Sunday at Bill's Mother's: 5th Oct 2025
Making Monoliths. Feet First. Run Happy. Treasure Dog.
Morning. Another packed and surprising issue today, with wooden towers and iron hounds appearing in our parks and woodlands. We have news of why parkrun makes you happy, and how listening to children is guiding our feet first transport policy.
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Treasure Hound
“Root rot floored this glorious Sycamore, rendered its timber rotten. So I offered an iron sculpture made from melted down engine parts.” So says sculptor Jason Thomson, in a note sent to me after I spotted his new sculpture on social media.
Jason likes a bit of strangeness and ambiguity: see his Iron Toad in Endcliffe Park, or seek out his decaying fish on the Five Weirs Walk, or his scary giant looming out of the woods by Sheffield Parkway.
“A bearded dog with crow’s wings for ears breaks free from a golden collar,” Jason adds. “A strongbox spilling nature’s treasure makes up her hindquarters, apparently whittled from a rooted stump that holds modern picnicware petrified in iron.”
Obviously, I have to go and see this amazing beast lurking in Graves Park. It’s hiding behind the fallen Sycamore at the edge of the old Deer Park, below the hill up through the woods to the Rose Garden Cafe.
The sculpture was funded by a series of grants sought out by the council’s manager for Graves Park, Catherine McDougall, partly as a celebration of the recent Digging Deeper For All and Climate Resilience projects, which enthused hundreds of volunteers to help research and record the history, wildlife and ecology of the park.
Jason spoke to visitors and organisations before starting the sculpture, including the Friends of Graves Park and Professor Ian Rotherham of South Yorkshire Biodiversity Group, who managed the recent projects.
As always, there were plenty of ideas about what a new sculpture for the park could include, says Jason. “It all usually makes a mental soup in my own mind, before the thing finally occurs to me.”
The old tree, which came down in Storm Elin nearly two years ago, was to be the site of the sculpture, and Jason says a small mongrel dog started jumping around his feet on one visit to the fallen tree. He then noticed a crow a few yards away eyeing him up. And so the idea of a mixed up dog with crow’s wing ears was born in the mental soup of the sculptor’s mind.
Further research and conversations added a strong box, linked to the old London Road through the park, where Dick Turpin and Mary Queen of Scots may have travelled with their loot or luggage. There’s also a slipped crown, a nod to the old deer park, and a suggestion that modern parks should be free to all.
Modern tupperware and picnic cutlery appear on the sculpture too, inspired by the old Sycamore’s status as a popular picnic spot.
And then there’s the story of the ghostly dog, or boggard, of the dark and eerie Bunting Nook road that runs alongside the park, said to be the most haunted road in Sheffield. Might the boggard of Bunting Nook look like the sculpture of 2025?
The root rot of the old tree will quicken its decay, and the sculpture has hidden ridges on the tree side, says Jason, which will fill with soil and grubs and insects as the Sycamore rots away.
Jason tentatively titles the strange beast the Graves Park Dog, or the Tupperware Wolf in his note, but says his sculptures usually take on a life and title of their own in time.
Within ten days, the dog with crow’s ears had gathered an ear necklace, bracelets and an array of coins, conkers and treasures at its feet, perhaps inspired by the sculpted strong box of Mary Queen of Scots, spilling Beech leaves, or royal coins.
I hear the sculpture’s name might now be the Treasure Dog, or Treasure Hound. Jason is delighted.
Making Monoliths
The new Wyming Brook seems to be doing well. The old dark forest has been developing into a lighter landscape since the felling of hundreds of larch trees by government order a couple of years ago. (See our earlier post for full subscribers here).
Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust’s nature recovery manager Nabil Abbas (who looks after the site) tells me this year’s tree work will involve making monoliths, by effectively killing off a few Beech, Sycamore and Sweet Chestnut trees in Wyming Brook and nearby Fox Hagg to leave tall posts of dead wood.
The imposing monoliths will then provide ideal homes for fungi, invertebrates and woodpeckers. The process emulates a more natural woodland with lots of decaying trees and standing dead wood, unlike much of our own planted woodland.
(In Wyming Brook, non-native larch and non-native to Yorkshire Beech trees were planted a few generations ago to make a forestry plantation and hillside tourist attraction).
The process is often called veteranisation, says Nabil, and creates a much richer habitat. (I hope to have more after a visit with Nabil soon. Subscribe to keep up).
Happy Saturdays
Take a look at the people circling your local park next Saturday. You’ll see plenty of sweat and pain, and steely-eyed determination to finish in the top 20, or just to keep going for 3.1 miles. Or, if you have time, hang around until about 9.45 and watch the exhausted joy of the aftermath.
The international parkrun phenomenon came of age this weekend. Every Saturday, around 400,000 people take part in parkruns and junior parkruns, with almost 50,000 people volunteering to help. But the event started with 13 runners and 5 volunteers in October 2004, 21 years ago in Bushey Park in London.
Local parkrunner and scientist Professor Steve Haake O.B.E has studied parkrun for years, and mined the data to find why people take part, and what they gain from strolling, jogging, running or sprinting round a 5km course every Saturday morning.
He wrote a post for us last year, based on a groundbreaking study showing that the health and wellbeing benefits of parkrun are worth £667 million a year to the country.
