Behind the Parsonage in Haworth, which now houses the Bronte Museum, there is a field aptly named Parson’s Field.

It slopes gently uphill, and as I entered the field I saw a ram and several ewes in the top corner by the dry stone wall.

As I approached, they looked up and the ram stood at the back, side-on to me, full-coated and magnificent. The ewes looked a little spooked and one of them did something I have never seen a sheep do: She pawed the ground like a bull, and pulled back her lips to tell me not to come any closer.

I took several photographs while they were deciding I was not going to come any closer, and as they ambled across the field.

Five Sheep

 

The village of Haworth is set in the Pennine Hills, overlooking the Worth valley, and it is in the parsonage that the Bronte sisters wrote their most famous works, including Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

By the south bank of the river Thames in London, close to the Globe Theater and just across the river from St Paul’s Cathedral, there is pretty house, painted a creamy white.

Above the door, the name Cardinal’s Wharf is written. And to the side of the building is a plaque that reads –

Here lived Sir Christopher Wren during the building of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Here also, in 1502, Catherine Infanta of Castille and Aragon, afterwards first Queen of Henry VIII, took shelter on her first landing in London.

One can easily imagine Sir Christopher Wren getting up in the morning and looking out of one of the upper windows to see, across the river, his creation rising out of its foundations as the work progressed from the laying of the first stone in 1677 to the completion of the cathedral in 1708.

The St Paul’s Cathedral that Wren designed is the ‘new’ building that replaced the old St Paul’s that was gutted in the Great Fire of London in 1666.
 

 

Almscliff Crag in North Yorkshire, England, is an outcrop or tor of gritstone, visible for many miles around. It is a site of special scientific interest – a protected site under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 and a venue for climbers who boulder on it and walkers who want to look around the area from a high vantage point.

Bouldering is a branch of climbing concentrating on difficult technical problems, often just a few feet off the ground. Gritstone is a hard rock and, not surprisingly, feels very gritty and rough to the touch, and provides very good friction for climbing.

For the climbers who come to do some bouldering, Almscliff is within easy reach of Harrogate, and quite near the road, so dragging a crash mat up from the car is not hard. A crash mat is a kind of portable mattress onto which a climber can jump to avoid landing on hard ground.

Yorkshire gritstone is also called millstone grit because it was used for making millstones for grinding wheat. Whilst millstone grit is a hard rock, the grit must surely have rubbed off and become mixed with the wheat. Certainly, from time to time a stone would have to be dressed, which involved cutting fresh furrows in the stone where they had worn down rubbing against the opposing stone.

Walking around the base of the outcrop on a bright October day, I could see cow pats dotted around on the grass, and it occurred to me it must be a strange site to see cows wandering around the base of the rocks high above the surrounding countryside.

A view across the valley from Almscliff Crag