November 1922

November to January sketching and painting in the high moors.

The second winter, after the long stay at Weymouth, produced weather to my liking. The Wharfe was swollen and I decided to take my large sketching box up to the Strid above Bolton Abbey. I had been studying the small waterfalls on the moors, trying to find a way of interpreting the different tempi involved; the jet of water falling into a deep pool from which it flowed at a different pace, then quickening again as it thrust into a narrower channel. I was always terrified of the Strid, partly due to the number of fatalities among people who made the seemingly easy jump across the rocks through which the whole of the River Wharfe flowed.