The Glasshouse Terrace

Throughout the whole restoration project at Cliffe Castle I was reluctant to draw the new glasshouses, at first because the site was mostly hidden behind security fences and was hard to see. I sketched the dome when it first arrived on site and later when it was raised, by a huge crane, and carefully lowered onto the framework.

And earlier still, right back at the beginning when things were being demolished, I sketched the old glasshouses to capture them as they were before they disappeared.

But for the last month or so the terrace has been complete (although we’re still waiting for the animal houses and aviaries to be finished) so I didn’t really have an excuse, other than the weather. I kept telling myself I really must have a go, but every time I looked at them I was alarmed by the technicalities – delicate white glass structures are hard to draw and the dome is full of complex elipses, (spot where I got that wrong) not to mention the perspective and the fact that whole thing is built on a hill. So in the end, especially as it’s still cold and often windy (today we’ve got intermittent storms of sleet) I took numerous careful photographs and worked from those. I don’t really enjoy doing this – it doesn’t give me the buzz that working directly outside on location does, and I never feel I’ve really connected with the place – but it does mean I could take my time working out how to get to grips with all that spindly white framework. Unfortunately it also made me work less spontaneously and fluidly and much more tightly than I normally do these days – but hey, these things happen. Now I know the structure better and next time I sketch it – from life, hopefully! – I’ll be more relaxed and look forward to drawing it in a completely different way.

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Where to find what on the blog

Welcome to the blog-page of my website.

You can find selected posts on specific subjects here:

CLIFFE CASTLE MUSEUM AND PARK:
Heritage and Restoration

A Heritage Walk in the Park

The Pond
Progress on the Pond

Glasshouses
The Glasshouse Terrace
Victorian Technology Unearthed
Buried Treasure
Glasshouses & a Victorian Obsession
The Dome
Raising the Dome

Dark Lane
The Lower Field

The Fountains
The Fountains; the dolphins return

The Grotto

The Great Beech – a Farewell

To help make it easier to find posts on different subjects, this post stays at the top of the blog page as an introduction with links.

The most recently published post is just below this one – simply scroll on down the page.

If you want to find my entire sketching record of the restoration work at Cliffe Castle Park in 2016 and 2017, the project called Drawing The Work, the link below will take you to all the posts in the series.

Cliffe Castle/Drawing The Work

Other Cliffe Castle posts that are not directly about the restoration work, but about activities and daily life in the park are archived under the category:

Life In The Landscape

And posts about the perimeter walk project that started in July 2018 are under the category

A Park of Many Parts

If you’re looking for a particular post or subject, you can always go to the Home page or the foot of any other page, and scroll to the bottom of the screen where you’ll find a Categories drop down menu, and also a Search button.

If you simply want to see the sketches from Drawing The Work on their own, and not read the post – I’ve put a selection of the sketches on the Drawings page.

Making the Impossible Possible

I don’t often write about it, but I suffer from ME/CFS (which I’ve had for 30 years).  It’s one of the reasons that I sketch the way I do (in short bursts, and fairly quickly), and also why sketching is so important to me (more of this in a minute).

When I started sketching the restoration work at Cliffe Castle I didn’t know how often I’d be able to get up to the park or how much I’d be able to do, because my condition is variable and unpredictable, but it turned out that I managed quite a lot. And somewhere along the line I realised that Urban Sketching of this kind, with the support and encouragement of other Urban Sketchers, had made a huge difference to the way I felt and to what I was able to do.

I also began to think that it was important for other people to realise this as well, because it’s probably not obvious that sketching on location is something that can be so useful in managing a chronic condition – not just to people like me with a disability but also to people who aren’t disabled, to make it easier for them to understand what I can do and what I can’t. And an added bonus is that I’ve become more confident and better at explaining this, which makes things easier for everyone.

The exciting thing is that this month’s edition of Drawing Attention, the online newsletter of the international Urban Sketchers organisation has picked up on this theme, and back in December I was interviewed for an article on the subject which has now been published! (Note: it’s better viewed in an internet browser on a computer rather than on a tablet or phone).

