Long Strides towards ‘Freedom’. A 44 km walk from Holmfirth to ‘The Yorkshire Sculpture Park’ ……. and back!

There’s a wise saying that has been around for as long as I remember:

‘Save the best till last’. 

It’s a saying I’ve often resorted too and smiled at in doing so.

An example: as a child, I clearly remember saving the best part of my tea till last.

So, it was at the start of our last weekend of living in the Holmfirth valley that I was keen to ‘try’ to walk to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Bretton, not that many miles north of Barnsley .

As we are living near Netherthong which is on the westerly side of my OS Explorer 288 map and the YSP is some way off its eastern edge, I was under no illusions that this was going to be a BIG walk: but I reasoned that it really would be fun to at least ‘give it a go’.

Shortly after 9am I closed the garden gate, turned left and after offering a doleful ‘Good Morning’ to Laurence the Rooster who had been crowing from his usual position on the garden wall and with his typical gusto for most of the last 3 hours. I headed east. 

(I’d found out earlier in the week that ‘Laurence’ was called ‘Ernie’ by Lisa who lives on the farm. She seemed to like Laurence though and intimated that the new name would stick,)

Why the Sculpture Park?

It was a pretty easy choice to be honest.

I’ve now lived in Yorkshire for exactly 26 years having moved into our previous home in Greetland near Halifax on 4 April 1995. 

In that time I’ve always marked a visit to YSP as a top family day out.

It combines fantastic opportunities to walk within a beautiful natural environment, with interesting outdoor sculptures and pieces of art to admire round every corner.

In my opinion it really is a ‘jewel in the Yorkshire Crown’ and I have always loved it there.

It is also an area of parkland that generates many personal memories; a few are emotional, like the visits I’ve done with family members who are sadly no longer with us, but for the most part my memories of YSP are really happy. 

On our final weekend in the beautiful Holme Valley, it really was the obvious choice of destination for me.

As ever, the steep climb up to Thongsbridge got my heart beat a-pumping and within 15 minutes of setting off I was already overheating and stripping off.

The daffodils near the turn down to Holme Valley camp site were pristine and set the flowering tone for my day.

The frequent sight of even brighter Forsythia was to regularly repeat as I trampled across hill and dale. The sunshine of midweek had left me a new legacy to enjoy even if the mercury levels had dipped.

I instantly regretted not wearing my shorts. 

The Met Office had forecast a dry but cold day with pending artic temperatures. It was typically much warmer than that though and I was soon quite hot and needed to ‘layer down’ to just 2 thin T-shirts. 

I really do love the Holme valley.

If the walker in these parts is prepared to toil up some lofty elevations they are always rewarded, on all fronts, with spectacular views that can stretch on all points of the compass, sometimes for 20 miles or more. 

Today, as usual, the views were spectacular and the higher I went the more I was visually rewarded.

Bushy catkins hung from their branches like bloated caterpillars.

The opening hour of this walk would mark my return to the footpaths I had first walked 6 weeks ago. The hamlets of Biggin and Fulstone were quiet today and sleepy with a morning stillness that only early morning on a Spring Bank Holiday in the UK can provide. 

I met just the one solitary walker and we chatted for a good 10 minutes.

The locals in these parts are really friendly. 

I’ve been able to stop and chat to so many interesting people who, just like me, find the ‘Great British Outdoors’ to be the perfect suppressant to the more destructive emotional and physical elements of this global pandemic.

Honesty seeds hung next to the deep green of a small holly bush. This area abounds with holly. Something in the air of the Holme Valley clearly makes holly feel at home.

The now familiar sight of an old phone box recently turned into a community library, greeted me in Fulstone.

I was encouraged by 2 of the titles: A DVD named ‘Hope Springs’ starring Meryl Streep and a book titled ‘Dare to dream and work to win’.

They both dropped a timely message to us all, within this most uncertain of times.

Fulstone is a very pretty hamlet. The daffodils at the village entrance were sublime.

The lofty splendour of Emley Moor mast came into closer focus. 

The fresh grass cutting patterns on the fields below Matthewman’s wood near Shepley were alluring.

I’m not a great fan of spacial formality in public spaces and especially private gardens but there was something very appealing about those long mower lines linking near with far.

A single tree gracefully took centrefold in that field.

Emley Moor mast was to be my navigational companion for the next 6 hours.

I never actually got very close but seeing it so near, sparked memories of when I had got much closer several years ago. 

The mast was like a siren: ever silently calling me east but my true path was elsewhere and I resisted its allure. 

We could always see that mast from our upstairs bedroom in our old house near Halifax.

It is a massive structure.

The sheer scale of it reminded me of the likely devastation it’s collapse had caused over 50 years ago.

I carried out some research after returning home and discovered that it was on March 19, 1969, that a combination of strong winds and the weight of ice that had formed around the top of the mast and on the guy wires. That freak mixture had brought the whole structure down.

