Freezeframe today

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Nicola

It’s the last day of our travels – that doesn’t mean that we’ve stopped traveling. We still have to get from Wakefield to Hertfordshire (via three train journeys) and then stay at Granny Fiona’s for the bank holiday weekend. But it’s different now, the four of us are parting company at Peterborough – with Pete detouring to London for a West Ham game and then up to King’s Lynn, Norfolk to see his dad (granddad).

Even so I’d like to freezeframe today because it is the end of our adventure travels where we go somewhere we’ve not been to before. Today it was the 196 to a collapsing set of farm buildings at Wintersett by a charming pub. We walked on by and down the lane to the Winterton Countryside Discovery Centre. Here we learnt more about that first naturalist, Charles Winterton, by donning solar tope style helmets which were wired up to the ghost of Winterton who talked a lot about “balance” making him an ideal password. We also learnt that he’d died, aged 83, with the sound of the corncrake in the distance – a bird that no longer over-summers in Yorkshire because the habitats are gone.

The display was an ambitious idea that sadly didn’t work well and was further depleted by a lot of plastic walls and trees inside the centre. However other things in the centre were marvelous: the girls both made animal masks and created their own badge while I juggled around a nature jigsaw of footprint/home/poo and diet for a rabbit, otter, badger, fox and deer. It took me several guesses to get it right.

And then on to the park which we tramped across – Lola spotting a damsel fly, vole in the long grass, toad and froglet. “There is a lot of nature here,” was her verdict – though much less than when Winterton built his big wall around the estate and the mining and golf course hadn’t been built or his horrible son inherited and played big game hunter with his mates to deplete the wildlife further.

After about two miles we came to his old house (massive Georgian pile) surrounded by so much lake that it is on an island. It’s now a hotel and we were able to toast ourselves and the future of slow travel and free bus passes with wine, beer and lemonade at Charlie’s Bar to the bemusement of the honeymooners and trout fishing enthusiasts. Yet again it was a lovely evening with mackerel clouds skudding on a blue sky – the girls think this has been our luck, invariably we’ve had not just good weather but fabulous weather.

The last pit pony

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Nicola

His name is Robbie and he used to work at Pant y Gassey in South Wales. He’s now retired and living in luxury (well a very comfy stable deep with recycled paper bedding) with the added benefits of a well kept field, plus other horsy friends at the National Coal Museum www.ncm.org.uk. At one time (1913) there were 70,000 horses down the mines – often quite big cobs like Robbie – but tiddlers too.

It wasn’t until 1942 that any of the ponies down the mine were guaranteed some daylight – two weeks in August when the miners had their annual break. I still remember watching Blue Peter on TV and seeing pit ponies enjoying their summer grazing. Life for the horses must have been very hard as the men just wanted them to behave so they could get their job, shifting coal, done quicker. As a result there had to be a Parliamentary ruling that no pony could do more than three shifts in 72 hours. Bonnie, the centre’s horse keeper told us one very happy story about a former miner who told her how a pony saved his life, simply by uncharacteristically refusing to move. Moments later the roof caved in where they would have been.

Down the mine

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Nicola (sorry pic is sideways)

Visiting the National Coal Mine http://www.ncm.org.uk/ was a real surprise. It’s the final stage of our power tour (we’ve been to a hydro pump station in Scotland; the Sellafield visitor centre next to the nuclear reprocessing site; ogled on and offshore wind turbines in Cumbria and elsewhere; seen a water wheel at work in Devon; taken the train past the carbon dinosaur cooling towers at Doncaster; stayed in a house with superinsulation thanks to its turf roof; enjoyed showers in Yorkshire from solar water heating and now we’ve been down a coal mine.

The underground tour at Caphouse Colliery, which takes more than an hour, is free. It was also the best of all the numerous guided tours we have been on throughout the past three months. Our star guide Andy, a former miner at the much deeper Thorne pit in Doncaster managed to explain the whole process of coal mining to his group of 20 adults and children (all over five, but none older than nine years). We were shown how to use a safety lamp to check for black damp (no oxygen) with a big flame low down; and fire damp (methane) by looking out for a blue glow above a tiny flame higher up.

