35. Saturday 26th March, 2011

With spring in the air last week we planned to venture out again at last after our long cold winter to finish off all those little bits of the survey which needed checking and tidying up. Of course, that meant the weather changed dramatically from the warm sunshine of Friday, to the cold blasts of wind ripping through our layers of thermals and fleecies, and grey skies of Saturday. Undaunted, three survey teams worked on the Whitfield site all day, busily measuring, plotting and hachuring away. Ruth, Jane and Chris on the moor side mill ponds, Pat, Tony and Sue on the mill site itself, and Phil and Peter drawing up a cross-section profile of the whole site. There was much consultation and exchange of queries between teams as we made sure the plans all tied together neatly, and that we hadn’t missed any features out. By the end of the day we were feeling the cold getting right into our bones, but at least it’s done. Jane Lunnon

34. Friday February 11th, 2011

Back to the fieldwork today. Jane and Alan spent a misty day measuring and describing the botanical zones on the eastern half of the area south of the wall. Despite the very cold weather in December we noticed, with some alarm, that the Creeping Thistles have already have started their regrowth, reminding us how much more we have to do for the botanical survey.

© Alan Williams

We noticed that the water level had risen considerably since our last visit a couple of weeks ago. This is as a result of the work by Bentley's is being scaled back it nears completion and the heavy rain of the last week

Alan Williams

33. Thursday February 3rd, 2011

After much preparation (and practice to calm our nerves!), four of the Project Team gave UWHG members a presentation talk on the evening of February 3rd, at the Soroptimists' Rooms in Skipton. With the help of Alan's slideshow we gave the audience a whirlwind tour of the site's history, the water management systems, the methodology of the field survey, and an introduction to the botanical survey. The feedback was good, and everyone there said they found it very interesting.

© Alan Williams

We are now in the process of writing up the formal report, copies of which will go to various bodies such as the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, Craven Museum & Gallery, The Chatsworth and Bolton Abbey Archives, Skipton and Embsay Libraries, Yorkshire Water, and the Yorkshire Archaeological Society.

Jane Lunnon

32. Friday 21st January 2011

So what have we been up to over the winter? The snow and biting cold weather has kept us away, but that doesn't mean we haven't been busy.
Alan and Jane have been working on the botanical survey, cataloguing and editing a large archive of photographs and flora lists for the botanical survey, while the field survey team have been similarly tying up loose ends and preparing materials for the report.

We are now drafting the official report which will go out to the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority and others this year, and discussing the best way to provide a more general readership with the project's findings. The team have had a couple of meetings to get the report writing under way.

Alan and Jane have been out today measuring up the habitat zones and checking them for descriptors to include in the report; Alan has also been taking additional photographs for the archaeological record. And Alison has re-visited the site to check on some of her ideas regarding the walls and boundaries.

Jane Lunnon

31. Wednesday 1st September, 2010

It was a glorious day of warm summer sunshine at last, for myself, Ruth and Peter who turned up for some more surveying today. We were able to go back onto the moorside and check out a few more details for the gazetteer of archaeological features.

Peter taking a GPS reading © Jane Lunnon

And Jane continued the botanical survey as usual. There are no new flowers emerging at this time of year, so this will probably be the final month for the year’s survey of flowering plants.

The water level of the reservoir appears to have settled at a half-way point – not as low as it has been, but still revealing quite a lot of the mill site which would normally be underwater. The longer the site is exposed the more stones are moved around or thrown into the reservoir – the site is losing its integrity little by little as the weeks go by, but thankfully, so far, there has been little significant damage except to the section of 18th century field wall, now destroyed, which used to lie on the popular footpath nearby.

The Mission Building continues to deteriorate gradually, but happily is still providing enough shelter for an owl to live there.

Ruth checking the Gazatteer © Jane Lunnon

We were asked recently if there were any traces of the old cottage gardens left on the site – unfortunately the botanical survey has found no evidence of the survival of vegetables, herbs or cottage garden flowers – introduced plants such as purple and yellow irises we know were first planted here during the past decade, while the white foxgloves are growing several hundred metres away from the mill site, so we cannot be sure if they originate from the mill workers’ cottage gardens.


Jane Lunnon

30. Wednesday 25 August 2010

Alan and I turned up for a day’s botanical surveying again. Now it’s the school holidays the reservoir isn’t so quiet as normal – it’s more like the weekend, when this place is a very popular spot for family walks, and children playing. As always there were plenty of dogs around, and we enjoyed the company of several friendly canines - and their owners - curious as to what we were up to.

Alan started off the day by re-taking some of the technical photos of the mill site features on the foreshore – he’s a perfectionist with his photography and wanted to get everything just right.

Then he followed my trail of blue flags marking flowers and fungi that I thought were ready for photography.

Luckily, he was wearing his wellies as he slipped into one of the numerous little becks while photographing water mint flowers. His feet still got wet, though!

We enjoyed a leisurely lunch on the newly oiled bench by the millennium-planted oak trees. Someone has recently tidied up around here and cleared out all the weeds. Luckily the tiny little germander flowers have survived.

I spent the day finishing off the August botanical survey for the reservoir side – the moor was closed for the shooting season today, and since my survey would have involved going off the footpath, I couldn’t complete the survey on the moorside today, and will have to return another day. The flowering plants are slowing down now, and we should soon be able to stop recording these, although we still have non-flowering plants on our agenda. We hope to focus on these from September onward – and Embsay Reservoir and Moor certainly have a wide variety of grasses, mosses, lichens, ferns and fungi waiting to be recorded.

Jane Lunnon.

29. Wednesday 18th August 2010

Toothache notwithstanding, I joined Alan at the Whitfield site today to continue our botanical survey. The weather was very changeable again, and the shower cap proved very useful in protecting Alan’s camera! We are now finding that the rate of new flowers appearing has slowed down as summer progresses, and the survey went well as so much is just a repeat of last month’s inventory of plants.

We agreed that since we are new to this kind of thing, that we would focus this year just upon flowering plants, and leave grasses, lichens, mosses, ferns and fungi out of our report for UWHG’s Whitfield Project 2010. This makes things much simpler, and allows us to give more attention to producing a good data set and photographic collection based on this smaller botanical survey.

I left the site early in the afternoon, leaving Alan waiting for the latest shower to pass so he could photograph the last of the flowers on his list for today.

The botanical survey will continue again next Wednesday.

Jane Lunnon, UWHG Archivist