The second day in a row to feature a pic of birds asserting their rights over human-designed territory. These geese had decided they were crossing the main road in Hebden Bridge this morning, and that’s just the way it was. In the end, the woman in the dungarees saw them safely to the other side.
A welcome sight on an early morning: by now in the year the sun is still not up for the first few trains. This is the earliest shot on any day, and the first pre-7am shot, since 30th November 2019.
These fences along Old Gate are, doubtless, the prelude to the building of new flood defences in the town. Now one might consider this a good thing, particularly if one’s property has ended up under water on one of the four occasions (count ’em) that the town centre has been inundated even just in the lifetime of this blog (June 2012, July ’12, Dec ’15, Feb ’20).
But in the first place, one can question the necessity of these works — or at least, wonder why they have been prioritised over known strategies of flood prevention that could take place on the moors above the town. But that land is all owned by the Walshaw estate, who want to continue burning heather and ensuring the peat bogs don’t hold the rain that falls, because it’s uneconomic for them to do that; so they push the problem down-valley, and now Heben will push it further down, and unless we build walls all the way down to the North Sea, some poor bastard will get that water in the end.
Second, all this will most likely turn the pleasant, leafy environs of the Hebden Water into a stripped-bare drainage channel — as similar ones have in Mytholmroyd. If the foliage in the background of this shot is still there in a few months’ time, I will take this back. But I doubt it. So the attractiveness of the town centre (and it does matter — many of the shops here would not exist without tourism) will be ruined, and we’ll still be blind to the real causes of the problem; bad land management and climate change.
It’s not been the most dynamic week, though work was done. Time to pack up and look forward to the weekend.
There are so many questions begged by this corner of Calder Holmes Park that I don’t even know where to start. Who is ‘Bird’? Why is s/he called that? Is the superhero graffito connected in any way? What have they done to deserve being called a ‘potatoe’ and has Dan Quayle been involved?
This is a very boring photo. In that respect it epitomises my day perfectly. The title of the post says it all.
Most of Hebden Bridge, as it stands today, was built between about 1850 and 1900. This gives it a uniformity of appearance that is part of its appeal. But add to that the creative solutions that the architects and builders adopted in order to cope with the place’s steep topography, and sometimes, there is real beauty to it. I love Windsor Road, seen here — it’s just so regular in its steps up the hill. How precisely are these houses placed in relation to one another. Could you do this? I couldn’t even think about how to start on such a project.
Latest shot, and first shot after 10pm, since early October last year. Nights out are still not entirely a thing of the past. The Nightjar bar sits under the Hebden Bridge Picture House, and if you don’t see why I’ve appended the ‘Hawks’ to its name in the title of this post, well, maybe this painting is familiar to you.
After another hot and dry day it was a surprise when Hebden was drenched by a substantial storm in the early evening; such things can be expected in high summer, of course, but the surprise came more because there weren’t really all that many clouds around, and the sun mostly kept shining throughout. But rain it did, and hard; these two were not the only ones scuttling for cover.
Like the shot four weeks ago, one saw the response this morning, without necessarily being aware of the emergency. There were a significant number of fire engines in town — five at least — and a sense of urgency displayed by the running fireman here, but nothing all that apparent seemed to be actually happening. It’s not as if I was being barred from the area.