When I sketch I disappear into a space and time that separates me from everything else that’s going on around me, which is one of the reasons it’s so important to me and why it’s such a useful tool in a situation that would otherwise be overwhelming and exhausting. Drawing is tiring, but much less tiring for me than talking and listening and interacting with people (no matter how much I’m enjoying the conversation!)

I’m amazed at what the last two years have taught me. I hope more than anything that other people can discover this too. 

Cliffe Castle/Drawing The Work: (41) Animal Houses, and The Café

Those who recall Cliffe Castle from years ago will remember there were always animals of one kind or another, and birds. Stories from far back in living memory tell of peacocks that roamed about and occasionally got into other people’s gardens and even into the classrooms of Greenhead School (before the days of University Academy Keighley). Going even further back some people remember a parrot, and someone told me the other day there were pot-bellied pigs. When I first came to Keighley there were chickens in a pen below the old playground. But the animals I remember best and loved the most were the guinea-pigs and the rabbits, and these buildings that I sketched earlier this month and which are still being finished will be their new home. I’ve been longing for them to return and it’ll be wonderful to have them back. (Birds will return to the aviaries, but which and when remains to be seen). 

At the same time, at the other end of the glasshouse terrace, the café is being fitted out – at the moment still at the carpentry stage, counters, shelving, storage units – and this is tremendously exciting because we’ve all been waiting so long now since the old café closed. 

This new one will be so much better in so many ways. Wonderful views, much more comfortable, good hot cups of tea and coffee (and much more besides) – and dog-friendly, as the covered patio at the Tower House end of the terrace has an adjoining door, so that dogs and their owners can sit in comfort together, sheltered but apart from the main indoor café.

It’s cold in the park these days (today it snowed) and not easy to sketch outside. My fingers get stiff, and recently I’d been struggling with a painful finger and thumb on my drawing hand that wouldn’t straighten, which is now thankfully much better due to a cortisone injection. For a while I was sketching in a whole new strange and wonky way, but things are getting back to normal. 

Until the café opens the glasshouses are still not open to the public either as this requires an on-site presence, so it’s even more eagerly awaited, and for now all we can do is to peer through the windows, admire the cacti and watch the carpenters at work. Me, I’m looking forward to somewhere warm to sketch from – that, and a good hot cup of tea. 

Christmas at the Castle, and Re-opening the Park

At last the long awaited day for the re-opening of the restored park at Cliffe Castle finally arrived, last Sunday, and with fanfares and trumpets (well, a brass band)  we celebrated in style. 

The glasshouses have been decorated with birds from the 12 days of Christmas made by children from early-years age groups in local schools. I’d been dying to sketch them because they’re just gorgeous – and they look wonderful nesting among the succulents and ferns and flying overhead. Outside the Oompah band were playing with gusto in sub-zero temperatures; my fingers were almost too stiff to draw.

Along with hundreds of visitors, against a background of snow we heard speeches from dignataries, watched a costumed pageant of Cliffe Castle past present and future, listened to a children’s Christmas choir, and cheered when the Dome House was declared open as a golden ribbon held aloft by two stilt-walking fairies was ceremoniously cut. 

These stilt-walkers never stopped smiling and unbelievably showed no sign of feeling cold, even when waving their wands and standing around holding the ribbon. There was such a crowd I couldn’t get a good view for more than a few seconds at a time so I took photos – but they turned out to be extremely hard to draw. It’s very disconcerting looking up at someone who’s about 10 feet tall, and my brain must have stubbornly refused to accept this and wouldn’t let me get the foreshortening right, so they don’t look anywhere near as lofty as they should. Their costumes were so beautiful I had to do a bit of sketching from my photographs later but still got them out of proportion. And don’t ask what happened to the face of the fairy on the left….. 

The birds in the glasshouses include two gloriously chubby French Hens with outstretched wings that look extremely happy among the cacti – they were attracting admiring looks and smiles from everyone who passed them. They’re just irresistible. The immaculate Victorian costume and the stunning hat were from the pageant, thankfully indoors in the warmth of the Castle. 

The Keighley Christmas Carol was an ingenious way to present the past, the present and the future of Cliffe Castle – the children did a wonderful job of portraying the Butterfields. This is Henry Isaac Butterfield himself – or ‘HIB’. I couldn’t sketch fast enough to catch all the scenes….

