30 DAYS WILD : 27 - THE WILD SIDE OF TOWN

E Mill, Dean Clough. The mills at Dean Clough were built over time.
E Mill was built in 1857

I invite you to draw an equilateral triangle with its base parallel to the bottom of the page. Put an X part way along its right hand side. Now, from the bottom right hand corner of the triangle draw a vertical line of about the same length at a right angle to the base. You are creating a not-to-scale diagrammatic map of the area I've been covering in recent weeks for Loose and Leafy. Doing it this way is in the tradition of the London Underground Map. It doesn't precisely show what things are like 'on the ground', you couldn't use it easily in order to walk from A to B, but it sets things enough in relation to each other they can take a place in your mind. 

Roses and coronavirus street plants at an entrance to
Dean Clough, Halifax, Calderdale, England.
June 27th 2020

The base of the square is the town centre. The apex is Warley Moor where we saw the meadow pippit (or lark), the Large Heath Butterflies and the Hare's Tail Cottongrass. Going down the left hand side we are descending into the Luddenden Valley - where we walked in the woods and looked along the stream by a bridge. The Tale of Three Levels noted some of the changes in the terrain in between.

Roses and coronavirus street plants at an entrance to
Dean Clough, Halifax, Calderdale, England.
June 27th 2020

The X is where I live and the vertical line is the Hebble Valley which is so steeply sided in places I think of it as a ravine. Where it meets the base of the triangle there's a huge, renovated mill complex called Dean Clough, which was once one of the largest carpet factories in the world and is now converted into offices, art galleries, a theatre and restaurants. In its hey day,  Crossley Carpets employed 5,000 people - the majority of them there. (According to Wikipedia this number was reached in 1900 after nearly a hundred years of manufacturing. According to the 'Let's Look Again' site it didn't reach this number till 1923.) Now, around 4,000 people work in the replacement industries. Or, rather, they do usually. There's a pandemic and the car parks are empty. And this week, because of the rain there are few people wandering around at random. Perfect for my first foray into 'town' for months.

To be blunt, the contents of Dean Clough are not as exciting as they sound on paper (though they could be!) but unlike the residential areas high on the banks either side, it is usually pretty well manicured. The coronovirus is 'seeing to' that and plants are on their way in, springing up between the stone paving slabs in front of the rose beds at one of the access points on the west side.

Nettle growing through cobbles in street. Halifax, England. June 27th 2020.

Walking through Dean Clough is not only to dip into the combined history of the area and the hopes for a Halifax 'on the rise', it's very good for leg muscles. You go down lots of steps to the buildings, then can climb even more on the other side of the valley to reach the park by the Bankfield Museum in Boothtown via a steep cobbled street which is unkempt at the best of times. But with less traffic and fewer pedestrians, plants here are beginning to get even more of a hold than usual. Nettles are one thing 

. . . the tomato plant was a surprise!

It's a little disconcerting. A bit 'end-of-the-world-ish'.

An extraneous fact: 

during the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester (1819) many escaped injury or death because the horses of the Manchester Yeomanry couldn't managed the slippery cobbles of the steep streets in the rain. Manchester is nearly 60 miles away but I think of Peterloo as well as the mill workers in their clogs when I am walking these kinds of streets here. I am amazed the clogs gripped.

LINKS

Dean Clough on Wikipedia

Crossley Carpets on 'Lets Look Again'

Hebble Brook on Wikipedia

Bankfield Museum

Peterloo Massacre on Wikipedia

Manchester Yeomanry on Wikipedia

British Clogs on Wikipedia

Wearing Clogs in Yorkshire in the 1920s on the Bancrofts from Yorkshire Blog

Buying clogs in Calderdale now - the Walkly Clogs site.

   

This post is for Day 27 of the '30 Days Wild' challenge organised by the Wildlife Trusts.

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30 DAYS WILD : 26 - DRAWING TO A CLOSE

Seeing this Hart's tongue fern in someone else's wall (June 16th 2020)
inspired me to find out more about how to look after them.
I've cleared away some clutter from in front of those
in my own wall and have been drip-feeding them plant food.

