Today promised us a brief interval of fine weather before the rain sets in again. I grabbed the opportunity to get out for a walk, and possibly a climb also. The idea was to link two objectives. I wanted to sustain my current commitment to drawing, and I wanted to look at a climbing venue I had not visited before.
The crag is called The Scout, and it is part off a long rocky ridge that lies above one of the minor roads linking West Yorkshire and East Lancashire. I’ve looked at the place from the other side of the valley on several occasions but never managed a visit. It really was something of a revelation. The rock is absolutely superb, and there is a range of routes there within the limits of my capability. I didn’t climb today because I didn’t have the time, but I did manage a bit of scrambling about, and can’t wait to get back there with friends.
My other success was on the drawing front. Today I tried two novelties. I thought it might be interesting to attempt to work with fibre-tipped pens, as I have seen several examples of this technique in the book on drawing I’m reading at the moment. I took a middle-grade one and a fine one, to give contrast of line. The idea was a good one, but the thicker one was too heavy. With a little graphite to provide a sense of tone, however, it worked reasonably well, and I’m encouraged enough to try it again.
The bigger success was in relation to the subject-matter. I wanted to do a panorama of a large section of the ridge, laid out across a double spread of the sketch-book. Retaining a sense of proper proportion across such a wide subject is notoriously difficult, and the classic error is to find that you have run out of space by the time you reach the other side of the page, as a consequence of beginning with too large an image. In the event I was delighted with the way in which I did manage to accommodate the entire length of the crag across the two pages, retaining (more or less!) a sense of the proper relationship between the different elements of it. My absorption in this aspect of my project was the reason I didn’t have time to climb.
Incidentally: we’ve heard that, as a result of the current pandemic, people are tending to award themselves a “staycation” instead of their accustomed foreign holiday. That was certainly evident today. The small town of Hebden Bridge, through which I passed, noted as rather arty and “alternative”, was heaving as I drove through, with parking extending along the roads leading to it. The little village of Heptonstall, on the hill above it, which I have come to think of as a kind of hidden jewell familiar only to the locals, featured a regular promenade along its main street. As is so often the case with tourist destinations, all you need to do is walk for a kilometre away from the main attraction and you have the place to yourself. Up on Scout Crag I might as well have been on the Moon.