His new report has been published this week, and again we have an exclusive laypersons post from Steve, for our full subscribers. (It’ll be emailed out shortly, or find it here).
He wanted to know what caused the improvements in life satisfaction reported by so many parkrunners, and sent out a survey to almost a million people to find out. One of the main findings shows the main reason is clear but perhaps surprising, if you only see those pained faces after the two mile mark.
People start parkrun for fairly obvious reasons: to get fitter, to lose weight, to meet people. But the reason they carry on is very simple: parkrun makes you happy.
(It’s a little more complicated than that of course. In his piece, Steve explains why those pained, then happy, faces are worth a lot more to the local economy than you might think.)
The methodology Steve and colleagues used to enumerate the value of parkrun can be applied to any other activity, he adds. Whether it’s an art class, a gardening group, a walk programme or a run in the park, measuring if it actually works (and what it’s worth in cold hard cash) is crucial, in these days of short term funding for health initiatives, often run by volunteers.
Steve goes through some of the comments received to his survey, which might convey his findings just as well as the data. Levels of wellbeing and life satisfaction have clear links to debilitating conditions like anxiety and depression, for example. One respondent explained how the weekly boost from parkrun quite simply kept him going from one week to the next.
“Parkrun saved my life,” he said.
Others told how meeting fellow runners inspired them, how running with your family left anxieties and irritations behind, and women said parkrunning with other women helps them manage their pregnancies better.
And those wellbeing benefits particularly matter to those at the back of the parkrun, running or walking round well behind the 20-30 minute runners. 40% of those people have long term health conditions, like arthritis, asthma, anxiety and depression.
Which is worth bearing in mind next time you visit one of our local parkrun parks. “The back runners and walkers really do deserve being cheered on,” says Steve.
Since the new Parkwood Springs parkrun seems to be on hold, I’m hearing it might just be overtaken by another site as the city’s 8th adult parkrun. To keep up with this kind of thing, and so you’ll be among the first few thousand to know, subscribe below.
Feet First
Our planners and politicians have launched their long term Walking, Wheeling & Cycling strategies this year. The glossy documents from Sheffield Council and South Yorkshire Combined Authority (SYMCA) follow consultations with people and organisations all over the county, and it’s clear our politicians now reckon a combination of improved public transport and getting around on our own two feet, or via people-powered wheels, is the new way forward.
I have a post on how we might need to rethink our attitude to motor vehicles coming this week in the wonderful Sheffield Tribune. But in the meantime, the far sighted active travel staff at SYMCA have sent me a few words about their own strategy, crafted by listening to people not usually heard in the noisy world of urban transport, like mothers, teenagers and children.
“It quickly became apparent that we couldn’t ‘cut and paste’ a strategy from somewhere else. We’re different from other places,” SYMCA say.
“Since Ed Clancy started his Active Travel Commissioner role in 2023, he’s met with hundreds of different community groups, businesses, employers, members of the public and elected politicians to find out what they want, and need, to help more people walk, wheel and get on their bikes. The strategy is built on evidence, shaped by insight, and driven by ambition,” they add.
“We’re designing our new projects with people, not for them. We’re listening to those who are the most often left out and left behind: people with disabilities, women and girls, people from ethnically diverse communities, and those living on low incomes. And we’re making decisions that reflect their needs, their voices, and their lived experiences. We’re putting our communities front and centre and we’re changing how we work. We’ll build safer neighbourhoods that people feel proud to call home.”
Watch these spaces.
More What’s On Out There (from Sunday 5th October)
A tiny selection from our new (and regularly updated) What’s On Out There news and listings post for September and October.
Sun 5th - Lantern Workshops at Shire Brook Valley
Mon 6th - SRWT Volunteer Day - Crabtree Ponds
Tues 7th - Friends of Ecclesall Woods volunteer & footpath repair session
Weds 8th - RSPB local bird walk - Longshaw
Thurs 9th - Green City Action Grimesthorpe community allotment
Sat 11th - Ranger -led Volunteering at Wardsend Cemetery
Sat 11th - Parkwood Springs conservation volunteering
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Great to hear about about Jason Thompson's new sculpture. He also has some fabulous sculptures in Woolley Woods and at the bottom of Newman Road in Wincobank.
And as for Steve Hakes's comment about Parkrun participants, for me sums up one of the problems: “The back runners and walkers really do deserve being cheered on". All participants deserve to be cheered on. Simply turning up for alot of people is a major achievement. The whole point of Parkrun is that it isn't supposed to be competitive. I say this as someone who helped set up a women's running group. Most of us don't want to be surrounded by men who are just about exhaling their lungs as they cross the finish line.
And great that SYMCA is consulting groups that don't normally get consulted for their active travel programme. But alot of this work about inclusive participation was done 35 years ago when Celia Brackenridge was head hunted (by what was then Sheffield Polytechnic) to lead the new degree course in Recreation Management. The problems have never really changed in that the biggest obstacle to anyone's participation in sport and leisure is that it is predominantly from the viewpoint of white, middle class, competitive men.
I love the funky dog! Isn’t it curious the way people are leaving mementos - maybe it’s akin to throwing coins into fountains and wells. I guess it gives us a tangible link with whatever the place means to us.