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Tofts and Crofts
Richard Bell’s Wild West Yorkshire nature diary, Friday, 2nd October 2009, page 1 of 2
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I DREW this building on Woolpack’s Yard Wakefield from the waiting room on the second floor of the new medical supercentre on King Street, behind the town hall in Wakefield. These long narrow streets opening onto Westgate follow the lines of the ‘tofts and crofts’, i.e. long strips of arable land each with a cottage on it, of the medieval town.
Success at last; this is my third visit to a nurse to dislodge the wax in my right ear. I’ve been dropping warm olive oil into my ear 2 or 3 times a day. It’s strange that an olive that’s grown, perhaps, on a hillside in Tuscany has ended up being used improve my hearing.
You’ve got to give the oil chance to work; a good 15 minutes each time, so I’ve timed my sessions by catching up on the recordings I made of the late night repeats of Time Team Channel Four broadcast in the spring so my enforced interludes of inaction have enabled me to brush up on the history of the landscape, which is appropriate because my latest series of walks has a historical theme.
Next step is the audiology assessment. I’m looking forward to hearing grasshoppers and redwing contact calls before too long!
