OUR STREET...The 2014 Xmas Card

Much of the urban north-east of England was developed alongside the Industrial Revolution. Railways and coal mines were the major employers of the average bloke. Our street is a "railway street". Houses for the engine drivers down one side and the stokers down the other. The manager and deputy had larger three storey houses at this end of the terraces. Colliery towns were similar.
One of the pitman painters from Spennymoor was called Norman Cornish. He died this year. This is Bishop's Close, Spennymoor...a railway and coal town...painted by Norman.

At the end of the road are the railway wagons carrying the coal from the colliery. It looks very similar to our street. The railways tended to have a generic architectural style.

The railways and collieries are long gone from the end of our street and the wasteland has recently been developed into a shopping centre. But I felt that I could recreate a winter scene.

The photo was flipped and traced and...

dry point etched onto an acetate sheet which was inked and printed down at the Bishop Auckland Townhall using the Tom McGuinness (another pitman painter) press.
I left out the cars and there were no people about which simplified things.
I watercoloured the first print.

It worked quite well so I printed another and developed a snow scene on it.

This has become our xmas card for this year. It went off to the printers up the road. They "enhanced" the colour a bit and brightened it up....

People up and down the street love it and so do I but of course our own house is not in it. It is behind the hedge on the front left.
So I wish you all a merry xmas. The snow is supposedly on its way and the temperatures are dropping so the street may soon look just like this.
Cheers Gillian

Low Barns Wildlife Reserve... What a Lovely find!

We've been to Low Barns a couple of times in the last few weeks. It belongs to the Durham Wildlife Trust and it is a great renovation of an old industrial site. There is a lake surrounded by a path and green growth is thriving beyond belief.

We took the camper the second time and parked it under the trees. It looks quite cute peeking out there. The picnic site has a "hide" where you can watch the cheekier birds. All the tits and lots of finches and a robin and a wren call by. The blue tits have a blue head and are small and fly away before you can point your camera. The coal tits have a striped black and white head and are too fast to photograph well, but I tried.

And the great tits are bigger and more common...usually.

Because of the mild and moist weather everything is growing well.

This is an enormous patch of "weeds". But what is a weed? I've always considered it an unwanted plant. These aren't really unwanted even though they are nettles and such. They are all an important part of this environment

Behind them are the trees that create the ecosystems that suit all the birds.

Behind all these trees is a billabong or oxbow lake. This is a part of the river's path, left stranded when the river changed course in a flood. The river in question is the Wear, shown below, which skirts the northern edge of the reserve.

The blossoms have been fabulous...

...and there will be lots of conkers later this year if these horse chestnut candles are anything to go by...

...and the may and hawthorn blossoms are everywhere.

Wherever you provide an environment which is food rich you get these two...

The reserve makes some revenue from parking, from a cafe, from the sale of charcoal which they make on site and from memberships.

If you live in the north-east this place is very well worth a visit. It is a mile and a half, on a dry, gravel path, around the lake. There are a few hides to stop in on the way and people are friendly and very informative. I'm too impatient to be a twitcher myself but they were patient enough to tell me that the tall birds in the trees that looked like cormorants with a white chest were in fact juvenile cormorants and their chests would turn black next year...

We shall return

Cheers Gillian