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 →

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 →

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 →