Between Ruth and I we’ve accidentally ended up with a theme.
Author: Steve Scott
Shelley are visiting The Hepworth Gallery Gardens in Wakefield on a sketching outing. I thought I’d give you a bit of (hopefully) entertaining background on one fascinating aspect of the place.
The Gallery is actually built on an Island. On one Side is the River Calder, which of course meanders there all the way from the hills above Hebden Bridge. Alongside the route of the Calder are various bits of canal that are sometimes pure canal and at others join the river. From the Hepworth onwards, the canals start getting much bigger. If you are sat in a narrow boat in one of the locks you suddenly feel small and vulnerable.
Just by the Hepworth a canal cut runs away from the river and the Hepworth is on the island made by that bit of the canal and the river. On the other side of the bridge from the car park there is a boat yard servicing the canal. I once watched a canal boat being lifted from a lorry, over the boat yard and into the water by the footbridge. You are now in the flat and marshy land east of the Pennines.
Shelley Village Hall is in a different sort of place. It is on a hill that is part of a river catchment area. On one side of the watershed a river runs down the valley towards Huddersfield and on the other the water runs down into the valley through Denby Dale. The river running to Huddersfield joins the Colne and Holme rivers and heads north east joining the Calder at Cooper Bridge. Meanwhile the River Dearne on the other side heads off to the Sculpture Park before shooting off south east to join the Rother going through Rotherham. Rivers seem to do odd things.
All the rivers mentioned so far are eventually headed towards the Humber and Hull. They are part of a much bigger catchment area. One part starts in the Hills above Settle, where rivers head across to Lancashire, up to Cumbria, over to Tyneside and, of course, down through Yorkshire. All those Dales and places like York that we like to visit have rivers that eventually end up in the same place.
Perhaps more astonishingly is all the rivers, like the Dearne that eventually reach the Humber from a southerly direction. The Dearne joins others coming down from the south Pennines, including the Don before joining the Ouse on its way to the Humber. That wasn’t always true though. Until some amazing river engineering by a Dutch engineer the Don joined the most astonishing tributary of the Humber. This one originally flows through another place associated with the Arts – Stoke on Trent. Yes, a whole set of rivers on the other side of the Pennines meander around as the Trent heading southwards, then turning east and finally north, before joining up with the water from Shelley and heading to the sea.
So, as you sit sketching on your engineered island, think about the amazing geography of rivers and human attempts to control and use them. Your Shelley water flows down below our house in Ossett in both a canal and a river. Coal from pits under Thornhill was originally transported on the canal, before the railways were built in the same valley. Incidentally, the flood defenses built near the Hepworth lost a traditional foot route and Ruth is part of a group working with the Council, the Canal and Rivers Trust and Sustrans to get routes restored for pedestrians and wheelchairs and cyclists. Another set of connections in my fascination with what I’ve called Paths of Desire.
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A nest Box Adventure
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Digital Assistance
I’ve avoided painting from photographs most of my life, especially other people’s but I am softening with age. Whatever keeps you going.
At the moment I want to do a painting based on a sketch of Lindisfarne Priory I did a few years ago. Oddly I find it harder to transcribe shapes from a sketch than I do from a scene in front of me.
I suddenly had a brain wave and I took a photo of the sketch that I had taken for the web and edited it into two photos, one for each half. While I was at it I reversed each of the halves.
I printed each half out on a4 scrap paper and then I had an A3 version of my tiny sketch. I then used conte pencil to draw round the main lines of the sketch on each sheet, turned it over on the painting surface and rubbed. Hey Presto an A3 version of the original, the right way round. I’ll use photos to help me add more texture and detail.
If only I’d thought of that when I was copying an old abstract etching of mine onto a plastic sheet for our printing session last year.
We’ve crept into May and the temperatures are swinging with the change of wind direction. Some glorious sunshine but not enough rain. Trees swapping from blossom to leaf and everything looking crisp before it all becomes too overblown.
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A message to my grandchildren
And anyone else’s children and grand children
I’ve just been drilling holes through several strips of corrugated roofing at a time. It is a slow and boring job. Hard on old wrists too. That is just one of the many things I now do (as a retiree) to please myself and to help other people.
