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 →

A coolness to the air. Swallow alarm calls and the gentle, tentative fluting of bullfinches. The Horsehold herd are slumped in the mown meadow beside their barn. The sun washes over and revives the tired woods, picks out a few favoured farms and settlements of the valley, giving them each a brief time in the … Continue reading Gloaming →

With the jet stream stubbornly stuck to the south, low pressure systems continue blustering the birch, sprinkling the brown sugar of their seeds on the paths, and whirling the downy willowherb seeds across the green. The neighbourhood children are clad in waterproofs and wellies against the near-incessant drizzle, making the best of the wet woods, … Continue reading Aftermath →

A charm of goldfinches chatter and jangle as they work patches of thistle, harvesting their downy seeds, in the fields beside the ruin of Brown Hill Farm. Starlings cascade from the telegraph wires, and a greenfinch grates from the trees that surround the working, whitewashed farm of Lane Top. Its sheep navigate slowly among the … Continue reading Thrive →

In the first dun light of morning, a wren sings its usual trill, but it is tentative, muffled, truncated, evidently subdued by the night-long deluge. Another, atop the mound of Hannah’s lemon-and-cream honeysuckle, has a different attitude, celebrating getting through the night with its usual full-throated cacophony. Nearby, the Colden thunders headlong into the Calder, … Continue reading Harvest →

Bindweed knits nettles and balsam, great willowherb and wild raspberries together on the verges. Children pluck the white trumpets of the first, either affixing them to their noses with inhalations, or squeezing the calyx to launch the corolla into a graceful twirling descent to the ground, an old game that gives it one of its … Continue reading Witness →

At Slack Top Cemetery, from the high bordering holly and sycamore, wych elm and horse chestnut, comes the soft whistles of bullfinch, the sparking ricochets of siskin, the bright jangling of goldfinch, the grating rasp of greenfinch. A swallow hawks over the mown paths between the graves, their silent rows sunk between rosebay and foxgloves, … Continue reading Traces →