After today, there will be four days of '30 Days Wild' left - a challenge set by the Wildlife Trusts to do some random act of wildness every day in June. The 'wild' ideas they suggest have not been very 'wild', not in the way of the street parties which have been breaking out around the country as lockdowns are lifted . . . they have been things like going for walks, for picnics, for listening to the birds, watching out for butterflies.

It has coincided with other challenges in all our lives. For my part, in the early days of the month I could not go out at all because I was 'shielded'. More recently, we 'shielded' people have been encouraged to go for walks as long as we keep away from others so I have swung from being totally at home and pretty inert to walking in remote places and scurrying along for the sake of exploration and to re-animate my body before it gets too sluggish and slow.

I've managed quite a few of the 'challenges'. I planted some corncockle flowers for the sake of pollinators. (They didn't come up.) I checked there is water both for the frog at my allotment and for the birds but as I'm allotmenteering by delegation instead of in person I haven't the photos to show you. But it's there.

The Wildlife Trusts sent an email poster with 'Wildlife Yoga' positions. My next door neighbour, with whom I now share a long-distance cup of tea every morning, suggested we should add outside yoga into our routine. 'What, in front of all the people passing?' No! And I haven't taken up the suggestion that I should make a mandala out of leaves and things either. (A sort of circular pattern which I think is supposed to be meditative but . . . )

I suppose these sycamore seeds (13th June 2020} could have
been turned into an artistic arrangement but I got carried
away by looking at the inevitable aphid . . . and wondering
whether the two sizes and shapes of seeds came from different trees outside my house.
Then I realised - that despite there having been plenty of blossom
on both, one has masses of these winged 'helicopters'
or 'keys'but the other has none.
Can you spot the aphid? (Clicking the picture will enlarge it.)

So it's been a bit of a mixture. Some things I've done. Some things not. I think perhaps I've been a bit lacking on the artistic front. I included a poem but I've not drawn any drawings. My photos are my 'art' so maybe it's a good moment to introduce you to 'Message in a Milk Bottle'. Until I got leukaemia I used to post a picture there every day. And I have, from time to time, on and off, since. But mostly, recently, Message in a Milk Bottle has been neglected. Unlike on Loose and Leafy there are no words - just the photos. The discipline of (almost) daily posts on Loose and Leafy for June has been gearing me up for going back to posting on Message in a Milk Bottle. Loose and Leafy will gradually drift back now to a post roughly once a week but if you like my work you might enjoy Message in a Milk Bottle on the days in between. I'll aim to start again at the beginning of July. In the meantime you might like to browse what's already there.

It isn't all nature - perhaps about two thirds. It depends what I'm doing and what's around. I like shapes and colours and walls and things dropped on pavements and bits of plastic caught in barbed wire too.

Has doing the Wildlife Trusts' Challenge changed me in any way? I think perhaps it has made me more self-aware of what I am looking at. After all, a post a day calls for rather a lot of concentration. And I've become more aware of my place in the landscape. The photo of the digger on the hill is the kind of picture I would usually post on Message in a Milk Bottle but this digger is so prominent it has become a sort of Pole Star on some of my walks.

21st June 2020

And I've become more aware of some of you. Some who have been reading and commenting on these posts are old internet friends. Some have newly arrived. As I potter around the house, noticing the presence of woodlice in the cellar and the strange absence of spiders, as I've left my vase of flowers to decay on the windowsill so I can watch the petals fall, as I've counted the sycamore seedlings I've pulled out of the pots in front of my house . . . I've been chatting with you in my head. Some of these conversations have turned into posts. Others, you may never know about. For both, thank you. Thank you for accompanying me - in my head as well as on our screens.

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Links:

Wildlife Trusts

Message in a Milk Bottle

30 DAYS WILD : 25 - TODAY I WALKED IN THE WOODS . . . WATER

Today I walked in the woods.

