We squelched and slid through the February mud in the Worth Valley, where we uncharacteristically followed signposts and clutched a walk leaflet to guide ourselves round the Railway Children Walk, a tour of the shooting locations of one of our favourite films. As we passed Three Chimneys we could just imagine Bobbie, Phyllis and Peter … Continue reading A Vivid Winter Light
We began January with our traditional new year expedition to the source of a river, Crimsworth Dean Beck this time. From a morning of deep frosted shadows in the naked woods to a quiet mulberry dusk in the high moors, we passed through a Peter Brook painting at Outwood, skimmed slim stones beside Grain Water … Continue reading A Quiet Mulberry Dusk
Here we are again, my boy, like so many times before, emerging from the frosty morning shadows of the deep valley and its woods, out and up into golden morning sun, with the promise of a beautiful, memorable day before us. We’ve certainly picked a fine day for our quest to follow Crimsworth Dean Beck … Continue reading Even the Longest Journey
How can philosophy help deepen and enrich our understanding and appreciation of landscape? By way of an answer, I will offer reflection on three philosophical questions we can ask of any place or landscape: What is the narrative of this place? What is this landscape’s moral character? How is this place faring? I hope to … Continue reading Philosophy of Landscape: Narrative, Ethics, Welfare
What is the lay of the land? That was the question my year-long writing and photography project sought to answer with respect to the upper reaches of West Yorkshire’s Calder Valley. It has been a culmination and distillation of 15 years of exploring and learning about my 60-square-mile patch of the Pennines, more or less … Continue reading The Lay of the Land
The valley roars, raging against the dying of the year, with the winds of Storm Pia driving a fine drizzle in waves of analogue television interference against the backdrop of the buffeted Callis Wood birches. Gale force eight gusts tear branches down, and sudden squalls turn the steep valley side roads into rivers, leaving debris … Continue reading Endings
A buzzard pendulums back and forth across the tawny slopes of Chelburn Moor, hovering in the stiff December wind like a kestrel, arching its wings like a red kite, scanning and quartering with purpose, but drawing a blank on anything worth stooping for. This eastern side of the valley is a monolithic wall that rises … Continue reading Waves
Winter’s first foray has one more day to offer. The birch are once more feathered with frost, shining in the glare of the low sun, until a haze softens the vividness of the day into a dusk of pastel shades. The woods that basked and defrosted in the sun blacken as the gloom deepens, those … Continue reading Crossings
A succession of sub-zero nights, a powdering of snow, and the landscape is plunged into winter, even before it officially begins according to the meteorological calendar. The dazzling sun colours the south-facing slopes from white to green each day, only for ferocious frosts to undo its work by the following morning. Each night is colder … Continue reading Borders
The low strong sun musters every colour that the apparently dun, unvarying plain of Stansfield Moor has to offer: its lustrous greens of moss and lichen; its fawn and tawny moor grasses; the bladderwrack-brown of healthy heather, the graphite-grey of its stems where it has been defoliated by its beetle nemesis; the bare peat as … Continue reading Burnished
Landscape Story 