Grisby Dyke in the Playhouse Theatre (now the Arts Centre)

Trying to keep awake was the problem!

Great music in Buxton 1969

Grisby Dyke.

The Adventures of Miss Rosemary La Page.

Grisby Dyke were a band that played around the Manchester Area and often played in Buxton, Derbyshire.

Fragment from Shagrat Records - Heroes By Henry Ayrton.

During the autumn, winter and spring months of 1969 and 70, as a burgeoning 'freak' and underground music fan, I was going to a lot of gigs in the Blackpool, Preston, Lancaster, Manchester area. 

One band I saw a lot on my travels around then was Urban Gorilla - also variously known as The Stark Electric Blues Band, very briefly Lanchester County (an unofficial name soon replaced with Urbane Gorilla - note the spelling - it was meant to be part of a joke, but it got a lot of people confused) and finally Urban Gorilla. 
I saw them regularly in the Great Hall at Lancaster University and further afield including an amazing gig at the Pleasure Beach Casino on Wednesday 1st April 1970 where they supported the fast rising Black Sabbath and local heroes, Grisby Dyke - that night was also my first encounter with Stackwaddy but that's another story! 

Driving Sideways
The Story of a Band
by Henry Ayrton

Skirr Cottage Journal 2.

      By the middle of our first summer living in the cottage, I decided that I would like to give the cottage a name, honour it so to speak with some originality. The family agreed. The name that sprang to mind was not actually original at all, but I would imagine is still pretty unique to this day. Perhaps it is a little sentimental, but I saw it as putting our 'mark' on the cottage - at least while we were living there.  Having heard a tawny owl several times in the garden (its favoured spot is the top of a telegraph pole or the ash) and beyond the fields in the woods, and spotted a short-eared owl in the far fields below the Edge, my mind was made up. The name I settled on was Skirr Cottage, after Henry Williamson's first cottage in the North Devon village of Georgeham. The writer of 'Tarka the Otter' arrived in Georgeham in 1921 on his Norton motorcycle, fleeing from the confines of a South London terrace, and no doubt the traffic noise. Williamson had visited the area before the Great War, in which he fought, and remembering the still largely unchanged rural way of life, the beautiful landscape and the peace and quiet, decided to become a writer and make Georgeham his home, renting a humble labourer's dwelling known as Skirr Cottage for £5 a year. The name 'Skirr' is derived from the noise made by the barn owls that had nested in the thatch for generations.

     His prize winning book about an otter, the early drafts written in Skirr Cottage, won him great fame, and he went on to write some fifty books apart from 'Tarka'. Williamson may have had his faults, and as a result has been sadly ignored by the public and the establishment, but for me his books have always, and always will be magical, painting as they do such vivid pictures of the old rural way of life.

We have yet to see a barn owl in the vicinity of the cottage but we live
 in hope.  

Skirr Cottage Journal.

Welcome to the Skirr Cottage Journal.

This is the first of what I hope will become a regular nature diary feature. The ‘rural rides’ will take in the local area around my home and other locations in the Peak. I can never hope to reach the dizzy literate heights of my namesake Kenneth ‘Allsop’, but I will follow tentatively in his shadow and in awe of his great insight into nature and the countryside:

“In the short term, man seems to have it taped, to have gained dominance over the planet; in the longer term I think we may be the losers … Because central Government and local authorities betray the trust vested in them. Because landowners agree to it.

“Money talks. Beauty is voiceless…”

              Kenneth Allsop. In The Country. 1972.

  

  

  We moved into our new home - a cottage on the out-skirts of Buxton - on the 8th March 1996. Moving house is of course a traumatic experience for anyone, and we were no exception to the rule. The garden of course proved invaluable to us all, it being the main factor in 'pulling up stumps' in the first place. Being lovers of the local area and all ‘wild places’, we had longed to create a wildlife garden which help in some small way to preserve the wild creatures and the environmental biodiversity of the area.

        We soon greeted the silence: it is so quiet and peaceful here and at night and it goes quite 'dark', something that came as a surprise.  We then had to get used to the cottage's 'whims'; it creaks rather like an old galleon at sea. Such bumps and stirrings seemed to be amplified by the lack of heavy traffic noise, such as we were bombarded with before. The cottage is far from remote being on a long road full of other fare more modern dwellings built sporadically around the 1930’s and 40’s. The semi-detached cottage we inhabit was built around 1850 as far as we can determine, and was possibly a forest workers cottage built by the Chatsworth Estate.

     The garden wall borders on to open pasture (the back field), while a little to the west, stark trees line the high edge of Burbage Moor, an area known to us merely as the Edge. Here we now are, for better or worse - on the edge of the wild. We have been privileged to observe certain animals that are personal totems in my Celtic imaginings - hares in the backfield and up on the Edge. Sometimes we watch spellbound as one of the beautiful creatures creeps right up under our garden wall. They seem to me to be so primeval and one of the reasons why I spend so much of my time watching and studying them.

Below the Roaches.