skimming just above the far western horizon of graphite mountains. Only four minutes separated the first and this second circuit of his spring territory, a crepuscular patrol peculiar to his species, known as 'roding'. Since it is … Continue reading Woodcock →

We stride out towards my son's first Lake District fell on the kind of morning preserved for daydreams: cool air and warm sun beautifully balanced, a languid drift of light cloud across the fathomless blue, the benign bleat of Herdwicks and the bright song of a yellowhammer from a larch. But we have earned this … Continue reading The Beckoning Fells →

Between 1st April 2020 and 31st March 2021 I kept a journal on this blog of explorations of our patch of the Pennines made in that strangest of years. With it being a year since I moved away from this format of writing, I thought it was time to gather all twelve posts into one … Continue reading A Circling Year →

These late winter days on the cusp of spring are a gift: the air still cold but the strengthening sun warm and the light piercingly vivid. We leave as the sun is untangling itself from the beech-bristled horizon for a day-long walk under cloudless skies, 13 miles over the moors to Haworth. We spend much … Continue reading Top Withins →

I catch a bus out of the shadowed valley early, up to the song-bright moor. In the cornflower blue sky, curlews keen and wheel, lapwings rasp and wail, golden plovers sigh their heartbreaking lament, meadow pipits glissade down chutes of notes to the heat-hazed heather while skylarks are endlessly suspended in their own song. A … Continue reading The Ebbing Past →

The wind whips over the shallow pass at the head of the valley of Reaps Water, where we are seeing out the old year in a wild dusk. From our vantage, three horizons away and with two more behind it, Stoodley Pike Monument is a navigation bouy, bobbing on the moorland swell. My son swarms … Continue reading Endings and Beginnings at the Headwaters →