Grime Hill and Soot Hill West Pennine Lancashire, mixed media drawings by Rob Miller




Tramway tracks mine shafts and trees
Mixed media on paper
 Pioneer trees of Birch,Willow and Alder
 take root in an environ
 that is no longer grazed



Kate Rusby sings my young man

Birch and willow pioneer trees reclaim the moor
mixed media

The road to the coal  mines near Grime hill and Soothill
mixed media on paper

Speak of the North

By Charlotte Brontë

Speak of the North! A lonely moor
Silent and dark and trackless swells,
The waves of some wild streamlet pour
Hurriedly through its ferny dells.

Profoundly still the twilight air,
Lifeless the landscape; so we deem
Till like a phantom gliding near
A stag bends down to drink the stream


And far away a mountain zone,
A cold, white waste of snow-drifts lies,
And one star, large and soft and lone,
Silently lights the unclouded skies

Today was better, spring touches in the air, an expectation of warmer times to come, but no not warmer just now, this wind from the North, keep the jacket zipped, no snowdrops here either, nor any bleating. white. fluff lambs, jointing about on their stick legs,  like dragonflies without grace, here on Soot Hill above the Methodist Mission it is still winter.