Sunday at Bill's Mother's: 14th June 2026

Quail trail. Star Nightjars. Earth Mother moves in. Duvet protest. Bill's Mother's Book Club. And more out there news.

Looking and listening for Nightjars and owls near Stanage Pole

Morning. Lots of news today, along with a new Bill’s Mother’s Book Club with Dr Jo, and a bountiful birdwatch on the city’s dusky borders.

So with all that in today’s post, we only have a short but simple sales pitch: if you find Sunday at Bill’s Mother’s interesting, amusing, or useful, you can click a subscribe button below to upgrade, and with your pocket money sub, help us publish all this every week.

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Earth Mother To Park Hill

Work has begun around the Earth Mother sculpture at Park Hill.

I’m told the designer of her previous home in the 2026 Chelsea Flower Show Garden of the Year, Sarah Eberle, will be calling in soon to help supervise the reconfiguration of the On The Edge garden, commissioned by the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) to highlight the charity’s On The Edge campaign to celebrate and protect the wild edgelands of the nation’s towns and cities. At present the huge wooden head is already at Park Hill, with branches of hair and a tattooed arm, along with several mysterious bags of incoming landscape.

The chainsaw sculptor of the Earth Mother, Chris Wood, should also be calling in before the garden is ready, hopefully in a few weeks, along with Holmfirth wallers Lydia and Cuthbert Noble, who’ll be building new stone structures for the wild Park Hill garden, which I hear will feature a new meadow mound as home for the Earth Mother, festooned with local wild flowers. Watch that space.

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Tunnel Vision

The tours of our underground city centre rivers from the Sheaf & Porter Rivers Trust are on sale now. If you’re an explorer with no fear of wet feet or spooky tunnels, it’s the best £25 you’ll ever spend, not least because the profits raised go to the trust’s campaigning work to daylight our rivers, for us and our wild water creatures.

For example, I hear the trust finally have the green light to open up and landscape the Porter Brook along a trail from the inner ring road to the station, and they’re encouraging flood resilience engineers to in some way naturalise the concrete River Sheaf expressway above the Clyde Road flood defence work. And in July they’ll be opposing yet another landowner’s attempt to delay opening up the Sheaf near Troutbeck Road.

Meanwhile, SPRT stalwarts will be joining city river colleagues at a public meeting on 1st July about interminable delays in restoring the damaged waterside trails on the Upper Don and Sheffield Canal. More to follow.

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Bill’s Mother’s Book Club with Dr Jo Maher: Paul Besley & The Search

Welcome back to Book Club. This post is a bit different: I interviewed local author Paul Besley about his excellent book, The Search. Paul is a very interesting person - there was a lot I wanted to talk to him about. I hope you enjoy today’s post.

If you’ve ever pulled a walking guide on the Dark or White Peak from your pocket, or found yourself following advice from 1001 Walking Tips, you’ll probably have encountered Paul Besley’s writing before.

His early books are practical writing to make the outdoors accessible. But his latest book The Search is part autobiography, but mainly about his extraordinary border collie, the handsome Scout.

Published by Sheffield’s own Vertebrate Books, The Search documents Paul’s experience of training Scout, a Peak District mountain rescue dog. It won The Reader’s Outdoor Book of the Year award in The Great Outdoors Magazine, as well as other accolades. I’m not alone in my admiration for Paul’s remarkable story.

Mountain rescue dogs do something that feels impossible to our simple human brains. Often in extreme conditions, these remarkable creatures locate a human body by scent alone, across open moorland, in darkness, often in circumstances that would defeat any technology. And Scout is trained to that exacting standard.

(I got a brief introduction when I arrived at Paul’s house, sitting before me. Then Scout headed off for a walk with accomplished metalworker Alison, Paul’s wife.)

The book describes what it took Paul and Scout to gain these skills, why Paul found the endeavour so consuming and wanted to write about it.

In work, I’m used to conversations in ten-minute chunks, sometimes spread over years. On this occasion it was my pleasure to spend two hours and have a brew with Paul. He has extraordinary knowledge to share, on nature, land access, the Peak District, the South Pennines. Our our own local Alfred Wainwright, perhaps.

He was wearing a nasal oxygen tube throughout our chat. Paul has an advanced occupational lung disease, I think almost certainly acquired in the Sheffield steel factories where he started work at sixteen. He likely has less than a year to live, and in a stoical mindset he was keen to talk about that too.

The Search begins on Valentine’s Day 2012, with Paul falling a hundred feet while climbing near Coniston. He writes about it with a lyrical rather than gruesome touch - he comes round in a ditch, found by another dog like Scout and Coniston Mountain Rescue Team. Transferred to hospital with a broken shoulder, arm, ribs, teeth, and more. The experience plants the seed of an idea.