If you only go to one place in England – which I hope is impossible– then go here, to the National Coal Museum midway between Wakefield and Huddersfield. The only downside was that I hated the food (the children ate chip butties, yuck, but as everything else is free it seems only fair to purchase snacks there). There’s a housewife from the 1920s giving a chat about life for mining families; displays explaining how to mine; a 300 million year old fossilized tree; and loads of banners and info about off-duty miners too with their sweet peas, cricket leagues, leeks and racing pigeons. Most noteable were the displays drawing together the events during the strikes of 1984 and 1985 to stop pit closures. I cried three times reading about mining: the bosses were so callous trying to slash wages whenever the price of coal fell even though one miner died every four hours. I must have worn a Coal not Dole badge, and given a few pounds at least to the NUM support funds for that strike, but it’s only now that I realize quite how those closures destroyed the communities Margaret Thatcher insisted shouldn’t, didn’t and couldn’t exist.

In just one year, 1923, 1,297 men were killed in mining accidents and more than 200,000 seriously injured. Yet for most of coal mining’s history workers got no sick pay or social security which meant when they fell ill, typically with the lung disease pneumoconiosis, they ended up getting into debt and even losing the house that their boss rented to them.

The tour was an eye-opener even without having to cope with any of the machinery noise or dust. Our group was only allowed down after handing in our contraband – anything with a battery which included my watch, camera, spare torch and a heap of other useless stuff I drag around. After crawling under the lowest chocks (hydraulic props which replaced the wooden props to stop the coal seam above collapsing on to you) and then whacking my helmet head along the slightly taller chock props, with only my helmet light to see by… and thankfully doing this I am in serious awe of anyone who willingly went down in a mine. Indeed getting me down the 430m drop in the cage (about the height of Blackpool Tower) makes me think I deserve a long and full life in the sunlight.

Burning coal is one of the big contributors to the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions: 34 million tonnes of coal are mined each year and there are still 11,000 people employed in the industry (for comparison:in the early 1900s there were more than a million working at 250 pits producing 250 million tonnes of coal annually).

There are still at least 33 open cast sites in Britain plus big mining industries in the USA, India and China. After this visit I don’t plan to burn coal in my fireplace again (a treat bit of winter heat) once my last two sacks in the cellar are used up. I’m not sure that was the aim of the centre but I just hadn’t realized how damaging coal is to people, never mind the environment.

Saving Brass in Leeds

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Nicola

Essential Leeds – a tourist guide available from www.visitleeds.co.uk – offers a guide to 24 hours in the city either splashing out or reigning in. Inspired I adapted the reigning in version – which involved a lot of eating plus strolls in Roundhay Park and late night live music at The Cockpit, Swinegate – for daytime with kids.

The bus station (a 30min ride in from Wakefield) is right by Kirkgate Market which has more than 800 stalls. I knew it was good but was stunned by the range of goodies sold. It feels very continental – a Sunday in Lille even – wandering around the market where we goggled at fruit, African home foods, a Polish deli, baji stall, cheese counters, olive and nut emporiums, embroidery kits and wrapping paper. Did we buy? Yes three buttons (at 25p each) and two 100g bags of sweeties for 80p each. It’s all on line now too, so you can visit virtually if you want to at http://www.leedsmarket.com/.

Next stop was Friends of the Earth’s Leeds office , also in Kirkgate, which provided a nice cup of tea and directions to Leeds Art Gallery. Here we slithered across the grandest tiled hall (lost for 50 years behind bookshelves and now a cafe); used the free internet access at next door’s library and enjoyed the collection of pictures. The girls particularly liked Anthony Gormley’s bigger than lifesize figure made out of bricks and then did their own abstract works at the art cart area upstairs. Next door is the Henry Moore Institute with an excellent craft shop – it's one of the venues where you can buy real art by real artists from as little as #45.

On our way back to the bus we were entertained by buskers near Albion Street and then spent a happy quarter of an hour washing and rewashing hands at Lush.

Total cost of day: return bus tickets #7, mementoes (those buttons!) 75p, grapes #1.40 = happiness for less than a tenner. We are also very lucky at the moment to be staying in a lovely house in Wakefield gratis (though we would like to do some babysitting!), many thanks to Mary & Adrian.

