Lighting the Woods: what's on!

 

LIGHTING THE WOODS

the events list!

what's on:
talk, make, laugh, smile
be inspired!

Take time to pause,

To breathe, to walk, to wander,

To enjoy the woods of Buxton.

Step out in the darkest time of the year into an evening of wonder and remember summer flowers, butterflies, autumn toadstools and appreciate the winter cold

On Saturday February 21st 2026, Stone and Water invite you to take a walk through Grinlow Woods…tiny lanterns will flicker among tree roots, giant tree people will watch from the shadows, leaf-lanterns and shimmering birds will fill the branches. Join us for an evening of wonders

Put together in partnership with Buxton Civic Association, the Babbling Vagabonds and Creeping Toad, Lighting the Woods will celebrate the woods of Buxton. The underlying theme is just that: "local woods: their wildlife and wonder"

Events

All events are free: no booking or tickets needed: just drop by and join in!

January:
Tuesday 20th: sharing ideas: an open invitation for anyone who might like to get involved to come along and share ideas, offer skills, characters or just enthusiasm! We'll be at the Cheshire Cheese, 37 - 39 High St, Buxton, SK17 6HA...drop in and have a chat!

Sunday 25th: Woodland Windows and Wild Birds, Buxton Country Park, Temple Road, Buxton, SK17 9DH. Take the woodland home as a wonderful image in a picture frame. Coinciding with RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch, we'll be encouraging people to have a go here at the Cavern about then to take information away to do a Birdwatch survey of their own at home
Parking: at the Visitor Centre - charges apply
Bus stops: Community School/Green Lane


February:

Sunday 8th: Garden Lights, Serpentine Community Garden, off Burlington Rd, Buxton, SK17 9DR10:00 - 13:00. Inspired by the flowers and seed heads, the leaves and stalks and wildlife of the Gardens, we'll make tiny bottle lanterns. Make one to take home and leave us one for Lighting the Woods

Please bring a clean plastic bottle with you if possible (500ml- 2l all work!)
Parking: at the Pavilion Gardens Car Park (charges apply) or on Burlington Road.
Bus stops: Pavilion Gardens or West Road)

Sunday 15th: Bottle Lanterns at Buxton Country Park, Temple Road, Buxton, SK17 9DH,10:30- 15:00 The patterns of winter trees, leaf skeletons and the shapes of hibernating animals could all appear in these beautiful lanterns. Make one to take home and leave us one for Lighting the Woods

Please bring a clean plastic bottle with you if possible (500ml- 2l all work!)
Parking: at the Visitor Centre - charges apply
Bus stops: Community School/Green Lane

Tuesday 17th Unexpected Animals!: Buxton Library, Kents Bank Road Buxton, SK17 9HW: 10:30- 15:00, Woodland wildlife: making bugs and beasties: we'll use card and shiny scrap to make a collection of wonderful creatures for our Lighting the Woods event. Make one for us to keep and one for yourself to look after at home!

Parking: at library
Bus stops: Cote Heath Park on Heath Park Road

Thursday 19th: Where we live is...CREATIVE, Assembly Rooms, The Crescent, Buxton, SK17 6BU.Join our woodland team at this lively event by the Buxton Crescent Heritage Trust: we'll be drawing, cutting, sticking and probably making a lovely mess!

Times: 10:30-12:30 & 2-4pm
Parking: town centre car park
Bus stops: Terrace Road

Saturday 21st: Lighting the Woods: Buxton Country Park, Temple Road, Buxton, SK17 9DH and at last we fill the woods with lights and tiny creatures and strange characters. Come and take an late afternoon wander through the trees and meet the magical world of Grinlow Woods!

Parking: at the Visitor Centre - charges apply
Bus stops: Community School/Green Lane

WEATHER WARNING: we will try to go ahead unless our Buxton winter really hits hard! If you aren't sure: check the links below on 19th or20th of February

MORE INFORMATION:

Facebook: creeping toad or stoneandwater

Ig: creepingtoad or Limestone740

Blogs:

creepingtoad.blogspot.com

stoneandwaterblog.wordpress.com

Witches, snow and wonderful creatures!