Cuckoo spit. Woods in Luddenden Valley. June 25th 2020

There was cuckoo-spit in the grass. (Cuckoo spit is a damp froth which conceals the nymph of an insect called a 'froghopper'. I once brushed the 'spit' away and found a little green monster inside. It was nothing like its adult form. It would seem cruel to repeat the experiment for the sake of a photograph so you will have to imagine what it looks like!)

I came to a gate.

The gate led to a grassy stone bridge.

At the far side of the bridge was a style into a field.

Luddenden Brook. West Yorkshire. June 25th 2020.

But I didn't go into the field, I went under the bridge.

And looked along the brook.

And into the water.

(This reads as if it's a story for very little children learning to read so perhaps I should finsish by saying

"THE END"!)

This post is part of the 30 Days Wild Challenge set annually by the Wildlife Trusts.

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30 DAYS WILD : DAY 12. SITTING IN THE RAIN AND LOOKING AT A VIEW

Luddenden Valley in the rain.

Yesterday afternoon, after one lot of rain had left and another was encroaching on the valley, I took a flask of coffee and sat and looked at the view.

In real life I could feel the wind. I could smell the air. I could see so much more than you can see with a brief glance at a photo.

The sheep here are fairly prominent but there are also lots of cows and some horses.

Oat's Royd Mill, Ludddenden.

And down in the dip there's a big old mill - Murgatroyd's at Oat's Royd. It was built in 1847 for manufacturing Worsted (a good quality yarn made from the long strands in a wool fleece) and was incredibly successful because it relied on steam for power instead of water. Over time it was expanded and a huge number of people worked there. It closed in 1982 and now houses apartments. What a place to live! *

30 DAYS WILD
Today's Random Act of
Wildness is to
sit and look at the view.

Today's random act of wildness was simply that, sitting and looking at the view and thinking how happy I am to be here.

*Calderdale Council Luddenden Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Plan, 

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30 DAYS WILD : THINKING WHILE WALKING - BLACK LIVES MATTER

Warley Drain

Thinking while walking . . .

One of the challenging things about being on Twitter is that you get to know about events before they appear on the news. People caught up in wars tell us they are being bombed. People we've never met die; we grieve. Photos appear of forest fires, landslips, oil spills. We often know little of the context. We don't know how to judge the truth. Old news turns up as if it's only just happened. And sometimes there's silence in the media about things we 'know' and we don't know why that silence persists. Sometimes it's lonely. Sometimes it's bewildering.

It was on Twitter I first saw the video clip of George Floyd being murdered, before I had any context for it. Most of his body was concealed by the police car. A worried looking policeman was acting as a sort of intermediary between concerned members of the public and his colleague who was nonchalantly kneeling on Mr Floyd's neck. Immediately I wondered what I would have done if I had been there. Would I have said something? Done something? Intervened in some way? I didn't know what had been happening immediately before the clip began. Had the man on the ground been incredibly violent? Was he exceptionally strong? What would happen if the policeman removed his knee? It was in another country, another culture. Even those present seemed to be floundering. Later, another clip showed there were two more policemen kneeling beside his body, hidden by the vehicle. And, it turns out, he was handcuffed. He was well and truly overpowered. I see it over and over again in my bewilderment and feel complicit because I have no idea what I would have done, what I would have been able to do, had I been there.

Single, pink flox-glove flower opening.

I am English. I am white. I am very English. Very white. By the names in my family tree it seems there may have been some Welsh ancestors. When I was a child, the possibility seemed exotic. I think my grandparents had relations in Scotland but I don't know how closely I was connected to them. That's the limit to my non-Englishness! Of my friends and acquaintances I find it hard to think of anyone more culturally narrow. I am university educated. I drink lots of tea. I enjoy eating crumpets with butter on. I have a non-posh but middle-class English voice without a regional accent. Feel free to think of me in stereotypes. Some of them will probably fit! I have experienced housing insecurity (terrifying) but have only twice found myself without shelter by nightfall and that was when I missed train connections. There's always been a job or a friend to go to. I have been short of money. Even within this last year there was a period when I could only afford to eat oats for breakfast and potatoes with onions for my evening meal. But that was ok. I would shake at night and wander round the house worried because I was so poor and so ill but I like oats and I like potatoes and things got sorted in time so I never went hungry and never had to ask for the internet to be cut off (I still had you lot!). I was ok.  I grew up when there were still restrictions on what women could or could not do but somehow I didn't feel these had anything to do with me. I anticipated that I would find ways to work round them. By the time I was an adult they had fallen away. My experience of the police has been mixed. I have been arrested twice (for protesting about nuclear weapons). Some police I've met are 'really good eggs'. Some you'd definitely want to avoid. But apart from some rather rough finger-printing I've been ok. And even that was merely sensing there was a nastiness which could be dangerous rather than actually being harmed. Everything has seemed surmountable. I am comfortable in my skin.

