Intersection Logs

They had a Steam Gathering at the Industrial Hamlet this weekend, as a grand finale before closing down for the winter, and I spent a couple of happy hours there yesterday morning, taking photos of shiny traction engines and steamrollers, watching a blacksmith forge a chain, and poking into the corners and workshops again.

Yesterday we did our favourite segment of the Sheffield Round Walk, from Ecclesall Woods up to Ringinglow and down the Mayfield valley to end at Endcliffe park. The woods were full of bluebells, giant stitchwort, and wild garlic, as well as fresh leaves; there were robins, and a mob of ducklings on Forge Dam, and of course that heron. Most of the surprises of the day, though, happened in the field just before Ringinglow -- the bit I've taken to calling the Boggy Field with Cows In. Because it's boggy -- being apparently at least one of the sources of the Limb Brook -- and has a higher probability of bovine encounters than is quite comfortable. We decided to chance it rather than going half a mile out of our way, given the dry weather lately -- only to encounter surprise number one. In the last year, someone has devoted a lot of trouble and a lorryload or two of stone chippings to making a nice dry path through the bog.

Surprise number two was the Fungi of Unusual Size, growing on a dead tree; seriously, the things were the size of dinner plates, if not tea trays, and quite handsomely scaled in gold and brown. Someone had apparently harvested one, quite neatly with a sharp knife, but there were plenty left to admire.

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After detouring to look at the fungi, we sat down to eat our sandwiches while we were a bit off the beaten track, and that was when surprise number three happened; a sizeable branch fell off one of the beech trees with a tremendous crash. Fortunately no one was too close at the time -- though the nearest dog came running almost before the echoes had died down. (We got a closer look later, and it looked as though it had been rotten anyway, and had come down under the weight of the new leaves.)

From my back window this morning.

Yesterday was so wet that we didn't fancy going into the woods today, but we walked along the road to see the Beauchief Dam -- the reservoir for the Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet, where they made knives and tools with water power in the old days.

It's about as tall as the Town Hall, and from ground level it looks pretty much hemmed in by the buildings around it, but it's visible from Chesterfield Road (going up into the hills on the southwest side of town) so it must have some longer sight lines.

More details from the local paper.

Today's themes, as we wandered around the park and gardens at Chatsworth, were butterflies, dramatic reflections in glass-smooth water, fungi, and weird modern sculpture.

The ancient limes south of the Canal Pond, under which Dr. Johnson is said to have walked, are no more; they were obviously in trouble last year, cordoned off for being unsafe, and now they're gone. The resident sculptures -- an ever-growing collection, given the current duke's interests -- have been reshuffled again, and the annual Sotheby's exhibition is in the process of being set up, with some of the sculptures waiting to be set up in the private bit of the gardens between the Canal Pond and the house. The dahlias by the maze were in fine fettle, and there were some lovely hollyhocks and gladioli -- including purple ones -- in the kitchen gardens, as well as lots of ripening fruit and squash vines with rumpled orange flowers and fruit in all stages of development from golfball-sized to football-sized.

The weather was just about ideal --- dry, bright enough to be cheerful and photogenic, but with interesting clouds to reflect in the lakes and not too sunny to be comfortable walking about. The butterflies were out in force -- peacocks and large whites mostly, and one painted lady.

It's raining gently, and the sun is shining a little, but if there is a rainbow we can't see it from the east- or west-facing windows.

LJ seems to be letting me in today, so I've been able to scan my f-list for the first time since ... Thursday?

LJ still seems to be suffering from that DDOS attack; I've managed to get in exactly once today, to read the first page of my flist. I'll try crossposting this, but it may or may not go through. (EDIT: No, it's "database issues" now, apparently. Sigh.)

We went walking in the very soggy woods today, and up to Whirlow. There was a wedding going on at Whirlowdale Hall, with two beautiful vintage Rolls Royces waiting outside and a violin solo wafting down the drive.

I love the scent of the English summer -- cool and green and a little sharp, like mossy stones.

One day last July, my mother and I hiked through the little hamlet of Ringinglow on the southern edge of Sheffield, where the Round Walk meets the old turnpike road over the moors. The field by the pub was full of media-looking trucks and trailers, some of them with little paper labels on the doors: "Young Heathcliff, "Young Nell," "Kathy." I deduced that a production of Wuthering Heights was in progress.

I think, after watching the online making-of video, it was this one, which opened on Masterpiece Classic on Sunday night; what we saw would have been connected with the "riding up to the gates" scenes, where the houses were photoshopped in to a background of moors from "south of Sheffield."

I also think -- though the making-of is silent on the subject -- that the ancient stone track and dramatic crags featured in some of the scenes were Stanage Edge, a mile or two from the landscape in my icon. Either that, or there's somewhere on the actual Yorkshire moors that looks exactly like it. (The same edge featured in the Pride and Prejudice movie a few years back.)