Waiting for the Snow and Baba Yaga: tales of an old witch
New Books from Gordon MacLellan

Where would you hide a witch?

Where would you hide THIS witch?

Because when the witch in question is magnificent, ancient and flies through the old woods of the world in a mortar, rowing herself along the winds with pestle, and when her house is likely to wander off on its own and play with the capercaille in the shadows...hiding isn't really the idea....

 

Anyway, I've got two new books out now. One ( small spellbook of a booklet) is about Baba Yaga, that wonderful old witch who challenges, tricks, confronts and transforms just about anyone who survives the encounter (and if you don't, never mind, your long bones and skull will feature in the Yaga's garden fence!). The other book is gentler (perhaps). Waiting for the Snow is a new collection of recent poems of mine

 

From the cold stillness of a woodland in winter, to the wonder of bluebells, the perils of still water and the richness of orchards, Waiting for the Snow invites a different connection to the world around us.

Look outward, walk on the riverbank with open eyes and a willing heart. Turn inward and step carefully around the cracks in the pavement. There are mysteries here as well, watchful shadows lurking. Threatening, they still hold their own promise and the possibility of change.

Step out. Step away from the familiar and let Waiting draw you into a world of enchantments.

 

In Waiting you will find charms from birch trees and the wild frolics of the Birken Hoss. There are quiet reflections among bluebells and a dark, cold brooding menace that sits behind the Arctic nights. One of my personal favourites is Vigil that grew out of regular visits to the windswept, story-shrouded hilltop of Fin Cop here in the Peak District

 

BUYING COPIES (yes, please do!)

LINKS TO SALES ON EBAY:

Baba Yaga: tales of an old witch

 12 pages, 80cm x 150cm

Waiting for the Snow, 40 pages, A5 sized

If you would like a full set of recent books: Baba Yaga, Waiting... and Sacred Animals, message me directly and I'll send payment details and post the set to you directly

There is also a set of colourful postcards for sale if you want that extra touch of something tree-ish to send a friend or convince a foe that you're really a very nice (if rather leafy) Person....  

Hide a witch,

Inside a house,

Inside a wood,

Inside a beck,

Inside a bog,

Inside a crag,

Inside a world,

Inside a doll.

 

 

Walking down a street

 

WORD ON THE STREET

Resident? Visitor? Tourist, troubador or ghost, we’re looking for poems, snippets and short stories that celebrate ( or haunt, or disturb) Buxton’s Spring Gardens

Deadline: 31^st January 2023

Send as word doc to: creepingtoad@btinternet.com

Main project information on this blog, here

This post is to share images of Spring Gardens…..old photos a painting and generally though-provoking scenes…where we have dates, they’ll be dated

These images are here to intrigue, provoke, and hopefully inspire! If you live in Buxton, try standing in the same place as the photo and reflect on the changes you can see, feel, imagine....this is a rather random selection. We'll post more streamlined selections over the next few weeks

1820, view along Spring Gardens - Sheffield turnpike road	Grove Hotel and bottom of Terrace Road	Lawson's Vaults, No 2 Spring Gardens
Miller's Cafe, Spring Gardens, 1928	Milton's Head pub	corner of Spring Gardens and Terrace Road
looking towards the Crescent and the Slopes, including Winster Place and Royal Hotel	a parade in the rain	Shakespeare Hotel

Becoming Your Own Troll

Becoming Your Own Troll

The St Mark’s Flies hatched late in this hot spring. Usually they can be relied upon to be turn up on their saint’s day: a fluttering black follow-up to St George’s destructive tendencies, appearing on 24^th April with their blundering, drunken flight. While heat should encourage an early hatching, maybe it was also too dry. Certainly, sitting here on gritstone rocks looking own on the moss, I had missed the squelch it usually took to get here. The sense of an imminent wallow if I strayed into the boggy bits was gone and my wellies felt clumping and redundant. Sitting here now, a month later, at last, the flies were out with their bulging eyes (the males) and hairy legs, their feathered antennae (males again) and thick egg-bloated bodies (females), landing awkwardly and wearily on the pages of my notebook before dropping off the edge of a page and wandering away again.