So what would it be like without this sense of 'belonging', of . . . let us say . . . superiority? 'Superiority' in the sense of thinking one will inevitably be able to rise above whatever happens? What if the colour of my skin made everything different? It's hard to imagine. The closest I can get is . . . it's a trivial example but it's one of the few things to have rocked me at the time . . . 

I was in my mid twenties, at a conference in Italy, having an animated discussion with a Methodist minister. Suddenly he said 'You are beautiful when you are angry. Your eyes flash.' Since then I've realised this is a terrible cliche but no-one had ever said anything like that to me before in the middle of what I thought was a sensible discussion about something that mattered. Until then I'd always felt I had been treated with respect. It was the first time I had been stopped in my tracks by having my female-ness turned against me. In that moment the world changed. It was less of a place. I still get angry when I remember this. It's the nearest I can get to imagining what it would be like to have the world against me all the time, to feel I am being diminished because of something unchangeable about the way I look. To have to put up with this non-stop would be unbearable.

30 DAYS WILD
Today's Random Act of
Wildness is to
be aware of what it is to
be human.

I'm telling you all this because it's my way of being at one of the 'Black Lives Matter' demonstrations without actually going. If I lived in one of the big cities I would find it hard to keep away, even though I am shielded. Part of me wishes these demonstrations weren't happening. We have a pandemic. If people going to the marches were now to fall ill because they have been near each other, it would be yet another evil, another disaster piled onto a mountain of disasters. Yet I know why they went. I understand that. Millions of my fellow citizens, in this country and around the world, have the wind taken out of their sails, their wings clipped, their lives diminished every day for no reason other than their skin colour or their culture. But someone with a phone who captured the murder of one man at the hands of police in a country far away and not my own turned that moment into a MOMENT; and such MOMENTS have to be seized if we can gather the collective will to change, or be pushed to change. A moment turning into a momentum. The opportunities don't often come round.

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30 DAYS WILD : DAY SIX - A SURPRISE AQUILEGIA

This flower is growing near where the wasps' nest was. It's on a small, untended piece of ground. I think it might be 'Aquilegia Red Hobbit'. How it got there is anyone's guess. But it's tall, pretty and impressive.

I went for another walk on the moor. Saw a lark, two curlews (or the same curlew twice) a walker in the distance and two cross-country cyclists wearing lycra and helmets who came bounding cheerfully down the track. It was VERY windy. Part of the 30 Days Wild Challenge is to be consciously aware of the weather. This afternoon we had hail followed by heavy rain. Couldn't miss it!

30 DAYS WILD
Today's Random Act of
Wildness is to
be aware of the weather.

Have been thinking a lot.

Shattered!

That's all for today. 

Hope you are all having good days too. (Despite everything.)

Interesting Link

My phone doesn't accept apps. In case yours does . . . I came across this for identifying birds by their song. Chirpomatic. Has anyone tried it?

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30 DAYS WILD : FIVE - A WALK ON WARLEY MOOR

The water we are looking down on is 1,350 feet above sea level.

I have been for a walk! A walk in the open air! On a moor! Warley Moor in West Yorkshire.

A week ago the government announced that the shielded people (ie those instructed not to leave their homes for the sake of their health) could now think about going out for a walk. The place had to be chosen carefully; somewhere without people: somewhere without a teashop!

I chose Warley Moor.

This was the scene when I opened the car door.

