WE
TAKE A BREAK and, just five minutes walk from our door, we're
standing on a banking, overlooking a bend in Coxley Beck;
a little patch of wilderness. It's good to step out of our book business for
45 minutes and enter a different world; it helps us to put things in perspective.
Brown leaves
lie
in
drifts at
our feet, on the opposite bank of the stream crack
willow saplings,
which have grown up since we moved here 25 years ago, are turning what was
once a streamside meadow into woodland. The afternoon sun picks out the texture
of
the rough
pasture
on the
slope beyond, in
contrast
to the blue grey cloud that is towering in the west.
It's so quiet this afternoon; unusually there isn't even a distant drone of
traffic. We see only two dog walkers; grey skies seem to have persuaded people
not to take a walk or perhaps we've
just
hit
a lull.
As we walk
down
into the
Calder valley, the cloud has spread but a single patch of sunlight illuminates
an
area about the size of a 
football
pitch on the other side of the river, picking out birches and hedges in glowing
detail.
Two jays are busy down by the canal, near an oak tree at
the end of the old mineral railway. One has an acorn in its beak and is apparently
looking for somewhere suitable to
bury
it.
As the cloud passes, the returning sun illuminates details like
the green tightly furled catkin buds on a hazel (right) by
the track. It's been so gloomy for days and seeing the colour and detail, not
to mention the promise of spring in those incipient catkins, is a kind of revelation.
We've
been enjoying the light and the landscape; we've come out for a break, not
to study natural history, but I notice a web that at first I think is dotted
with
trapped midges. On closer examination I see
that
they're
small
brown spiders. The web extends along the top wire of the barbed
wire fence. Each spiky knot on the barbed wire serves as a miniature tent with
silky corridors linking them along the wire.
The silky shroud takes in the tops of the supporting posts
and the seed-heads of an umbellifer. The
web
is
sheet-like
rather
than lacy. It extends along the fence for about 60 yards. I don't think I've
ever seen a continuous web as a long as this one.
I
drew from memory back home, using a Pilot Drawing Pen,
then added watercolour but it looks as if the 'water resistant' ink has run
slightly, at
the top of the cloud in my spiders' tent drawing (left), so I tested
the Pilot and the Staedtler Pigment liner (right).
They both seem waterproof, neither has run into the yellow wash.