Thankfully, despite falling across a road and causing damage to both a chapel and the transmitter building, nobody was hurt.

My route now took me towards Shelley and into an area that I had frequently driven through, but never really previously explored on foot. 

The landscape change was quite noticeable. 

Now the countryside rolled. 

A strangely ornate gate lifted the drabness of a huge, newly ploughed field.

I passed a cluster of distressed farm buildings: an image that would not have looked out of place across huge swathes of rural France.

There were fewer severe descents and climbs like in the Holme valley.

The footpaths were bone dry and the fields I crossed were often parched and cracked.

The soil didn’t seem to be as rich over here, though the pervading colour of the fields remained a lush green.

It was pretty enough, though I found the bigger villages of Shelley, Denby Dale, Skelmanthorpe and Clayton West a bit of a disappointment. 

The planners at Kirklees Council deserve some scrutiny and robust challenge on their decision making it seems to me. 

Too often some iconic Yorkshire gritstone building were surrounded with red brick, rendered or imitation stone houses that made it all feel a real hotch potch. I totally understand the need for affordable housing, but there seemed to be no attempt to marry it all up. 

Having moved from an area where traditional York gritstone buildings dominate everywhere in Calderdale, it seems clear that Kirklees Council and its planners have made no attempt to retain this areas building heritage. 

The areas around those villages and small towns were beautiful. The towns themselves less so, though there was a forsythia enthused welcome for the ‘accidental tourist’ in Shepley. 

In Shepley I passed a massive spring water factory that bears the village’s name. A lorry was loading up with huge pallets of plastic bottled water. It dismayed me to see that the packaging of our food and drink in single-use plastic still dominates the food industry.

Not for the first time this week, I wondered when man ‘would ever learn?’

After 4 hours of walking and only one navigational error in Denby Dale itself when I somehow managed to walk 200 metres west instead of east, my Sculpture Park target was getting near. 

I followed a beautiful wooded path over Winter Hill where the daffodils were still in full bloom, but their bluebell successors were beginning their ‘march to full bloom’.

Perhaps when the bluebells are in full flower as May breezes in, we can truly put this Covid nightmare behind us?

The lambs were bigger in these less lofty lands.

In the Holmfirth area, the new born lambs are weeks behind: an indication of its colder climate and hardier terrain perhaps?

I heard the ‘Mohawk screeches’ of multiple pheasants and saw the occasional vivid splash of red, rust and orange as they scuttled away into the undergrowth, but capturing another photograph like this one that I took 2 days earlier was proving elusive. 

The graveyard of ‘All Hallows’ church in High Hoyland offered me a cooling respite from the sun of early afternoon. Vivid splashes of forsythia and daffodils glowered golden yellow both in the graveyard and also in so many gardens that I passed.

An abandoned farm trailer gave ‘me the eye’; actually 2 eyes as I dropped down from High Hoyland.

My ‘Strava App’ on my phone indicated that I had now completed over 20 kilometres in 4 hours and I was starting to feel quite tired. For a moment self-doubt entered my thoughts and I actually pondered abandoning the pursuit of the park itself and turning for home. A touch of self discipline steadied my weakened resolve and I pressed on.

As I left the edge of my OS map, so the blue waters and rolling landscapes of the ‘upper lakes’ at the Sculpture Park glistened their not so distant welcome.

I had made it and my weariness almost immediately diminished with the accompanying euphoria.

The Sculpture Park was as beautiful as ever and I was glad to have reached it.

There was just the one disappointment. Too many people! 

I mean nothing personal. After all I am one of ‘them’ too, but they seemed to be everywhere (though their social distancing and mine was very good) and I realised that these long months of isolation and lockdowns had made me a little bit ‘people averse’, for now at least.

Whilst I welcome the creep out of restrictions I realised and remembered that it was a long time since I had last mingled with crowds.

Whilst I hanker to gather again with the people I care about, I realised I wasn’t quite ready for full bodied re-entry just yet.

I visited a few of my favourite sculptures; mostly the ones that had been their for all 26 years of my Yorkshire life.

I fondly remembered the breeze block sculpture. In our early years in Yorkshire it had a ‘no climbing’ sign but no perimeter fencing. It was hard for my 3 children (and their dad) to resist climbing. In my view those sculptures were made to climb.

I remembered that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. I just happen to like them all.

I walked once again over ‘Cascade bridge’ and more memories returned. 

One of my more recent visits to YSP had been to see that bridge in 2016 when it had hosted the cascading red poppies from the ‘Blood Swept Lands’ Tower of London exhibition of 2014.

This was the famous floral tribute produced by sculptors Paul Cummins and Tom Piper that marked the 100th anniversary of the start of World War 1 with a striking display of 888,286 ceramic red poppies.

I had photographed it then and it had been a poignant moment. The bridge looked surprisingly bare in comparison on this visit.

