In the shadow of Callis Nab, the constrictions of the Calder Valley are released just enough to have once made room for the St James cricket ground. It was unlikely to have been ideal, spread as it was upon the flood plain of Mutterhole Holme where Jumble Hole Clough finishes its tumble down the valley … Continue reading Heal
Deep in the frosty morning shadows within Blake Dean lie the footings of the remarkable 700-foot-long, 108-foot-high wooden trestle bridge that carried a temporary railway from near Heptonstall to Walshaw Dean, where Enoch Tempest’s navvies spent seven years constructing three new reservoirs for the Halifax Corporation. It will be hours yet before the southern side … Continue reading Pilgrimage
A sharp wind harries sun and shadow across the saturated moors that enfold Crimsworth Dean. Its fields were once kept green by the application of Lancashire lime transported by trains of ponies along the high route of Limer’s Gate. From Lumb Falls it climbs to Naze End, and is still well worn nearly to High … Continue reading Antiquity
The embers of the Horsehold beeches and the birches on the Whins and the oaks under Callis Nab are blown to glowing life by the autumn winds. The equanimity with which a purring flock of long-tailed tits are moving through the willows and poplars planted by Peter 20 years ago is disturbed twice in quick … Continue reading Absences
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
Landscape Story 