Richard Bell's Wild West Yorkshire nature diary
31 January 2007
AT LAST, I've drawn the cover illustration for Walks Around Horbury and it’s a scene from the last walk, going along the bottom of Storrs Hill and back via the river at Horbury Bridge, that I added to the original quartet. This brings the total mileage of all five walks to just over 20 and the total ascent and descent to more than 1,000 feet, more than the height of the Emley Moor mast (above), although I won’t mention that on the cover blurb, I don’t want to put people off; each walk can be completed in 2 hours.
The footpath on the cover was the one that I walked every day when I attended Ossett Grammar School; behind that hedge on the left is where I photographed the goats last week. The area, between Jenkin Lane and Storrs Hill, doesn’t seem to have a name but on the right are the back gardens of houses on Windyridge Street, so I’ve called it ‘Windyridge’ in the caption.
When we moved to Horbury we always called Storrs Hill ‘the Ups-and-Downs’
so the little area at the top of the path, of quarry spoil heaps and Victorian
or Edwardian rubbish tipping became ‘the little Ups-and-Downs’.