I walked at a sharp pace for half an hour and met no-one. I walked back for half an hour. Still not a soul. Sheep, curlews, brent geese, gulls, a flock of small birds kicking up a high pitched twittering as they flew over a hill. A few walls near the road. And larks.

Possibly a skylark.
(Alauda arvensis)
Go to the RSPB site to hear a skylark sing.
Or maybe a Meadow Pipit  (Anthus pratensis)?
Go to the RSPB site to hear a Meadow Pipit chatter.

I think this is a skylark sitting on the wall. It had fluttered around somewhat as I approached. I wondered if it was drawing attention away from its nest. A bird person perhaps will be able to say.

Graeme at Imperfect and Tense suggests 'Meadow Pipit'.

Linking to 'My Corner of the World'
and
'Our World Tuesday'

30 DAYS WILD
Today's Random Act of
Wildness is to
go for a walk.

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30 DAYS WILD : DAY TWO - HARTS TONGUE FERN IN WALL

Harts Tongue Fern (Asplenium scolopendrium). June 1st 2020

Yesterday morning I sat in the sun with my neighbour. Long distance sitting. I brought out a chair and a cup of tea and sat in front of my front door - the first time I've done this since Lockdown. She sat on the wall outside her house, also with a cup of tea, and we bellowed at each other. Our doors are much farther apart than two metres but despite that it was very companionable.

And while I was sitting there . . .

no

pause

. . . simply sitting there in the sunshine with the trees above us and my trays of brussels sprouts and rudbeckia between us . . . that can count as one of the 'wild' things I did yesterday. Nothing more 'wild' and less tamed than fresh air and sunshine!

Anyway . . . while we were sitting there, I noticed these scruffy ferns in the wall. I guess they are Harts Tongue ferns (Asplenium scolopendrium) but they are very small and very sad. I'm used to Harts Tongues being a foot tall and a deep green and growing directly out of the ground in the Dorset woodland. However, the remarkable thing about these is not really that they are so dilapidated but that they are there at all. No water. No earth. What nutrition?

Dandelion seeds?

Also to be noted are the added 'extras' that only really get noticed later. I could already see the plants were sort of dusty as well as pale. Indeed, I had briefly wondered if I should tidy them up a bit before photographing them - a gentle sprucing with a handbrush or something. But that way you miss things. As well as the inevitable threads (what are these threads that are in all the pictures?) and bits of  spiders webs, there are seeds. Looks as if they are from dandelions. Ah . . . dandelions!

30 DAYS WILD
Today's act of
random wildness is to
sit in the sun and
look around.

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THE MEANING OF LIFE?

Dandelion Leaf in My Window Box
April 20th 2020

An older friend, charming but prone to gloom, once told me the only difference between a long life and a short one is that you do the same things three times instead of once.

In 2019 intensive care 'outreach' came to my bedside three times to advise nurses how to look after me. My temperature raged. My blood pressure sank. They monitored carefully in case my organs decided to shut down.

Sycamore seedling in my window box.
Unfortunately this will have to be taken out but for the moment I can be pleased
 I am being visited by a tree.
April 20th 2020

In 2019 two rounds of pretty heavy chemo didn't work. Even after I'd had a stem cell transplant, the leukaemia was still there. The consultant advised me that things did not look good. But the new stem cells settled in and I was given a trial drug 'on compassionate grounds'. Result! the leukaemia is in retreat. If it is still here, it is here in such a small amount it cannot be detected. This, note, is not the same as a definite 'cure' but it's pretty good.

Dead Daffodil Flower
20th April 2020

Then along come the corono virus to disrupt all our lives. All the immunities bestowed by childhood illnesses and inoculations were swept away by the transplant and my ability to fight off infections is weakened by the anti-cancer drug. I am, to put it mildly, a bit vulnerable. The government has put me in the 'shielded' group. (It's even sent me a food parcel!) This is partly to save my life and partly to save the lives of others. If I land up in hospital I could be in the way of someone else who needs to be there. I can't leave the house for three months. Oh joy! Even more time to contemplate the purpose of existence.

