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BBC News
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Fresh application lodged for sculpture honouring poet Ted Hughes
A fresh planning application for a sculpture to honour the work of former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes in his birthplace has been voluntary organisation Royd Regeneration wants to erect a 6ft 5in (2m) high iron sculpture in group had previously submitted a similar application, which was approved by planners two years ago despite objections from Mr Hughes' widow, Council will now consider the new application and publish a decision in due course. Hughes, who died in 1998, was born in Aspinall Street in the village in 1930 and lived there his family moved to Mexborough when he was of his most notable works include the poetry collections Lupercal, Crow, and Birthday Letters and the children's book The Iron Man. Currently only a small plaque near his former home makes reference to his connection to the village, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Regeneration, which works to raise Mytholmroyd's profile, is hoping to install the cast iron sculpture of a large milk churn and two life-sized foxes in the centre of the village, opposite the Dusty Miller in Burnley Road.A supporting statement with the application said nature played a part in the poet's work, with his boyhood in the Calder Valley providing some significant previous proposals were opposed by Hughes's widow, who wrote to the council saying she had not been consulted and did not think the design was the applicants said full a consultation had been done with the Elmet Trust, a Ted Hughes charity, and it felt uncomfortable for the village to feel it could not honour Hughes without the consent of someone who does not live the plans at the time, planners said objections were largely concerned with the subject matter and its relation to the character of Hughes, rather than siting and married his second wife, Carol Orchard, after his relationship with fellow poet Sylvia Plath ended. Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Telegraph
03-04-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Britain's birds are dying – here's what we'll lose
The poet Ted Hughes once memorably described the challenge facing any writer in describing an airborne crow. There are no words, he argued, to 'capture the infinite depth of crowiness in a crow's flight'. No phrase, no matter how well-chosen, could begin to do justice to the bird. Or, as Hughes bluntly put it, 'a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying'. It's a cautionary tale to which few modern-day nature writers seem willing to pay heed. As sure as the swallows arriving each spring, there'll come a fresh wave of books attempting to capture birds' essence. Given the sheer proliferation of these avian volumes, in fact, one can't help but wonder whether they're intended to test, rather than convey, Britain's enduring love affair with birds. Jon Gower's Birdland (★★☆☆☆) shows the perils of navigating this increasingly congested field. Gower, it's fair to say, is no arriviste to ornithology. As a teenager in the 1970s, he would regularly escape his claustrophobic family home in south Wales, cycling through old ash pits and marshes to lose himself in birdwatching. This book thus represents something of a culmination of that lifelong love affair: it sees Gower travel across Britain in pursuit of species from urban peregrines to the great bustards of Salisbury Plain. You can't fault his dedication. Studying corncrakes on the Hebridean isle of Coll, he finds himself furiously pedalling his rented bike to keep up with a group of eminent ornithologists in a Land Rover. Each chapter is interspersed with interviews with conservationists attempting to protect Britain's birds against a backdrop of decades of decline. Yet his paths feel too well trodden. The case studies he highlights will be familiar to anyone with more than a passing interest in Britain's birds: the RSPB's Operation Turtle Dove, the kittiwakes on Newcastle's Quayside, Oxford 's Wytham Woods – famously one of the most studied tracts of woodland in the world – and, nearby, the swift colony on the roof of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Gower abridges these stories into individual, loosely connected chapters, and in the process he offers little more than a bird's-eye view. Oddly, at the same time, his research gets lost in the thickets of modern-day nature writing, meaning there is little here that feels original. At one stage, he recounts the highlights of a Robert Macfarlane Twitter thread about JA Baker's classic 1967 book The Peregrine; we're thus presented with the curious spectacle of one author writing about another author tweeting about another author who was writing on birds. And as for the Ted Hughes test, a