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 →

A Midday Dawn | We have Christmas presents to deliver for friends in Luddenden, a tributary valley five miles downstream. We could make life easy for ourselves and cycle down the canal towpath, but we opt to make a day of it and cross the moor that separates us on foot. From town we bully … Continue reading Field Studies #06 →

Inversion | A hare sprints away, crunching across the frosted field. I forgive myself for not noticing that it must have been crouched in plain view for the past ten minutes just on the other side of the wall I have been leaning on, for the spectacle of the glacier of cloud in the valley … Continue reading Field Studies #05 →

The Medieval Park of Erringden | Over the 30 years that I have been interested in the ‘outdoors’ I have oriented that interest towards one or another aspect of it at different times. In my teens and early twenties I viewed it as an arena for various outdoor pursuits, then later the always-present passion for … Continue reading Field Studies #04 →

Erringden | The school run through the woods is under branches bowed low with snow, which my son takes great delight in pulling down to unburden them of their load, then letting them go to spring back up to their normal angle. After drop off, at the meeting of the Colden and the Calder, a … Continue reading Field Studies #03 →