Within a year, still recovering from his injuries, Paul has joined Woodhead Mountain Rescue Team and begun the mission to rear and train the young Scout.

The majority of the story follows their journey together - the exhilaration of successful finds, the deflation of setbacks. Paul is honest about failure, and how he internalises it: It’s not them, it’s my fault.

From my own experience, of meeting similar people in our practice area, that kind of reflexive self-blame is something often carried by bright people from backgrounds that didn’t give them the support or opportunities they deserved.

I found myself wondering how his diagnosis shaped the book he ended up writing. He began it before he knew how ill he was, the knowledge of mortality is threaded through. At its heart, The Search is about relationships - with the landscape, between Paul and Scout, between Paul and Alison. It is a moving book. A compassionate one.

I asked Paul about his first experience of going out walking. He described brilliantly, setting off at fourteen with a line-drawn map borrowed from Rotherham library, persuading a friend to join him on a route from Crowden to Edale, then Bleaklow. The young pair were spectacularly ill-prepared in everyday clothing and footwear, no back up if it all went wrong and sustenance was held in an old gas mask bag containing a sandwich each, and a bottle of pop.

Yet despite the lack of technical equipment (high spec jackets or footwear that we are now told are essential to enjoy our outdoor experiences), the young friends made it there and importantly back - then did it all again another day.

Fast forward through a tricky early life, being laid off after eight years at the steelworks, a failed early marriage, a battle with depression and addiction all shared openly in The Search, Paul went on to get a university degree later in life, completing a BA in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, graduating in 2020.

He can quote Proust and Larkin, could place features on an OS map (Grains in the Water at Alport, for example, and its likely connection to ancient land management), and pointed me towards other writers such as Jim Perrin.

Paul himself is sharing his ongoing writing on Substack Heading For The Exit about life with a terminal illness.

I came away with a lot to think about from our conversation. I’m lucky in my work to speak with many interesting people. On a bank holiday day off, talking to Paul was an education and a pleasure. Engaging with his writing and thoughts, enjoying The Search and marvelling at how a dog can be trained to save a human life or recover a body, and what that means to people like us, who love to adventure outdoors.

• The Search by Paul Besley is available for £14.95 from Vertebrate Books

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More Out There News

Walking & Wheeling Billions : The government has boldly announced £4.5 billion for walking, wheeling and cycling measures around the country over the next five years.

There’s already been a little anxiety from commentators who still think being able to happily walk or wheel around our cities is a minority interest.

But it’s happening anyway, and (as reported here over the last few years) the funding boost follows the direction South Yorkshire Combined Authority transport fundraisers have been heading. So, we can hopefully expect to step out onto a lot more zebra crossings and walking and wheeling routes soon. We’ll keep you posted.

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On The Verge : Green spaces, even those little wider than a bed sheet, are valuable refuges for wild creatures and people. But the council will decide tomorrow (Monday 15th June) whether to sell a strip of roadside verge that campaigners fear could lead to sell offs across the city, to replace urban green spaces for car parking bays or home extensions.

So protectors of the city’s roadside verges are staging a blanket refusal action tomorrow lunchtime.

We first covered the campaign to prevent the verge on Dobbin Hill being sold to a nearby resident two years ago. The dogged campaigners say the sell off will encourage more developers to pitch their own plans to eat away at the city’s grass verges. The complex ownership and responsibilities of land alongside highways (and next to footpaths) mean objectors in future would have a major fight on their hands: especially if sell offs have already happened.

The campaigners say that public green spaces like the land at Dobbin Hill can provide a safe space for pedestrians, in this case on a busy school route. At a time when we want to encourage more walking, especially to school (see story above) why would a council sell off land that helps schoolchildren travel safely?

Campaigners from Millhouses, Ecclesall & Carter Knowle Community Group point out that a planning request to build out onto the verge of a nearby gennel off Ringinglow Road was turned down by the council, on safety grounds relating to nearby Ecclesall Primary School. So there is a precedent for refusal on safety grounds, it seems.

Even though it’s only the size of 19 double duvets, the verge at Dobbin Hill is important for local people’s wellbeing and safety, campaigners say. So they’re asking for people who like Sheffield’s grass verges to bring along a flowery bedspread or duvet tomorrow to make a graphic case for the city’s patchwork of highway meadows.

• If you like grass verges too, the On The Verge action outside the Town Hall is from 1-1.45 pm tomorrow (Monday 15th). A petition to Save Dobbin Hill Verge has over 2,000 signatures so far.

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The Return of Woodbourn Road : Training will return to the city’s Woodbourn Road athletics track soon. Track leaseholders Sheffield Hallam University say they’re reviewing the situation following discussions with owners Sheffield Council and athletics authorities, but supervised sessions with qualified athletics trainers will resume later this month, three days a week. But there’ll still be no school events or competitions.

