Maybe snow.....

Colder than cold. White doves lift-drop-turn around Fanshawegate; a kestrel held high above the windmill on the Lydgate horizon. Sheeps dit-dot the fields below sugar sifted top of Totley Moss. The light is electric at my favourite ash tree. We stop, look, slow the pace despite freezing fingers and paws.

Fieldfares

Why do I seem to write this blog mostly in Winter? Perhaps I find it the most beautiful of seasons - especially when it is under such threat. Today the real symbols of midwinter burst out of the bony trees near Woodthorpe - a clatter of fieldfares. Here is what John Clare has to say in a gem of a sonnet:

Emmonsails Heath in Winter

I love to see the old heath's withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling
While the old heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps his melancholy wing
And oddling crow in idle motions swing
On the half rotten ash tree's topmost twig
Beside whose trunk the gypsy makes his bed -
Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread;
The fieldfare chatters in the whistling thorn
And for the 'awe round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again.

"Crimpled," "oddling" "bouncing woodcock" - what words! What a naturalist as well as a poet! Some of Clare's poems protest the harm wrought by the enclosure of the commons that he witnessed in his lifetime. We are enclosing our world with heat not fences and hedges. Will our winters ever be the same?

Moss Road

Here is the path leading up to Moss Road and the moorland of Totley Moss, taken by Blacka Blogger last Summer.







Here it is again, photographed yesterday, showing resurfacing in progress by the Council. Pretty surface eh?

Stone would have been so much more in keeping. This is the original path higher up.....

and here is the new surface - tarmac chippings.


Don't you despair?

I applaud their attempts to stop 4 by 4's getting onto the open moor though, by building a dry stone wall:

Unfortunately, the fuel guzzling darlings have started to knock it down:

Scrabbling about

Today Christine and I explored the deepest disused and presumably most ancient holloway on old Totley Lane down from Bradway. There are three levels at the Totley end, near Brook Hall and the Lodge. As one "road" became deep and muddy from packhorses and carts - it was abandoned and another path made higher up. Here we find an old purse and bag where some bad boy has chucked his stolen goods.


And an old fallen tree in the bottom, looking like something out of Tolkien.

Much singing from the birds today. The robins' songs seem less wistful, more confident. Later on, two were fighting over their territory at the edge of Greenoak Park.

Last night I was part of a small group (but set to grow larger) who have formed to fight the awful new lights on the A621 Baslow Road. These are huge, close together and line the open countryside and moorland outside Totley. The group also wants to monitor and campaign against other inappropriate development and creeping urbanisation in the city's green fringe , close to the Peak Park. The group is to be called SPACE - Sheffield and Peak Against Urban Encroachment. So - watch this SPACE!

White coal and holloways

We take the car up to Holmesfield Church carpark and walk into the woods. Once a medieval deer park, the earthworks around the wood to keep the deer in are still visible. We go in via a new wide path but rapidly veer off it into the steepling beeches. Hollows where wood was burnt for white coal - used to smelt lead - are still visible. The woods in Totley, here, and in the Cordwell Valley were all a valuable resource for this white coal. Most, apart from this one are now unmanaged and neglected.

We return via Hob Lane - an ancient deep holloway alongside the wood, once part of an important track running south to north.