Sunday at Bill's Mother's: 26th July 2026
City centre cycling. Our Nature Recovery Strategy. An underground celeb historian, a firefighting treasure dog & more out there news.
Morning. A packed issue today with pictures of the city centre cycling Grand Prix, and why you should have your say on the South Yorkshire Nature Recovery Strategy before 31st July. There’s also news of historians and film crews in our dark river tunnels, family circus shows in Ecclesall Woods to inspire local parents and politicians, and Graves Park’s treasure hound firefighter.
Treasure Hound Takes the Heat
The Graves Park Treasure Hound survived a recent arson attempt, sculptor Jason Thomson reports, after an overnight fire earlier this month.
Jason made his iron sculpture (which we covered last year) from melted down engine parts, commissioned by the council’s parks department to mark the passing of a favourite old Sycamore in Graves Park (felled by Storm Elin in December 2023), and also to celebrate the park’s Digging Deeper For All and Climate Resilience community projects.
A couple of weeks ago, a South Yorkshire fire team was called out to halt a blaze apparently set in the tree stump. Jason examined the sculpture soon after, and although a section of the old tree was badly blackened, the mystical dog had survived.
“The dog was born of a fiery process,” says Jason “and going by a previous metal piece I made that was unharmed by a tyre being burnt around its neck, I hoped this sculpture would also shrug off a fire.”
The sculpture features imagined links to Graves Park history, including a treasure chest, maybe belonging to Mary Queen of Scots or Dick Turpin, as they travelled the old London Road that ran through the park centuries ago.
Since it arrived in the park last October, local families have set down modern treasure around the iron dog, including sweets, fruit and charm bracelets. Sadly these were all blasted away by the firefighters, says Jason.
“But I hope they’ll return - to keep Black Shuck appeased.” (Black Shuck is a ghostly hound of English folklore, that roams the countryside as an omen of misfortune.)
The sculpture was designed to long outlast the decaying tree, Jason says, and has a series of hidden metal ledges within the stump, for grime and insects and new life to appear as the tree rots.
“I’m hoping that the tree gets the chance to melt away naturally now,” he says, “so that people can observe the ‘fast geology’ of decay. Eventually the dog will stand alone, and its compartmentalised back will be revealed and lived in by other creatures.”
Our Nature Recovery
Over this publication's 317 posts (so far) I’ve seen and heard how the world is changing around us.
Here we are, in another year of record weather events, and heat sweeping away homes and livelihoods and landscapes just a few degrees of latitude away.
But we’ve also seen how cheap and cheerful it is to rewet our moorlands to reduce fire risk and flooding, and how plants and wild creatures can restore landscapes so they can protect us better from the extreme weather to come.
Every wild professional I’ve spoken to over the last few years has told me the climate and nature crises are so interlinked that we can’t tackle one without the other. So this week I had a quick chat with one of the main communicators of our region’s Nature Recovery Strategy, which after years of preparation is theoretically, finally, about to begin work.
The strategy’s public consultation ends this Friday (31st July), and then after her report on over 3,000 responses, Kris Mackay tells me the ambitious full plan to restore the wild worlds of South Yorkshire will be published by the end of this year. So why is it so important? I ask.
“Nature’s not a ‘nice to have’, it’s critical infrastructure for our survival,” she says. “Nature brings us joy, and nature will also protect us in an uncertain and changing world.”
Over the consultation Kris (and her Growing Circles consultancy) have spoken to schools, businesses, landowners, farmers, villagers and townsfolk across South Yorkshire. The point is, this will need to be an effort by everyone, not just politicians and civil servants.
“Making nature recover is everybody’s business and responsibility. Government will be doing it,” she says, “but farmers also need to do it, and developers need to do it and people in communities need to do it. We each have our own area of influence and control, and nature can thrive and benefit in all of those areas.”
The strategy comes after many years work from over 1,800 ecologists and nature lovers across the county, she says, and the idea now is not really to offer this document up for dissection, but to make people aware of its existence, and have their final say before it gets going.
“This is our plan for what we want to achieve, and now the other thing we really want to hear from people is, how do you then deliver it?”
So far, the South Yorkshire Combined Authority has a budget of £185,500 per year for three years to support the delivery of its Nature Recovery Strategy, but it’s clear from Kris that the work to restore meadows and moors and woodlands, and bring back Eurasian Beavers and Pine Martens and Red Squirrels, will not just be achieved by big government grants, we’ll all have our shoulders to the wheel.
She seems confident there will be grants available, from government and developers, but there’s no clear picture yet of how much they’ll be and how they’ll work. And, don’t forget, all this is supposed to follow the global lead to ensuring that 30% of South Yorkshire (and the world) is ‘good for nature’ by 2030.