wren is described as a 'miniaturised, soft machine-gun spraying paper bullets of sound', and choughs as flying like 'an aerial clown-show'. At one stage, Gower even coins his own collective noun: a 'serenity of swans'. (There are already several words: flock, bevy, gaggle, herd.) For all his admirable passion, one can't help but wonder whether he might leave birdland to the birds for a while. In Bird School (★★★★☆), Adam Nicolson seems more alert to the challenges, and perils, of his field. Early on, he cites the writer Charles Foster's claim that whenever he, Foster, is perusing the 'birdwatching' section of a bookshop, he'll seek out the titles that describe the experience of having birds watch us, rather than the other way around. And, instead of striking out in pursuit of birds, Nicolson instead constructs a hide in a field close to his home on the Sussex Weald. What follows is in part a deep topography of a local patch, and in part an exploration of the intricacies of the lives of the birds that reside there. The result is deeply satisfying. 'We do not know each other and their lives are invisible to us,' Nicolson writes of the birds he watches. Instead of attempting to capture the unknowable, he draws upon an impressive depth of scientific and historical research to bring his subjects to life. Bird School works, to a degree, like a scrapbook, with Nicolson including old maps and notes – he records the exact sequence of birds singing in the dawn chorus – as well as a diary of the time he spends in the hide. He only loses focus when, on occasion, he ventures too far afield, as when he wanders the streets of Bonn in pursuit of blackbird song. When he stays put, Bird School is a worthy addition to a literary lineage that stretches back to the 18th-century writer and naturalist Gilbert White. Above all, Nicolson's dispassionate style is effective at illustrating the threat to Britain's birds. At one point he produces a series of graphs demonstrating the precipitous collapse of our songbird population over the past 60 years: bullfinches, nightingales and swallows have declined by 50 per cent, skylarks by 60 per cent and turtle doves by 90 per cent. The roll-call of species lost, he writes, reads like a list of regiments decimated in battle. Across Europe as a whole, bird populations have fallen by nearly a fifth over recent decades, a loss of about 600 million birds from a total of 3.2 billion in 1980. That collective indifference to what he calls an 'ending of a multiple form of life' inspired him to write this book. Bird School, then, is a fitting title: we should learn to rekindle our enduring love affair with birds, before they vanish from our sight.
The Guardian
11-03-2025
- Climate
- The Guardian
Country diary: The moorland is glittering with mad stacks of rime ice
In a sequence of grey mornings, this one was especially dismal. It was cold. The trees were dank and thick with mist, bark slick with moisture, whatever was left of last year's foliage drooping wetly, the bracken not bronze but dun, sliming into the earth, spring's promise unfulfilled. I dropped my chin into the collar of my jacket and started up the hill, eyes fixed on the uneven ground at my feet, marshalling enthusiasm. The change, when it came, wasn't gradual but instantaneous, as though a child had laid a ruler across the landscape and drawn a line, colouring in below with nondescript browns but above it with dazzling white. Overhead, the cloud thinned from dark to milky grey, the watery sun appearing on the horizon as I climbed out of the valley's warm bed of moist air on to the glittering moorland above. I found myself laughing, the day upended. Every tree and shrub was now coated in frosty geometric shapes, each one stacked madly on top of another. A bushy rowan had pretty much disappeared under these shards of ice, 'bristling / Galactic encrustations', as Ted Hughes described them. Hughes was writing about hoar frost and, strictly speaking, this wasn't frost at all, but rime ice; not water vapour desublimating on to a cold surface, but water droplets freezing on the chilled vegetation. The effect was similar, though rime creates spikier, heavier formations, useful knowledge if you're steering a sailing ship. The south-west breeze aided this construction, pushing mist across the moor, where it accumulated in crazy piles on the windward side of scrub and heather. The geometry of these formations is part of the spell. How can something that seems so complex and deliberate not be magic? I spotted an epiphyte – a plant that grows on another – in a nearby birch, a cartilage lichen, silver-green and wildly branching, topped with an even wilder crown of white thorns, woven from air, the tangle of ice evidence of a power unseen, or, as Hughes had it, 'Like a wand / That has swallowed its wizard.' Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