It’s movement, says campaigners from Sheffield Athletics Development Group, but there’s plenty more to do.

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Quail Trail and Nightjars Nailed

Chance favours the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur once said. Or, maybe it’s just third time lucky. Seeking out Quail and Nightjars is no easy task.

Last week was my third attempt to actually see, and properly hear, the ancient and strange creature of our western heathlands, the Nightjar.

June and July are the months to creep out in to the crepuscular light at around 9.30pm or so and listen for the sound of a huge unearthly insect rattling out where the Outdoor City meets the Peak District. (The churring sound of Nightjars is how they talk to each other after migrating to Sheffield from Africa.)

Redmires and Wharncliffe Heath are popular, but you might hear them anywhere on our moorland fringe, above crusty ground with felled conifer trees, or sometimes even on the open moors themselves.

Sheffield Bird Study Group (SBSG) organise an annual Crepuscular Creep event to hear Nightjars at Redmires. Actually seeing them is a different matter: I traipsed up with SBSG birders through cold breezes, drizzle and midges in 2024 and 2025, and heard only a distant churr.

“We had two flying across the path a few days ago,” says walk leader Richard Hill earlier this week. Can you guarantee that this time, I ask? He pauses ominously. “It’s a bit chilly,” he warns.

But we’re both in good spirits. Richard and SBSG colleague David Wood took me to what seemed a random field above the Rivelin Valley an hour earlier. There’d been excited reports of a Quail, a small game bird much commoner in the balmy south of England.

But occasional stray Quails are reported here, they said. Recently David spotted Tree Sparrows around here too, a much rarer and declining dapper version of our common House Sparrow.

Late evening sunlight dappled the wheat and barley fields, with a dozen half hearted Skylarks quickly clocking us as unthreatening bird nerds, and returning to the walls and fields after making a brief rising song in the sky for show only.

Richard had played a Quail call on his phone on the way up.

“Wet My Lip” he said, as the three syllable call tried to match its English translation. They move around quite a bit, he and David explained, with Sheffield’s summer Quails often being young males looking for a mate.

Quails like small fields with good cover from the growing cereal crops, I was told. Like this one. David and Richard stopped and fell quiet by the wall, as well prepared birders do.

Tree Sparrow above the Rivelin valley - Photo David Wood

We might see a Tree Sparrow here, said David, seconds before a small Tree Sparrow landed on the wall two yards away, cocked its head as a well timed punchline, and flew away again.

“Wet my lip,” said the field, and our binoculars scanned across the rustling stalks. “Wet my lip,” it said, but a bit nearer. Or maybe further away.

Quails can sort of throw their voices, I learned. Ventriloquial calling can confuse predators by making a bird’s call appear to emanate from different places.

We listened to the wet lipped taunting from all over the field, and then it went quiet. After a few minutes, as we turned away to hunt Nightjars at Redmires, a plump brown bird rose and bulleted over the wall into the next field, as David’s camera rattled in pursuit, like a Nightjar.

David confessed he’d only actually seen the species once before, and Richard admitted he’d heard but never actually seen a Quail, until now. A Quail in flight, above the Rivelin Valley. The birders were already grinning, with or without Nightjars.

Quail this week above the Rivelin valley - Photo David Wood

Up at Redmires, we ascend above the midge line to watch owls and Stonechats, and roding Woodcock, piping in wide circles around their nighttime territory. And then we settle into the darkness to listen.

The churring begins, one, two, perhaps three Nightjars, somewhere out there on the heath growing from the old plantation. My twenty or so colleagues compare the sound to a two stroke motorbike, a struggling washing machine or an alien insect. I hear snatches of a 1990s dial up internet modem.

Then it gets suddenly louder and everyone turns back up towards the moors, and two black winged creatures from another world tumble across the path like shadow puppets, rattle, disappear, then zig zag over again, crackling away into the night.

• There’ll be more on local Nightjars, with fabulous photos from local birders Andy Deighton, Peter Garrity and David Wood, and more from Dr Jo’s chat with Paul Besley in this week’s supporters supplement for full subscribers. Upgrade below to read it all, hopefully later this evening.

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More What’s On Out There (from Sunday 14th June)

A tiny selection from our (regularly updated) What’s On Out There news and listings post. Full version for full members, preview (& this week) for all at the link above.

Sun 14th - Parkwood Springs wildflower walk

Mon 15th - Friends of Whirlow Brook Park - Volunteer session

Thurs 18th - Balsam Bashing in the Loxley Valley

Fri 19th - Sat 27th - Migration Matters festival

Sat 20th - Wardsend Cemetery conservation morning

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Nightjar - Photo David Wood

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