At the moment, Kris says, we’re at about 6-7% in South Yorkshire. So are we going to get anywhere near 30% by 2030? She smiles. “I think if we’re going to, it’ll require everybody to really bring their best game.
Are you hopeful? “Yes, mostly, generally,” she says. “I always find it fascinating that you don’t need to give nature much of a foothold for it to recover itself. Nature wants to thrive and it wants to live, doesn’t it? That’s what gives me most hope.”
The South Yorkshire Nature Recovery consultations continue until 31st July. I’ll have more detail on the work to come in future posts.
Paddling For Britain
Sheffield’s ever-popular underground river tours hosted celebrity archaeologist Professor Alice Roberts last week, who put on her wellies and paddled under Sheffield railway station with a Channel Four film crew.
After her famous TV outings in the Rift Valley and the Greek islands, the Digging for Britain host said she loved the Sheffield underground river tour, and was delighted by the “sheer volume of industrial debris still evident on the Sheaf river bed, like crucibles, cutlery and grindstones,” said her host Simon Ogden of the Sheaf & Porter Rivers Trust (SPRT).
In the picture, she’s holding a piece of a grindstone, says Simon, “which she asked to take home as a souvenir of Sheffield.”
The filming was for a new C4 series provisionally called Grounded, about landscape, industry and history, with an episode on Sheffield expected to broadcast before Christmas.
The SPRT underground river tours continue through the summer, with places for August still available here - all profits go to SPRT’s work to open up local rivers.
City Centre Grand Prix
Active Lives Commissioner for South Yorkshire (and former Olympic gold medal winner) Ed Clancy launched this year’s 100-strong community ride before the main racing at the annual City Centre Grand Prix cycling event last week.
Ed’s former colleague Ollie Wood won the men’s race for the second time, while Katie Scott won the women’s event.
The crowds were as big ever, Ed Clancy told me, and the Sheffield Grand Prix is getting a reputation on the national scene as a great race to watch, with lots of twists and turns, cobbles and hills.
Ed and team are now preparing for the spectacle of the Tour de France Femmes sweeping into Sheffield next summer. The exact urban Sheffield route has yet to be finalised, he said, but the hope is that La Tour will inspire more women and girls to get cycling in 2027, with planned programmes for local schools, arts and culture events and learn to ride courses for schoolgirls.
There are still more men riding around the city than women, he said, but when you make places safer to ride your bike, the gap between men and women starts to close.
So will we see safer roads and routes to make that happen as La Tour arrives?
“There’s a really strong pipeline of schemes towards the new funding,” said South Yorkshire director of active lives and safer roads, Nicola Marshall. “And I think there’s really great political will at the moment in Sheffield for the changes we want to make.”
Parents for Future
The latest local heatwaves spurred members of the Sheffield Parents For Future group to show their opposition to renewed North Sea oil and gas drilling last week, with demonstrations at Sheffield station, Heeley and Ecclesall Woods.
Group member Sarah Llewellyn said: “The new extreme heat records in June showed the climate crisis is here and we can’t afford to make a bad situation even worse by approving North Sea oil and gas drilling. Projects such as Rosebank are not compatible with a safe and sustainable future for our children. This is an opportunity for Andy Burnham to put people, and our future generations, first.’’
The new government energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, was once a vocal renewable energy supporter, but jumped into an early meeting with oil and gas industry leaders in Aberdeen last week, and it’s now her decision whether to overturn the drill baby drill ban at Rosebank and other prospecting sites when a consultation on the halt ends next month.
Parents For Future Sheffield host a series of woodland circus shows on the 30th and 31st July and 1st August at Ecclesall Woods, aiming to inspire families to “connect with nature, and learn how to have their voices heard for positive change.” See: https://www.hopeforthefuture.org.uk/events for free tickets.
If you like It’s Looking A Bit Black Over Bill’s Mother’s, please share this post with anyone and everyone. The more readers we have, the more we can cover.
More What’s On Out There (from Sunday 26th July)
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 26th - Friends of Whirlow Brook Park - Sounds of Summer concert
Sun 26th - Parkwood Springs - Wildflower Walk
Mon 27th - Fri 31st - Daily health walks in parks and green spaces from Step Out Sheffield, 10 am start
Tues 28th - Friends of Loxley Valley footpath work
Weds 29th - South Yorks Nature Recovery Strategy online consultation event with SRWT
Thurs 30th - Green City Action Grimesthorpe community allotment
Fri 31st - World Ranger Day, walk and activities at Longshaw
Sat 1st Aug - Parkwood Springs conservation morning
We need just a handful of our free trial readers to upgrade to reach our 350 paying member target. At that heady point, we’ll have enough full paying supporters to launch our new Commoner’s Muck section about the city’s hundreds of voluntary groups and the wild places they look after.
It would make my Sunday if you could join us. A pocket money full supporter’s subscription will set you back less than a pint of beer a month. Thanks for reading.