So now the park is officially open again (even though there are still things to be finalised). The half-finished café opened for the day with a sign on the door saying ‘Opening Soon’ and was overwhelmed with customers. There was a real sense of catching a moment in history here; the children who played such a big part in the celebrations will be the ones who use the park for generations to come and who’ll look back and remember this day as the start of a new era at Cliffe Castle, and I will never forget it. Sketching the Oompah band on the glasshouse patio under the Tower House with fingers so cold I could hardly hold the pen, I felt suddenly and overwhelmingly happy to be part of this space suddenly alive and filled with people for the first time. I found myself grinning like the Christmas tree fairies.  

The covered patio at the Tower House end of the glasshouses is a wonderful space for performances – and sketching (I was drawing the band). The building in the background with the striped roof is the unfinished structure of the animal houses and the stripes, astonishingly, are where snow had slid off very decoratively in alternating sections, which is an unexplained mystery and something I shall have to investigate……

Cliffe Castle/Life in the Landscape: Cold, Dark, Colourful

The days are so short now that the light is often fading by the time I get up to the park, so I’m watching where I put my feet (it’s often muddy) and with my eyes down what I mostly see is the ground. But this is often the best place to look for the most colour and beauty on a dark misty afternoon. I can’t help picking up leaves one after the other just to marvel at them – whole trees look spectacular when they turn gold, as some do – but individually every leaf is a world of beauty. There are so many of them lying around everywhere, making a nuisance of themselves on the paths and lawns and having to be raked and swept up – and yet each one taken separately is so incredibly lovely and every one unique.

Most of the trees have lost their leaves now, and this year some never turned the truly glorious colour we hope for in Autumn anyway, but near the Beechcliffe entrance there are three handkerchief trees that always turn a wonderful golden yellow, and these still glow in the fading light, so yesterday I did a fast sketch of one of them before the cold made me move on.

I did a brisk walk, round to the pond, (enjoying the fountains) up to the Castle (a quick look at the animal houses that are still not finished, but it was too dark there to draw) and over to the playground where there were a few mothers, hands in pockets and coats zipped and buttoned, with children all open coated and un-gloved running about and climbing on things with never a thought for the cold.

It may be damp and cold (and the forecast is for it to get colder) and the afternoons may be short and dark, but out there in the park there’s colour and life in the landscape. 

Cliffe Castle/Drawing The Work: (40) Time Capsule

Back in the summer while work on the restoration project was still in the building phase, children from several primary schools in Keighley put together a collection of objects – newspaper cuttings, coins, stamps, things they’d written – to seal up inside a time-capsule to be buried under the Norfolk Island Pine beneath the dome in the glasshouses.

Ingeniously constructed from sections of drainpipe it looked very impressive, but it didn’t get buried at the time as the glasshouses were then still a building site. However last week it was carefully placed in a hole dug and prepared for it, and covered over and completed with a stone plaque instructing that it should not be reopened before June 2067.

I Iove time-capsules. When my sister and I were children we used to write notes and hide them in the house whenever we could. Not long ago one turned up behind the bath panel where it had been walled up for 50 years, and the current owners of the house were delighted with it and managed to contact us and send it on. The whole idea of walling something up or burying it so that at some distant time it will be discovered and explored by someone living in the future feels a bit like time-travel, and it fascinates me. All through the excavation and demolition phases of the restoration at Cliffe Castle we were hoping that we just might unearth a buried or hidden message, a Butterfield time-treasure purposely concealed – but nothing came to light. 

There were things that had been dropped by accident or thrown away – a milk-bottle, a couple of Victorian coins, jugs and jars and pieces of pottery and numerous mysterious rusty metal objects that were hard to identify, and all their stories remain tantalisingly untold.

All this got me thinking what I would put in a time-capsule if I were to make one now, and it would certainly be drawings, or whole sketchbooks. I often feel that sketches are frozen moments in time, almost like fossils. They record the moment something happened and how I saw it, what it meant and how it felt – something that passed through me and ended up on a piece of paper.

