A little bridge

If this looks a tad familiar that's because I've posted the other side of it here in glorious technicolour..

The weekend in black and white is here.

A manifest denial of the truth

With a few tweaks here and there a dull afternoon's walk down Snuff Mill Lane becomes a promenade along a fiery glade. 

On the return journey, in the darkening twilight, we encountered several bats flying just inches over our heads on this stretch. Must be the exceptionally mild weather bringing them out.

 

*Insert the usual seasonal cliché here*

  

I'm feeling even lazier than normal so the next few days may be filled with trees going orangey-yellow like it has never happened before. This scene is near Driffield keld last seen in verdant splendour here.

The Hull plinth

In the manner of Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth I offer you the scaled down, rough and ready Hull version which features that aid to modern living, without which no public space would be complete, the damaged runaway shopping trolley... oh, have we got culture for you! Anyhow Queen's garden's trees are nicely doing that thing they do at this time of year.

Chop it up for firewood

They say planting a tree is a gift to the future well I think the time has come for us to enjoy what this gift has to offer by way of heat and light. This tree on Nelson Street has clearly not been alive for quite a while but, as ever, there's been no hurry to remove it possibly because this is a conservation area where you can't blow your nose without prior permission from the Council. Perhaps they are deciding what suitable gift to make for posterity ...

Lake view

I've posted about East Park before so I've absolutely no excuse for doing it again ...

Weekend reflections are here

Cleminson Gardens

The renovation and make-over of Cleminson Hall is now complete at long last and apartments are on the market. A two bed flat is advertised at £275,000 which seems like a lot to me especially as the photos don't seem to show anything special just a dull flat in an old house. Still there's some nice trees around the place. Oh and while I'm here the new housing development has a street name: Cleminson Gardens, how sweet.

To see the cherry hung with snow

I don't know if A E Housman ever came to the City of Culture but if he did I'm sure he'd have appreciated these loveliest of trees even if they are on Clough Road which is as far from a woodland ride as you can get.

Margot, who is quite possibly Mr Housman's number one fan, took this.

Perhaps Wendy Cope is a bigger fan.

I think I am in love with A.E. Housman,
Which puts me in a worse-than-usual-fix.
No woman ever stood a chance with Housman,
And he’s been dead since 1936.

Wendy Cope

A beck runs through it

Taken by Margot K Juby

If you wander through the snickets of Cottingham you'll come across this little beck. It may look fairly harmless but some idiot built houses right next to it and becks being becks have a tendency to spill over now and then flooding said houses. Well D'oh!

I'm just a walking the dog

'For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?'

Jane Austen

I caught this couple walking their pet just across the road the other evening. For some reason I don't think this puppy will win any prizes at Crufts. 

The old oak ash nexus

Ash flowers

In the perennial race to be be first out it appears that this year, despite flowering away madly, the ash is showing no leaves while the oak is well on the way. Those who study these things for a living (now that's a job I could do!) say oaks are coming into leaf nearly two weeks earlier than they did thirty years ago and ash about week earlier. That'll be global warming, they say,  or climate change as it's now politically correct to call it. And if you're a student of racing form the last time Ash beat Oak was in 1986. Ash is also under attack from a fungus threatening to make it extinct in the UK so this may become a one-tree race in the not so distant future.

Oak

The weekend in Black and White is here.

Barmy Drain

When applying for planning permission to build anything new  nowadays you have to supply a flood risk assessment, a surveyor, at no small cost, looks at the plot and decides how likely it is to flood and what if anything should be taken into account when drawing up plans. Good job then that such niceties did not prevail in the middle ages else nothing would be standing in these parts. The whole Hull river valley until the middle ages used to be one big marshy malarial infested lake stretching up as far as Driffield with occasional interventions from the Humber to add to the gaiety of nations. But bit by bit and without any help from the Environment Agency river banks were raised and drains put in. The late 18^th and early 19^th century saw really large investment in drying out the land and bringing it into cultivation. And so here's the Barmston (Barmy) Drain as seen from Clough Road doing what it has been doing since the passage of the Beverley and Barmston Drainage Act of 1798 taking the wet stuff from East Yorkshire's marshy carrs and putting it into the river Hull in a neat controllable fashion. Despite the rubbish piling up on the banks these drains provide a rich habitat for wildlife though it has to be said I only saw two wrens and a depressed looking duck while I was here.

I've posted about this waterway before here.
If you are into the history of drainage (and be honest who isn't?) here's an old pamphlet about draining the Hull Valley.
The weekend in black and white lurks here.
And weekend reflections are hiding here.

Home again, home again, jiggety-jog

As I shall not pass this way again here is the view going home.

A few trees and things

Here's a sample of some of  Cottingham's many splendid large old trees. These are all on or around Newgate Street/ Priory Road. I'd like to say they are well looked after and protected but I've noticed a few recently in a nearby street being removed to make space for a car to be parked or some such reason. 

Déjà vu

The Christmas tree is deepest red

Its plastic leaves will ne'er be shed.

I hadn't been into town for over a month so I missed, if that is the word, the seasonal decorations, save for these remaining red trees which had been recycled from past yules, waste not want not. If this post seems familiar that's because exactly two years ago I posted this. 

Fairfax Avenue

Fairfax Avenue is a residential road that runs from a roundabout on Cottingham Road to a junction with Bricknell Avenue. I guess most of it dates from the 1930's when land round here must have been cheap judging by the space given over to the wide grass verges which are protected from parking by regular wooden posts. It is, you might say, a typical surburban street lined with typical semi-detached houses and you might expect it to be a bit uninteresting, bordering on the boring. Well maybe; except in Winter time when the silver birches are as you see or in Spring when the blossom is simply stunning and sometimes in Autumn when the leaves turn and do that colour trick that trees do so well. So that only leaves Summer; now it can be "rather dull, unfunny and suburban" in Summer I will admit. 

The weekend in Black and White is here.

Gross Value

Inglemire Lane, Hull

Some time ago I posted an odd picture of trees in nets and mentioned that this was due to impending development of the site. Here you can see the fruits of all that. It's a school in case you were wondering. No sorry scrub that, this is no mere school, this is a Catholic international sports college, with "world class thinking" and "world class achieving"; so there. Hmm, no matter, the trees are gone along with the fashion of calling a spade a spade.

All the leaves are gone ...

Taken by Margot K Juby

...and the sky is grey.

The Weekend in Black and White should be here.

Les feuilles mortes

One of the downsides of a long avenue of trees is the great fall of leaves at this time of year. If, however, you still have to find the inner adult in yourself then a long path of crispy crunchy golden brown leaves is a joy forever, as you noisily slush you feet through them and kick them gleefully in the air to the obvious alarm of youths who have yet to find the simple pleasures of life.

Now to the tricky question which to prefer: Yves Montand's Les feuilles mortes or Piaf's Autumn Leaves? Personally, I think listening to Piaf sing in English is akin to hearing a cat bark mais à chacun son goût! Now I'm sure I'll get this mournful tune as an earworm, agh!

...a green thing that stands in the way

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.”
- William Blake, 1799, The Letters

I suppose if you have a canal then having really large trees growing over a good third of the waterway is not such a good idea. So it shouldn't have come as such a surprise to see these remains on the banks of the Driffield Navigation. Below how it was a few years ago before the haircut ...

That old Weekend in Black and White is here.