Calluna

Sleeping under heather and heath.

Inviting grouse to nest in the rich thickets of her hair,

Once a year, eyes of cloud and sky open,

As she rises from dreaming

To dance with her cousins of the Tors.

 

 

A beetle takes off from the prow of that notebook, a straight-line, don’t stop me, buzzing flight leading my eyes down and over shades of sand and fawn and green and darker green, grass and rush and moss with the heather somewhere between grey and green and mauve with just the first few frecklings of flowers.

 

Tussock, the Marsh Boggart

Hidden in the Moss

A clump of rush,

Of sedge and grass and stone,

Pebble eyes opening when you have squelched past,

A rustle and whisper and a slight drip,

Rising from the mud and the mools,

To follow you, to pause, to hide, to sink again,

To follow again.

Sparking marshfire from fingertips,

A lamp to light your way,

Homewards maybe.

Or swampbound.

 

 

It is good here in the edge of the ridge soaking in the cloud light and gleams of sunshine

Sit here long enough, quiet enough, casual enough and you become the stone as well and the bird on the next rock sings and a vole forages in the shadow of my stone self.

 

There are lots of small birds, keeping low, in the heather, among these tumbled tor-stones, in the willow scrub but this warmth of cloudy sky is empty. A single raven flew across earlier but there are no buzzards soaring now, no stray seagulls, no swifts. A summer sky empty of swallows

 

Gritstone skin on a stoneface troll, folded down, here, with grass in the creases of her joints and something scrabbling holes in a nostril. The ravens come and talk, a crow flies by on lazy wings, a curlew calls. Ever so rarely, a hen harrier will rest on a head-rock watching the moss for movement

 

I had been reading a chapter about old Norse mythology and a proposal that the beings we meet now as different types of creatures: Aesir, Vanir, Giants and Trolls originally were not seen as separate species but were more like tribes of the same basic lifeform and that was why Giants and Aesir (the gods) could so easily marry and why exchanges between them all were often so evenly matched. The piece went further, however, suggesting that even less than separate tribes, to be described as a Troll, in particular wasn’t because you were in some way troll-monstrous (and you were always very far from some vindictive 21^st century digital grouch). To be a Troll was to be in a magical state, to be in a personal condition where you were either ready to, or were already, working enchantments. That quality of “trollness” could descend upon anyone and then they might be called entrolled and that possibly our “enthralled” comes from the same root where thrall was to be caught in that magical troll-state. It felt a bit tenuous, my memory probably changed the detail but I’m a storyteller, point me in a direction and let me go, or light my blue touchpaper and stand back….the thought of people becoming entrolled was enough…..

Stop.

Stop talking and listen,

Stop listening and watch.

Stop watching and feel.

Stone is good.

The curve of a rock face,

The fern in the fold,

The lichen on the edge,

The moss,

Detail.

Don’t think. Just look.

Don’t look, just feel.

Don’t feel, just be,

Touch it. Lean on it,

Lie down on it,

Be warmed by it,

Just be beside it until

Everything

Just

Stops.

 

I have been working on a project for Buxton Museum and Art Gallery. With funding the Arts Council England’s Emergency Fund, the Museum has commissioned work from a number of local artists*, inviting us to respond to both the current exhibition, Between Two Worlds, and to the current situation and offer ways in which the Museum could be a point around which the community turns, or be an agent standing as an organisation between two worlds, the world that was and the worlds that we might be becoming. My work is being turned into a series of story-poem films which we’ll start posting soon…but posts like this, my thinking, gathering, rambling posts, are appearing here…..

