Spring at Bill's Mother's
Swifts, rangers, rats and rivers
The first English Bluebells are here. The timing is a little out for the woodland flower associated with the month of May up here in the north, or maybe that’s not so unexpected nowadays.
A new season seems a good time to reopen some features from our back catalogue, for our many new subscribers, and as reminders for those who’ve been with us since we started just over two years ago.
So here’s our Bluebell post from a couple of years ago, opened up for you all for a few weeks, with an invitation to plan your exploration of the Outdoor City’s shimmering blue woodlands. (Our archive posts are usually available to full subscribers only).
Along with Bluebells, today’s brief post has links to a handful of stories from this time last year, some opened up as free to read, and one for full subscribers. And yes, that’s a reminder we need half a dozen more free trial readers to convert to fully paid up subscribers before we reach our full sustainability target of 305 full subscribers.
I’m rubbish at business planning and that kind of thing, but I’ve managed to work out our 305 full supporter target will allow me around two days of work a week to put this publication together, at about the average pay of a northern England feature writer.
Obviously, those two days a week are theoretical, and it’s often many days and quite a few nights of research, phone calls, photography, hustling and hassling, as well as the actual writing and publishing.
(Our What’s On Out There guide on its own takes many hours of work every month, yet it generates few new paid subscriptions, for reasons I still haven’t worked out. But it’s worth doing, I think, to help spread the news about thousands of worthwhile events to people who don’t yet know about them).
So, if you’ve been reading for free for a month or two (or year or two), is £4 a month affordable to help us publish this magazine? It might not be for some, and that’s fine, our Sunday post will remain free for the foreseeable future.
But if the cost of a Millhouses Flat White every month is within your means, signing up as a full member takes a couple of minutes, and will help you and all our readers to keep reading about the wild outdoors of Sheffield.
We covered countryside rangers last April. Would a new government support a service needed more than ever, we wondered? This post also included news of the fabulous Sheffield Swift Map. (As you know, it’s our target to reach our magic 305 supporter number before this year’s Swifts arrive in Sheffield. They won’t be long now).
And looking back, I see we keep returning to the reason Sheffield is here in the first place: the rivers and brooks that wind round our houses and through our history. Some of our most active civic volunteers are determined we and the other wildlife of Shefield can thrive in and along all our waterways,
In April 2024, we published a prescient post after taking an inner city tour of the River Sheaf with the Sheaf & Porter Rivers Trust, learning about combined sewage overflows and lost urban meadows, and how canalising an urban river might lead to damage and disaster, now that rainfall is getting dangerous.
The damage was done (for 2024, at least), when the river bank collapsed after one of last year’s storms, and very costly rebuilding work is now underway. Here’s that post, re-opened up for everyone.
Last week I took a stroll with local nature writer Joe Shute to find the Skylarks of the Shire Brook valley. He’s planning a new book, this time about how nature and wildlife finds a way to live on in post-industrial cities. Shire Brook was maybe a little lusher these days than he was expecting, but he heard how the valley has effectively been reborn over the last thirty or so years, from centuries of polluting industry.
Last April, he’d just published his latest book, looking at the real lives of one of our most despised animals, the rat. This post was published for paid up members, and so it shall remain. (The upgrade to full subscriber button is below. It’s £4 a month, and you have no idea how much it’ll help my stress levels).
Thanks for reading, and we hope you have time to look at these posts, from the archive of over 220 features about the wild outdoors of your city.
On Sunday, we hope to be looking at the prospects for our moors after the sunniest March on record, along with news of a renewed version of Terry Howard’s Moorland Notebook, the veteran access campaigner’s personal account of the value of local moorland. We’ll have our next Muddy Mother column, and the return of Secret Seating. If you can, please help us publish all this stuff by chipping in below.