During the path-laying phase every day ended with a lot of clearing up with brooms and shovels, and since drawing people moving is so difficult but such fun I tried to sketch this action, and mostly with disastrous results. This time I think I caught something – but not without absurd anatomical mistakes 

The delicate operation of guiding the dome into place on top of the glasshouse. It was a hugely challenging thing to draw because the crane was so enormous, there was so much going on and it all happened fairly quickly – but I couldn’t miss the chance to see what I could get on the page. I certainly remember what went on better from having sketched it – even if this meant focusing on some things and missing others. 

I suppose you could say that this whole project, Drawing The Work – and the posts on this blog – are a kind of time-capsule, except of course that they’re not buried or hidden; the posts will stay here for anyone to see. 

Some of the visitors at one of the Heritage Walks, listening to Claire pointing out features and explaining the building work. I love sketching people when they’re engrossed in looking and listening because they’re unselfconscious and much more interesting to draw. 

The work of the restoration is now almost finished, and from now on, my sketching will be more about life in the park rather than the work of restoring it. A big celebration to mark the completion is going to take place in the park and museum shortly before Christmas on December 10th. The exhibition of Drawing The Work goes on in the museum until January, and we’ve produced greetings cards using a selection of my sketches which will be on sale at the Christmas celebration and in the museum shop.

My Cliffe Castle posts here will now mostly be under the heading Life In The Landscape, and I’m looking forward to a whole new programme of sketching possibilities. Hope you’ll follow me on the adventure! 

Cliffe Castle/Drawing The Work: (39) Responses to Art

Not too long ago I was sketching up at the glasshouse terrace, the only part of the park that was still a building site. Walls were being built at the edge of the walkway that will curve along the front of the animal houses and aviary, and I was watching (and sketching) a skillful bit of bricklaying. After a while the bricklayer stopped to go off in search of something and as he passed me in the carpark he asked what I was doing, so I explained. (It seems he hadn’t been working on the site all that long and hadn’t seen me before). 

The conversation went like this:

Bricklayer: Are you an artist?
Me: Yes. I’ve been drawing this project since the beginning….
Short pause.
Bricklayer, thoughtfully: Only difference is, I draw with a trowel, and you draw with a pencil. 

I liked this, and wrote it down – though I didn’t really need to write it to remember it. It says a lot about what drawing is. Of course bricks (or Yorkshire stone) aren’t a sketchbook and a wall isn’t a drawing, but a trowel is a tool just as much as a pencil or a pen, and bricklaying and drawing both require eye/hand co-ordination and a lot of practice. When you do a lot of it and practise often, you get better at it and it more often goes well. Not always – and I imagine bricklayers have good days and bad days just as a sketcher does, though the consequences of a bad bricklaying day could be more serious and long lasting than the times that I do wonky unsatisfactory drawings. I can just turn the page and start another sketch, and try not to mind when things don’t go right – though it’s a fact that I never get over the feeling of uneasiness whenever this happens. After days of not drawing, when I need a lot of warming up before anything will flow there’s always a small sinking feeling, a nagging little voice that says you’ve lost it, it’s never going to go right. It does come right, eventually, after a fair bit of exercise, but it always feels the same. 

I was talking about this with a sketcher-friend of mine recently, Louise Garrett, and she had what I think is the brilliant idea of carrying a rough book around as well as a current sketchbook. Something to scribble in and do quick drawings with lots and lots of looking, lots of warming up. Drawing is like dancing, or singing. It’s a physical-neuralogical-emotional thing, and you have to respect that and be patient. And just do the work. 

My ‘Drawing The Work’ project and the exhibition now on in Cliffe Castle are going to be the focus of the October session of Bradford Museums’ ‘Responses to Art’ programme – this coming Thursday, 5th October, 10.30 – 3.00. Very unfortunately I’m not going to be able to be there myself, but Joe Bean from Yorkshire Urban Sketchers is going to come along and talk about Urban Sketching – and hopefully bring lots of examples of his own work. Joe loves building sites just as much as I do and draws them brilliantly – he’s just done a wonderful series of sketches of the demolition of the historic South Stand at Headingley Stadium. I’m thrilled that people will be able to see his work at Cliffe Castle and have a chance to hear him explain what Urban Sketching is all about – like me Joe is a passionate urban sketcher! 

