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 →

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 the 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 … 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 →

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 →