Art girls

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Nicola

Here are two fine pix of Nell and Lola at Wakefield Art Gallery doing their own work - inspired by the city's famous sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore etc (or maybe just bored?).

Bag ladies

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Nicola

At the Yorkshire Sculpture Park http://www.ysp.co.uk/ I bought sewing kits for the girls – a very clever concept which gave us about two hours of embroidered pleasures and, until they are lost, I hope months of swanning around with a very cute horse handbag for Lola and Nell.

The kit wasn’t cheap at #13.95 but I think it would make a brilliant present, made or unmade, for anyone creative but in a creation rut. See the selection at http://www.sparrowkids.co.uk/.

War of the Roses

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Nicola

There’s not much brickwork left at Sandal Castle http://www.wakefieldmuseums.org/ – a pleasing bus ride on the 110 from Wakefield – but that didn’t stop the kids marching around the ragwort fringed paths up to the motte and bailey singing the appropriate nursery rhyme:
“Oh the grand old Duke of York,
He had 10,000 men
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again.

And when they were up
They were up
And when they were down
They were down
And when they were only half way up
They were neither up nor down.”

We’d already met an eccentric local historian, John, who’d explained that the grand old Duke of York was Richard of York (Richard III) who’d gone out one dark Christmas evening (30th Dec 1460) looking for food. As Macdonalds (!) was closed he headed for Burger King (!!) but unfortunately ran into some nasty Lancastrians and lost his head. To add insult his head was then placed on a spike at Micklegate in York. Lola adored this story but Nell remains a little puzzled about why Burger King…

The following year Richard’s son got revenge at what is known still as England’s bloodiest homeground battle at Towston near Tadcaster and becomes Edward IV. The Lancastrians (red rose wearers) might well have won this if their arrows hadn’t fallen short in the windy conditions allowing the Yorkists to pick them up and fire them back. This was only really the start of the Wars of the Roses, an ignominious phase in British history that lasts from 1455-1485.

It gives me a certain pleasure to know that Pete (who went to Lancaster uni) and I (ex York) are in someways still gluing together that entente.

Mad as snakes

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Nicola (sidewinder shot of the girls helping to complete the longest knitted scarf in Wakefield, one of the Wakefield museum's current projects)

If you know anything about Charles Waterton (1782-1865) – Britain’s first naturalist – then you’ll know he was so eccentric that it’s taken nearly 200 years for us to accept his “crazy” nature ideas. Waterton lived in Wakefield at a big pile called Walton Hall Park. He had 260 acres of parkland, including a lake, which he fenced with a three-mile long wall to protect and provide food and breeding sites for wildlife. He made the first artificial nesting boxes (pipes in the wall for sandmartins, adapted old trees for owls, etc) and paid 6p for live hedgehogs (about a fiver) which he then released into his park. Part of his former home is still preserved for wildlife and nature trails – though much of this area, now known as Anglers Country Park, also had to suffer the idignity of being turned into one of Europe’s deepest opencast mines back in 1974. It’s now reckoned to be the most important inland over-wintering bird site in Yorkshire.

The Waterton Trail around The Heronry are meant to be good ways to enjoy places that Waterton liked to watch nature (though he didn’t get the bonus of a cuppa at Squires Tea Room). Opening times of the Waterton Countryside Discovery Centre are from 01924 303980, or see http://www.wakefield.gov.uk/.

Waterton’s catch phrase may have been “balance; in all things balance: keep thinking balance” but after trips to Guyana and Brazil he used his patented taxidermy skills (not stuffed but hollow) to show the world new species and to create bonkers animals which you can see at the Wakefield Museum http://www.wakefieldmuseums.org/ including the most infamous, The Nondescript. This looks like a human – a monkey from Guyana’s face slotted into a monkey’s bottom.

There’s also a painting, done by his mate Captain Jones in 1824, showing a shoeless Waterton capturing a cayman in the rainforests of Guyana by leaping on to its back. It’s hard to know what shocked Victorians society most. His barefoot habit? Marrying a 17 year old who'd wanted to be a nun? Protecting habitats? Being a scientist who played the most unscientific tricks with The Nondescript, etc?

