A skein of 125 pink-footed geese trumpets out of the bruised bank of fog that glowers above the scaffolded St Paul’s Church at Cross Stone. It arrows across the blue gulf and shining fields of Mankinholes Tops and plunges back into the mists that roll over Langfield Edge. Taking this flypast of their wilder, migratory … Continue reading Cherished
The first frost brings October to its heat-addled senses, resetting it into seasonally appropriate temperatures and a succession of clear and blessedly cold autumn days. The Calder, having spilled from its source on Heald Moor, winds its sinewy way down the faultline of the Cliviger Gorge to Todmorden. Morning mist hangs above Cornholme’s St Michael … Continue reading Custodianship
A gauze of mist wreaths through the oaks that have colonised the Brock Hole Delphs on the headland of Heptonstall. The sun slings shafts through their twisted etchings, and spiders have suspended bowed threads between every branch, each strand sagging under a weight of water droplets. Clear a century ago, the slow flooding tide of … Continue reading Tides
The Callis Wood birches are bowing out of autumn early; having shed their leaves in the past weeks, they have faded to an ashen, winter-ready grey. Among them, though, the beech are beginning to blaze. Fleets of red admirals marshall on the buddleia in the soft sun, though the watery light belies the unseasonable warmth … Continue reading Renaissance
Along the Widdop Road from Slack, past Stoneshey Gate, embowered by sycamores and from where Gamaliel Sutcliffe planned his mills for Colden Clough; beyond the cloistered grandeur of Greenwood Lee, which Abraham Gibson bought in 1762 in a drunken stupor, and from which his son moved his spinning equipment to Lord Holme (now Gibson) Mill, … Continue reading Testament
A day of relentless rain and the clough streams froth and thrash and surge into the river. The stones and boulders around which the currents usually flow are every one of them overwhelmed, but their presence is magnified in the foaming swell and violent heave of the surface. At the meeting of the waters at … Continue reading Imprints
At dusk on the penultimate day of the unprecedented September heatwave, small sounds are swallowed in the muffled dimness of the valley side woodlands: the purring ‘seep’ of a treecreeper, a squirrel’s peculiar throaty grunting, the patter and slap of acorns prematurely falling. After shielding and shading from the blaze of the day, the canopy … Continue reading Inheritance
Thirty minutes after sunset, bats flit along the shelter belt of trees that lines New Lane at the top of Mytholm Steeps, disturbing the wood pigeons that, having settled in the spruce for the night, now clatter out of them to find another roost. The north-western sky is pastel grey, the south-eastern cobalt blue, into … Continue reading Roots
The normal hulking Victorian solidity of the 121-foot stone obelisk of Stoodley Pike Monument is insubstantial today, drifting in and out existence, vanishing and reappearing in wreathing vapours of low cloud. Its inconstancy untethers the Calderdale landscape, which orients itself around this commemoration of the coming of peace after the Napoleonic Wars. Or rather, this … Continue reading Restoration
Hazelnuts are ripening along Winter’s Lane. The roots of their trees are next to an unnamed stream which, having gathered in the fields below Pry, flows down through Den Farm, disappears under the Castle Hill quarry, reappears in Knott Wood to flow through the site of Old Charlestown and is channelled under the Woodman railway … Continue reading Ripening
Landscape Story 