My phone pinged as I crossed the bridge and I was reminded of another anniversary by my oldest son.

He sent me a photo taken exactly 4 years ago.

It showed both my sons my nephew and I posing on yet more sculptures.

This time the steel horse sculptures were on the iconic Alto de Perro, near Pamplona, northern Spain, and taken on day 5 of our 27 day, 500 mile trek on the famous Camino de Santiago.

We had raised £15,000 for The Yorkshire Brain Tumour Charity based at Leeds General Infirmary though that jaunt. 

That photo from 2 April 2017 reminded me that today’s walk of 44km and 50.886 steps was my longest for 4 years. 

To be totally fair, whilst I had found the crowds of visitors at YSP a little disconcerting, I’m pleased to report that I never saw one bit of litter inside that beautiful estate. 

I had previously alluded to my disappointment with mankind’s persistent ability to ruin and destroy.

That trait to spoil had been especially stark in our national news updates this week as some unseasonably warm weather had massed the inevitable crowds in parks and on beaches across the land.

The great British public had duly resorted to type and left tons of rubbish for someone else to dispose of when they had abandoned their personal sun traps..

It still beggars belief that the very people who visit our local beauty spots are the ones who trash them.

Once again I felt total shame to be British. 

Don’t let people dissuade you of who is to blame for this problem or by claims saying it is caused by just a few.

I would counter by claiming that it is perpetually caused by the ‘careless majority’ who just don’t care about how they leave these precious beauty spots. 

What happened to the ‘take your litter home’ messages that I, and most people I know have respected all of our lives?

It is shameful and it shames us all!

At a time when the Covid financial payback is receiving an understandable scrutiny, it is an interesting question to ask; just how much unnecessary public funding could the UK save if it’s people could just clean up after themselves? 

I would conservatively guess that we are talking millions……. maybe billions, every year!

As I headed up the steep slope that connects the upper lakes at YSP to the Longside Gallery at its southern tip I remembered the physical challenge and toil of pushing my teenage son up that steep mile-long slope during the Easter weekend of 2016. 

He had spent some time in a wheelchair as he had just started to recover from serious brain surgery (our Camino de Santiago exploits of Easter 2017 had actually marked the end of this challenging chapter of our family life) after his second operation in February 2016 and our family visit to YSP in the Easter of that year was our first ‘Great Escape’ and celebration of his recovery. 

I remembered my elder sister and her husband visiting that same weekend and my wife and I watching ‘The Stranglers’ in Leeds the next day. 

They were happy memories: I told you that YSP was special to our family. 

Those memories restored my aching limbs. As I looked back I knew that I would be back God willing!

So I began my journey back to Upper Hagg, following some now familiar and some unfamiliar paths. 

It struck me as I walked back that Yorkshire does fully deserve its title.

On my way back I passed interesting bridges, irrigation channels and my mind was filled with more lush green images of our wonderful countryside and heritage.

As I peered over the ridge above Thongsbridge some 4 hours later I realised again that this really is ‘God’s own Country’ and that on Tuesday we will, as a family, be privileged enough to move to another part of this spectacular part of the world.

One thing I feel is certain; our new life in the the heart of the Yorkshire Dales will not be a disappointment. 

As ever though, it is the simple things in life that will enthuse me. The first one is looming.

In just over a week’s time, once it is legally allowed, my cycling obsessed friend Bryn, who runs a successful hair salon in Halifax, but actually lives in Harrogate, is riding up to my new home to cut my Boris-like mop outdoors on our patio. 

That’s an example of true friendship and ‘mobile hairdressing’ of the highest order and is yet another a ‘creep out of lockdown’ event that I really can’t wait for.

Bryn invited me to join one of his madcap 100 km plus bike rides as we made the arrangement. I’ve countered by inviting him the chance to join me on a 44 km walk like this one, but this time within his own playground of The Yorkshire  Dales.

It will be interesting to see who wimps out first on this 2 sided challenge!

Our life in the Holmfirth valley is nearly done and what a fantastic 6 weeks it has been.

This area comes with a ‘highly recommended’ tag and the Airbnb we live in is simply brilliant. If you want the details to hire it please contact me. I promise that you won’t be disappointed.

As I removed my boots I noticed just how battered my OS map has become.

In shorts 6 weeks I’ve walked so many byways in this lovely area and that referencing has clearly taken it’s toll.

That was definitely the best £5.20 I’ve spent throughout the year of this pandemic.

Thanks again for the read.

If you want to keep up to date with my latest blogs about ‘Yorkshire Life’ and it’s beautiful landscapes as we enter a ‘brave new world’ of Dales-living, please remember that you can follow me for FREE by subscribing to my WordPress site.

In the meantime my very best wishes go to you and your family. 

I hope you all enjoy the new beginnings afforded to us on 12 April and the new found freedom it brings. 

Please try to remember though; you and I can take our litter home for free too!

Martin x