Waterton is also remembered for his capacity to fall out with many, including Audubon the world’s most famous illustrator of birds and still revered in the US thanks to the huge Audubon Society. He actually threatened to horsewhip the world’s most famous naturalist illustrator claiming that he had got the tips of a rattlesnake’s teeth facing in the wrong direction, and they didn’t climb trees! As Waterton was wrong it is possible that he just found the American Audobon far too poo-faced and therefore couldn’t resist a good row to see what mettle the man was made of, after all Waterton was himself a specialist in tweaking the species.

On the buses

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Nicola

It’s not your obvious tourist destination, and yet Wakefield is a brilliant place to stay. It’s in Yorkshire (good), boasts at having part-educated sculptural legends Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore (v gd) and seems full of friendly people (v v gd as I’m constantly getting lost as I make my way around the city and having to ask for directions which invariably include instructions for me to “turn right at the cathedral”). And the tourist info centre was voted the best in Yorkshire last year (2006).

But what I like best about Wakefield is the bus station. It’s clean, the departures board and timetables are easy to understand, there are lots of places to sit, and even on a Sunday morning two shops were open – Bakers Oven for snacks and WH Smith for the papers. Admittedly my last experience hanging around at a bus station was in the disaster of Workington. It may have had the first covered passenger waiting area in Britain but hasn’t yet realized that these days we also need somewhere to rest our weary legs while we wait for our bus to turn up.

Andy Goldsworthy rocks

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Nicola (the Goldsworthy tribute band pic is on the right)

I’ve waited about six years to see it, but when Nell was told we were off to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park http://www.ysp.co.uk/ she had a meltdown. Half an hour later she’d forgotten and was skipping to the bus which runs hourly, even on a Sunday, from Wakefield to West Bretton and a short (unsigned) walk into the park.

It turns out that Nell is not the only child to disagree violently with her mum. On the 435 an only just still blonde woman, with a disconcerting bruise and cut on her right cheek, chats to us about life then and now in west Yorkshire and the famous sculpture park.

“My daughter loves it up there, but I just see three men with holes in them. It’s target practice not art,” she says happily as the bus passes The Station Pub and into the countryside again. “But when we were young we’d spend all day up there, looking for frogs. It never used to rain then. These days I think the sun has died that's why I always take this mac...” With her commentary, at turns painful and then delightful, the journey passes fast. Thanks also to her directions we enter the park at the controversial spot - Jonathan Borofsky’s tree-height Molecule Man 1+1+1. The girls siddle into a photographic spot by it, but as I snap they start squabbling, just like the giant men arguing above.

Tempers calm after a reviving hot chocolate so we walk to the Andy Goldsworthy’s rooms in the Underground Gallery. Here Nell undergoes a cathartic change. “This is cool,” she says breathing heavily as we walk into the second room, done out as an inverse bird’s nest made from sweet chestnut coppice carefully slotted together. In the third she’s the one to spot that the cracking clay is held together with hair – from users of Barnsley, Wakefield and Huddersfield hairdressers during Christmas 2006. And in the fourth Nell stares for nearly 10 still minutes at the curtain of horse chestnut stalks in front of us. Assuming these wonderful, and increasingly fragile, pieces don’t collapse you too can see the show until 6 January 2008 http://www.ysp.co.uk/ and also http://www.cc.gla.ac.uk/goldsworthy. The exhibition catalogue - celebrating his 30 year connection with YSP - provides an excellent future memory jog too if you are willing to part with #15 for it, Andy Goldsworthy at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (or just borrow it from me).

It’s still raining when we emerge from this bit of the show but Lola, Nell and I don't care; Goldsworthy makes us want to reconnect with every one of the elements. Which is why we also head to the Longside Gallery (a barn) where Goldsworthy has created his "shit" work: a river window from cow dung (genius!); a series of sheep feet canvases and a mud ball from the creation clean-up. He's also experimented, Damian Hirst style, with blood droplets on snow from a roadkill hare, and a deer.

Nell, ever bloodthirsty, adores these pieces too. I hope this doesn’t indicate a scary mother-daughter future ahead.