 

A wind blows round the edges of me,

Me, green as the grass,

Me, brown as the earth,

Bristling beech husks, that’s me

And the river runs through the hollow shape of me,

Here I stop.

Here I let go

Here I can be still.

Here I become my own troll.

* Wonderful people like

Martin Olsson

Sarah Males

Aidan Rhode

The Green Man Gallery

Caroline Chouler

and more....

Images: the scan is from one of my troll drawings...sorry it is so poor! Photos are from the landscapes around Buxton where I live

 

Some of my best friends are Trolls, and Boggarts, 

and  Beasties and Bits

Dreaming of lemmings

Dreaming of lemmings

challenge and change with Buxton Museum

In Buxton Museum and Art Gallery throughout these distanced months there has been a fascinating exhibition. Built from material from the slowly dismantling “Derbyshire Schools Library Service” collection, “Between Two Worlds” holds a wonderful array of material from beautiful prints to dresses to Inuit carvings from cold northern lands. Everything here holds stories. There are the graceful evocative prints of Clifford Webb and then there is a small, sliver of elegance, carved on a cold night or maybe in one those endless summer days of an Inuit shaman changing into a bird. And, no, we haven’t been able to go and visit the Museum for months but gradually we’re heading for a reopening and meanwhile you could visit the Museum Blog and Youtube channel, read an article or try an activity

 

More telling than the pieces, are the terms used to curate the collection – not terms chosen by the museum, but words originally used to describe the people involved

 

“As you are, in fact, abnormal, I think it would be a good idea if you took up art” said Kyffin Williams’ Doctor. Williams had epilepsy. Williams’ work is stunning - striking landscape painting (go on, look him up)

 

The Museum, however, presents this work not as examples of the work of degenerates, the disabled, the displaced, Old Uncle Tom Cobbley And All (see below) but as statements of power, of creative strength and honesty, ways of telling the stories of people and cultures that stood, or still stand between at points of change where past and future offer possibilities, threats, challenges, cultures standing between two worlds. Working with an Arts Council England Emergency Response Fund grant, the Museum has also invited a whole bundle of local artists to respond to a challenge from the Museum

 

“We want people to say “Do you remember in 2020? We learnt to do this from the museum website; the museum made us smile; they helped our business to win through… it was brilliant… the museum an influential supporter, a change maker”. “ Brief to artists, Buxton Museum and Art Gallery

 

I’m a storyteller and poet and a creator of events…for me the museum’s challenge is resolving into a fusion between the Between Two Worlds exhibition and the stories it holds and the world we have found ourselves living in now….this is by way of a starting point post/ Other artists have gone down different paths. We didn't have to use this exhibition but for me...there were carved bones, how could I not?

 

I like looking at things.

I like feeling into unexpected connections.  

I like carvings, things to hold, to handle, to speculate over…

For me, the museum is helping me ask questions of myself and of the people around me: might not make us smile but might help us ask challenging questions about ourselves and the opportunities that might comes out this disturbed summer

 

Displaced, we are,

Disabled ,they labelled us.

Imprisoned, depressed, degenerate

All of that, that’s us!

Tolerated sometimes.

Persecuted at others.

Revived by the strength of our hearts.

Challenged, that’s us too.

Challenging: insiders, outsiders

Strangers or friends,

We remember who we are.

 

We all need to remember who we are, not a superficial O, this is me, but where our inspiration and our identity lies. I feel it is important that we use these strange weeks to stand between these worlds of before and during looking ahead to an after, consciously, awake and questioning:  to look at who we have been in these months, who we could be, should be, haven't been, might yet be.... 