Anyone interested in going along on Thursday should ring Cliffe Castle to book a place, on 01535 618231. It should be an interesting day! 

Cliffe Castle/Drawing The Work: (38) Landscaping

View from the glasshouse terrace

There are still things to do, but at last the sloping terrace in front of the glasshouses is no longer a building site full of heaps of reserved topsoil and piles of hardcore and gravel. This view that I sketched a couple of weeks ago is now already a thing of the past; now the carefully raked surface that was a glowing tawny and russet brown in the afternoon sunshine has been covered with turf and is a beautiful green lawn.

The diggers are mostly gone, and I miss the excitement of their sheer bulk, their lumbering unpredictable movements and the colour and animation they brought to the site. There are many things I regret not documenting better, and I wish I’d drawn more of all the different kinds of diggers and dumpers and cranes that have come and gone, all with their own specialities and peculiarities. I find all of them exciting.

Digger on the glasshouse terrace

I haven’t drawn any of them with the care and attention they deserve, either – and neither have I learnt anything about hydraulics or the engineering of heavy plant (I love the use of the word ‘plant’ when it refers to machinery – as when you see a sign saying ‘Plant Hire’ and you know it’s not about renting a rhododendron, or my favourite traffic-sign that warns of ‘Heavy Plant Crossing’. I would have loved to have seen a sign in the park saying ‘Heavy Plant at Work’. Wouldn’t that have been something.)

Plants of the more usual kind have begun to appear in the glasshouses and I hope to get the chance to see more of this soon – I just had the briefest glimpse through the door the other day. Cactii, succulents – all kinds of soft beguiling colours and strange and exciting shapes. At last architecture and planting is coming together, and what’s been just a vision and plans on paper is becoming something real…..

Trial planting of ferns for a ‘rootery’ in the glasshouse

Cliffe Castle Park in Keighley is being restored with funds from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Work started on site back in June 2016 and I’ve been following progress and sketching whenever and wherever I could. I’ve called the project Drawing The Work, and my sketchbooks and watercolours are now on display in Cliffe Castle Museum until Christmas. 

Cliffe Castle/Drawing The Work: (37) Endings And Beginnings

The pond is finished! The final stages of lining it included putting in water-bar, (or high-pressure gasket to give it its proper name) – along the two channels in the cement that had been left for the purpose. It’s clever stuff – it absorbs the expansion and contraction that happens with changing temperatures and thereby prevents cracking in the cement. Amazingly this narrow red tape can expand up to 200 times its size, which is why they took great care to make sure the surface where it was laid was completely dry, to stop it immediately puffing up to something the size of an anaconda……(!) 

All this was explained to me in patient detail by Bill the site foreman who has never minded me asking endless questions. He’s always been ready to stop and kindly educate me about things like the proportions of cement-mix, or the uses of threaded stainless steel bar. I’ve learned a lot from Bill, and not least by just watching him at work and directing the men he works with. 

After many years with Casey’s, Bill has now reached retirement and I was extremely honoured to be asked to make him a card that all his fellow workers could sign and present to him on his last day, at the end of August. Yesterday was the day – and like all endings and good-byes, a moment of a lot of feelings and emotions. When a team has worked together for a long time, breaking that apart is hard for everyone – especially those who have worked closely side-by-side, and when someone as well liked and well respected as Bill moves on, he leaves a gap that will not be filled. Lots of smiles and laughter, but in the days and weeks to come Bill will be missed. I will miss him too, along with all the rest. 

Detail from Bill’s retirement card

And now the pond that Bill worked so hard to perfect is full of water, with not a sign of a leak; the fountain in the middle has been installed, and the bases of the two carved marble fountains have been lined and made water-tight, and on Wednesday, for the first time and after such a long time of waiting – and just in time for Bill’s last day – the water was turned on and the fountains came to life. I was so excited I think I actually jumped up and down – and even though the security fence is still up and poking a camera through the wire mesh is not an easy thing to do, I managed to take a wobbly video with my phone. 

(Sincere apologies if this video doesn’t work as it’s the first time I’ve ever posted one; I’m hoping that together the magic of the WordPress editor and my ability to understand it will carry the day……)