Obviously, I haven't come up with any brilliant ideas. I can't even work out what I want to do with my own life let alone understand the purpose of  'life' in general. But I do keep thinking about my friend's idea that we merely repeat ourselves.

With all this going on, I've still not really 'moved in'. Others would have been more efficient but I still have things in boxes and in odd and 'wrong' places. It's quite entertaining. I don't really know what I still own and what I disposed of before moving from Dorset to Halifax. Things keep turning up. The other day I was looking for a missing memory stick when I came across a package of writing from when I was at Junior School.

In it, along with a little 'book' I'd written about the reign of the Stuarts and another about cats which included an incomplete chapter on 'Methods of Tiger Hunting' (!!!!!) was a short page and a half about wild flowers. I present it to you here for your entertainment. It's a sort of proto-type Loose and Leafy. I don't seem to have changed my mind or my ideas since I was . . . somewhere between seven and eleven years old. On the one hand it's a good find; good to discover one has been consistent, a current of interest over a lifetime. On the other . . . . maybe all I am doing is saying the same thing over and over. Is this what my life amounts to? What, I ask myself in the spirit of enquiry rather than negativity, is the point? If I had died aged twelve (not at the time an option) would I have contributed any less to the world than I've achieved in the decades since? Perhaps the answer is simply that there is a virtue in repetition. Perhaps some things are worth saying over and over? I don't know.

Certainly I'm currently experiencing the truth of something I am always advocating, only in reverse; that fresh air and exercise make the mind as well as the body lither, stronger and happier. Cut off from both I'm growing sluggish and dull. I feel queasy and faint really easily. I'm having to work at not being miserable. I've decided to be delighted in the small functionings of my brain. "Wow! I remembered something! How did I do that?!" I'm trying to persuade myself that walking up and down the three flights of stairs in my tall, thin house is a fair swap for hills and moors.

And perhaps I am truly having to settle with the idea that the sole purpose, the main aim, the highest and most worthy career goal of my life is to persuade everyone that dandelions are wonderful . . . and that this revelation is worth repeating endlessly; way more than my allocated three times!

* * * 

P.S.
Because I live in England I have been in the care of the NHS. On behalf of the country as a whole it has spent thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds on keeping me alive and never once has anyone asked me if I'm worth it. I am a citizen, therefore I am cared for and my treatment is free. I am not a patriotic kind of person but I am bewildered when I realise having a system like this is not the aspiration of every country in the world. Goodness, am I grateful! I am hoping someone in the NHS will think preserving the life of a repetitive dandelion advocate is truly commensurate with the expense.

P.P.S.
The stem cells which saved my life were donated anonymously through the Anthony Nolan Trust. If you are between 16 and 30 years old you too can become a donor and save someone's life. If you are over 30 you are still able to help save lives through financial donations. The link is to the UK site but it operates a shared register with other countries too. I'm not sure how many, Germany is certainly one of them.

P.P.P.S.
In case you aren't able to read the text in the photographs, I've copied it out here - preserving the spelling!

"Wild Flowers"

"Wild flowers are often just as beautifull as garden flowers. When a wild flower is caught trespassing in a garden, it is normally uprooted and thrown away, but when it is found otherwise, the same plant is praised, picked, and taken home to decorate the house. Nature is one of the wonders of science, going on year after year, giving us food and delight. Sometimes when the words Vegitation or Vegitable are mentioned, our minds imediatly think of things like carots or cabages, so it is a good idea to remember the game anamal, VEGITABLE, and mineral.

If you look hard, even in the busy streets there are wild flowers. Dandelions grow tucked away in a crack under a wall. Mosses, ferns, and grasses are here and there, sometimes moss grows in between the  paving stones, but the best place to look is in the country, there you don't need to look very hard, in winter it is not so good but nearly always the dead remains of plants can be found.

Different plants grow in different types of soil and climate, so before going out into the country to find any particular plant, it is best to check that you know where to find it."

* * *

Link
Anthony Nolan Trust

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Linking to Nature Notes at Rambling Woods