All of which for me strikes a chord with a wonderful Tibetan rap that is about personal, communal and national identity and is about change and determination and also joy. So, please, drop in on Shapaley singing “Made in Tibet”

 

“we haven’t forgotten where we came from” Shapaley

 

And after all that, sitting in a box among the Inuit work is a wonderful carving of a lemming. It’s a bit damaged so it’s not on display, but for me lemmings are a delight and a reminder of the value of the overlooked, the despised. Lunch. A small animal who has been the subject of a horrible human-made story for 70 years. No, they don’t throw themselves off cliffs, unless some film director chases them

 

LEMMINGS

 

Grey owl with golden eyes

Listens,

For running feet,

Under the snow.

Hungry wolverine follows,

A scent trail under the snow.

Lynx and bobcat,

Hawk, fox and wolf,

All follow the whisper of hurried feet,

Under the snow.

 

Packed lunch.

Two-finger mitten,

Thumb glove,

Toe shoe,

A small slipper,

A hand full,

A cup full,

A whole family nests in an old hat,

A lemming casts a shadow

As round as itself.

The small one,

The quiet one,

Everyone’s lunch

Who holds the world together.

looking for summer lemmings

Pictures

• Clifford Webb prints: c. Buxton Museum and Art Gallery
• Brown Bear in Finland: c Adam Nardell
• carvings: G MacLellan

 

Springful of toads

A springful of toads

Still pool mirrors sunlight,

Catches clouds, conceals passions,

Toads in mud and hearts.

In June Last year, Creeping Toad started a new project called Toadwords. It has hibernated with its namesakes over the last few months so as we all wake up into spring (I do hope, however, you’re not all sitting in ponds, spawning), I thought I would give it a shake and see if we can’t find a few more poems. There have already been soem wodnerful pieces of writing. If you "search" this blog for "Telling Toads" that should call up thee alrier entries - or that link might have worked as well

So, a challenge: we have just passed National Haiku Day (UK, yesterday). So why not get out there and enjoy some sunshine and write an amphibian Haiku? If you can’t see any of our damp friends, look at the places they love: your overgrown garden, your compost heap, or the places of peril and dread, places that are dessicating deserts for a delicate skin….

Conventionally, Haiku have 3 lines of counted syllables: 5, 7, 5. (traditional Japanese) or 10 - 14 syllables overall (English). But I was advised (by a Zen Buddhist monk) not to be trapped by structure and think of 3 lines that contain 2 observations, a pause and a reflection….take what you will and have a go!

Email them through, please! toadwords@btinternet.com

 Or just feel amphibian and be inspired!

Walking a long road

Toadman.

Todman.

Toad Whisperer.

Frayed boots on a hard road,

Fingerless gloves and a long coat,

Black hat shades darker eyes.

A measured step, 

An ageless amphibian patience,

And a bag of toadbones in his pocket,

The Toadman will tell

The secrets you hid,

The treasure you lost,

The love you hunger for.

He’ll tell, he’ll always tell,

Your tale to the toads.

But bribe him well,

Pay him with coin,

With food,

With favours,

Never to let the frogs know.

The original project outline is here, but below is part of it…

In this, the Froglife Year of the Toad, here at Creeping Toad, I am inviting people to add their own creative ideas to a collection of Toad (and frog and tree frog,) stories and poems.  Initially, we will aim to encourage people to share these beyond the blog where they will appear, to read them aloud, to tell stories, declaim poems by ponds and generally celebrate Toads and their cousins.

Amphibians are in danger. Of all the vertebrate groups, amphibians seem to be in the most perilous of situations as populations across the world dwindle before pollution and habitat loss and the ravages of infections they have no defence against. Froglife is a UK based charity that sets out to promote amphibian conservation through active habitat management and wider education. While, Froglife is UK-based, the issues facing amphibians are global and I hope that by sharing our stories and poems we might add a little more momentum to a wider awareness of the wonders of the amphibian worlds. The decision to launch a Year of the Toad campaign grew out of the research presented in a Froglife paper: http://www.froglife.org/2016/10/06/goodbye-mr-toad/ while the wonderful (and not always sad) book In Search of Lost Frogs by Robin Moore is a great way of connecting to the issues confronting individual species across the Earth. Robin’s book is reviewed on this blog, here