Skeins of pink-footed geese trumpet over, their arrows made up of anything between 30 and 300 bugling birds. In six weeks, their regular passages over the valley’s airspace to find feeding in flatter fields of winter crops will end, as they migrate back to their summer breeding grounds in Greenland and Iceland. And this is … Continue reading Gift
The first daffodils fringe the canal at Callis, while on the other side of the towpath, among the communal gardens of the narrowboat community, snowdrops crowd on the edge of the hazel coppice. In Ingham Clough, at the base of an unnamed and unheralded waterfall, boulders wear a shaggy coat of moss threaded with lesser … Continue reading Promise
Morning frosts melt into mild and fragrant afternoons. More songs are added to the growing ensemble in the school-run woods; great tits sing the praises of teachers, a song thrush methodically works through its repertoire from high in a birch, dunnocks self-consciously rush through what they have to say too quickly for it to be … Continue reading Iridescence
Chatter filters down through the trees from the terrace of Lumb Bank. This grand house was built at the beginning of the 19th century by Gamaliel Sutcliffe to look proudly down on his creations, the Lower and Upper Lumb mills. Their two chimneys periscope up through the swell of the winter tree canopy, but little … Continue reading Remains
The snow vanishes not a great deal less abruptly than it arrived. The emerging grass on the green has a sickly, light-starved pallor, and the line of the sledge run is matted and threadbare. Two molehills appear just beside its fastest stretch. What did those poor creatures make of the rumble and roar going on … Continue reading Heeding
A sudden, unexpected hour of downy flakes transfigures the landscape. The Horsehold beeches and Callis birches glimmer in the sun that swiftly follows, sun that lasts, almost unbroken, for a week, colouring the south-facing slopes green during the day, only to have its work undone nightly by fresh falls. The village green, with its two … Continue reading Intake
The rain is incessant, washing over the Pennines in band after band. At Mytholm, the black-tea Colden meets the milky-coffee Calder in a headlong, frothing rush, both far above their standard levels, putting the newly-repaired river wall just downstream through its first proper test. Old field drains in the high pastures are overwhelmed, spilling a … Continue reading Palimpsest
The Hebden Water whirls into the River Calder at the Black Pit, having dropped 1400 feet from the moor after an eight-mile journey through reservoir, ravine, wood and town. At the second dawn of the year, bright and clear after endless rain, a song thrush strikes up its first verses since last summer, and the … Continue reading Beginnings
The woods that mantle the northern side of the valley – Rawtonstall, Knott, Marsh, Naze, Cowbridge, Spring, Common Bank – are browning and bronzing. Distinct woodlands 150 years ago, the abandonment of the steep valley-side fields that separated them has created a continuous band of tree cover, and is probably the most significant landscape-scale change … Continue reading Echoes
Malham | We have been to a number of agricultural shows – Todmorden, Halifax, Bingley, Kilnsey, Otley – since our son was born, making as they do an ideal family day out. But of them all, Malham is our firm favourite and a fixture in the calendar. It has everything you want from a traditional … Continue reading Field Studies #12
Landscape Story 