A fairly standard ‘tourist’ shot of my home town, but what the hell, it was a nice day and it does look good from this particular angle. I nearly took it monochrome, but that meant the two figures on the bridge became very camouflaged, and I think they set it off nicely.
Flat land is at a premium in the valley, so round here, the recreation grounds are built high up: as with the Astleys, a set of one cricket and three football pitches above Sowerby Bridge. There are worse things to do on a Sunday morning.
I like it when you get these built-in labels for a picture. My job of description is done.
A June walk, and another chance to experience the British weather’s propensity to change from balmy to, if not exactly wintry, then definitely cold and grey over the course of 24 hours. This is why the sheep have better insulation than we do. Stoodley Pike appears for the nth time: it might not be a very prominent peak topographically but the monument on it proves it can be seen for many miles in every direction.
Driving along roads not taken before, on the lookout for photo opportunities: this was a good one. Huddersfield is apparently Britain’s largest town (as opposed to city), and it looks pretty sizeable from up here.
The village of South Milford, east of Leeds, makes an exceptionally wet debut on the blog, and thus a rather grim one, despite being a pleasant place that hosted me entertainingly enough this afternoon. But it was damp, oh yes indeed.
This being a British summer, the balmy heat of Wednesday and Thursday has gone, and it’s raining again. It will do this until it feels like being different.
Old Town sits on the hills to the north of Hebden Bridge. In Christopher Saxton’s atlas of 1579, the first atlas of England and Wales ever published, it’s called The Old towne…. so it’s been around for a while.
Despite everything, it’s still Friday night, the end of a working week, time to relax. What tattered remnants there are of our social life at this time are up in Old Town, so that’s where we headed, despite it being the wettest day for a long while.
The cobbles that surface Sackville Street in Hebden Bridge are classic, but whether they are practical, ask the people that live there. I was just passing. Having reached the ‘bored stupid’ stage of lockdown myself, I wonder whether the painting in evidence here is recent, done by a local householder who has been on furlough for the last three months. But I guess the work looks older than that.
I reckon that under these circumstances, everyone is getting to know their immediate local environment better than they might have done last year. Reached through the woods near my house, the meadows on the upper terraces of the valley, near Old Town, are currently a riot of buttercups. Their yellow carpet is a more natural version of those blankets of oil-seed rape that one gets in more arable districts: and more pleasing, somehow.
Being 42 