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
Pry | I retrace the woodland paths that my son and I have walked to school, but instead of dropping down the last slope to home, I am drawn upwards out of the shadowed, frost-gripped valley to the meet the day's dazzling brightness. The holly and hawthorns have both been extravagant in their berry production … Continue reading Field Studies #02
Horsehold Wood | In a still, shrouding vapour, birch flare and beech smoulder. Despite the lack of an early, colour-intensifying frost, the autumn colours have been spectacular. Among the dying flames, long-tailed tits swing and pivot on twig ends; a nuthatch assumes an uncharacteristically upright pose in a crook of limbs; on an altar of … Continue reading Field Studies #01
2nd March We make a rare foray into town for a homeschool history project on Lavena Saltonstall, a Hebden Bridge-born suffragette. We visit her birthplace at Rawholme on Midgehole Road, and later residences on Unity Street and the vanished terrace of Buttress Brink, as well as several mills where she might have worked as a … Continue reading March: Renewal
1st February In the frigid evening air at the end of an intensely bright day, the lingering smell of sun-warmed soil kindles an almost painful hopefulness. Spring is a little way off yet, but today, for the first time, I allow myself to dream of its coming. 2nd February A fresh and heavy snowfall in … Continue reading February: These Shining Days
1st January For our New Year's Day walk, my son and I choose a route up the first section of the valley of the Hebden Water, labelled on old maps as Hebden Dale, a name which seems to have fallen out of use. We pass through a rather strange atmosphere in the centre of town, … Continue reading January: Frozen Fields
Landscape Story 