It made me think about schooling, because I failed (the word they used then) to get into the more academic school that my brother ended up going to. That meant that I went to a school where I did woodwork, metalwork and pottery. All skills I have used in one way or another throughout my life. We also did technical drawing, like an architect or someone designing a machine would use. I was absolutely awful at that and still am.
What I’m writing is not about how useful practical skills are but about how early failure, or failure at some things, does not define you or hopefully limit your chances.
When it came to the exams at age 16, I didn’t do well at those either. I aced maths but not others that I was supposed to be good at and failed several of the nine I was put in for. I didn’t care much because I’d decided to try Art School. It seemed better for me than the hair dressing option anyway.
At school I had been kind of adopted by people for whom art was a normal part of life but when I got to Art School, I realised just how little I knew about it. I also came across my first ‘posh’ people, with different sorts of names, different schooling and assumptions about life that were alien to me. Not everyone of course, but it was an eye opener. I also realised that I could not imagine how I would make a living from art, other than as a teacher and I was still off teachers. Oh well try again.
At Technical College I met again with others from my school who hadn’t flown through it acing everything either. I still couldn’t decide what to do but at least the sandwich course I did gave me work experience beyond stacking shelves and other bits and pieces I’d done for years. The result was that I didn’t ace things again, despite it becoming even more obvious that I could have done better if I’d tried. I was also socially awkward and embarrassed (though I think I hid it well) and often went along with things like heavy drinking that didn’t help anything.
The tale goes on but there is no point here in listing my series of failures to live up to expectations. I never found a course or job that completely felt like what I wanted to do. But I’ve had jobs all my life that keep me going. I slowly realised that I could make things better by using my skills and also that I could explain things clearly to people. I discovered that sticking at things was easier than I thought. I’ve always tried to keep on doing other things that help make me happy too.
I hope you can find a way through all the ups and downs too. Love from a grandad.
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Calculators, AI and Training our Brains
Ruth just introduced me to the idea for the need for the Friction given by human interaction and debate for keeping our brains active and developing. Aside from dismissing it as the next fad in brain training circles and Ruth’s understandable need to remind me of of reclusive tendencies, I realised that it gelled with earlier things I have written and said. When calculators started to become compulsory for schooling I saw that students started to trust them too much. They didn’t have the general estimating ability to see that their answer was way too small or large. My own struggles with mental arithmetic have at least schooled me in checking those problems of scale. Those struggles are one form of stimulative friction. I started giving lessons in estimating to counter the calculator tendency.
The huge rise in the trust in AI, at the same time as the rise in doom stories, is another calculator moment. We need to find ways of helping people to see through the mist of AI to recognise what is trustworthy and what is not.
I’ll be mulling over that from now on.
My last AI briefing was https://valleycreations.me/wp-admin/post.php?post=5083&action=edit
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A Good Garden Day
13/04/26 Pleasant weather after a cold start. Ruth, Simon and I all pottering. Some sluggish bees about and everything changing fast. Between us we created a log pile from the defunct arch, mended a boundary fence, potted seedlings trimmed back a willow arch, cleared beds of weeds and mulched more tender plants, Cleared the debris from an earlier pond clearance and put it in the dead hedge…….
It is nearly 20 years since I moved into this house and there were old, unused, nest boxes here then. Those were put up by Ruth who arrived here 10 years earlier. Despite that we’ve put up several since. One was hidden in a conifer about 20m away from where I film with an old Fairphone 3 but just about visible from that angle. Then wood pigeons nested and played trampolines on one of the branches and the following winter snows made a big gap in that part of the conifer.
Still no sign of activity, other than a quick investigation. Suddenly from another room, I spotted a bird going in, so rushed up and set things up. Over several days there have now been multiple sightings. Hurrah.
The first video is the best so far. The second just illustrates the effect of a change of wind direction on temperatures and thus insect activity in early April.
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Early April Days 2026
It has turned from reasonably cool to excessively warm and back to cool again in a week. Today has been warm in the sun. After finishing the arch replacement a well deserved ramble to take in the garden’s other pleasures.
