Our first visit to Yorkshire took place in 2010 and the destination we chose as a base was Wakefield, or to be slightly more specific, a village and suburb of Wakefield just to the south called Newmillerdam. We’d picked Wakefield in general because we’d decided we wanted to head up north and watch a game of rugby league in person, and we’d selected Newmillerdam because it looked attractive from the imagery we’d seen and it looked like there was a pretty straight route from it towards the city which would make walking to the rugby nice and easy. Which is a lovely theory if you ignore the scale on the map and don’t mind just how far away Newmillerdam really is from Belle Vue, but that’s a tale for another day.
The day before we’d driven to Yorkshire from our home in Hampshire and we’d stopped along the way to visit Coughton Court and Upton House National Trust properties before arriving at our hotel, the Best Western Hotel St Pierre. After breakfast and before taking the car into Wakefield for a look around we thought it would be a nice idea to take advantage of the crisp, clear weather and wander down to and take a walk around the nearby lake that formed part of the Newmillerdam Country Park, a local nature reserve. A pretty level path twisted and turned through the woodland along the water’s edge and ended up making for a great way to walk off the food and take in some spectacular sights across the mirror-like surface of the lake on this beautiful morning.
We weren’t alone on this walk in the nature reserve. We encountered numerous other people out for a stroll too – all very friendly and wishing us a good morning in that northern way that can sometimes be unsettlingly overfamiliar to southerners – and we started to spot wildlife too. Ducks we’d expected but happening upon a heron was a surprise to us. I think we startled it as much as it startled us because it soon took off and started flying low over the water up and down the length of the lake with occasional dives in attempts to locate its own breakfast. Photos were taken but with the sun behind it and the general speed of the bird it was difficult to get any sharp shots of the fishing action so I’ll spare you the blurry imagery.
Newmillerdam gets its name from New Mylle on Dam, the term used to describe the area from around 1285 when a corn mill was built on the lake. Prior to that it had been known as Thurstonhaugh, an old Norse name, and we spotted a nod to the heritage of this attractive suburb of Wakefield in the discovery of a wooden carving with Viking-like features. There were other artistic findings too on the walking route we took, such as wooden toadstools.
For the most part we were content to simply admire the views across the flat lake and I was keen to get around the southern tip of it on our anti-clockwise walk when the sun would start to be at our backs and it would make taking photographs a lot easier to do and with more chance of capturing some of the deep blue colours of the sky.
We spotted more herons and one of them could well have been the one we’d been surprised by earlier on the trek. With Newmillerdam Country Park being a local nature reserve it is home to a number of types of wildlife during the year. Originally, there were gameskeepers’ lodges around the lake to protect the animals from being poached as the area was managed for commercial purposes but these days it’s a public beauty spot. If you’re a keen birder then you can expect to see the Great Crested Grebe courting in the spring while if you’re more of a mammaler (yeah, I know that’s not a word) then grey squirrels inhabit the woods and the summer months bring the UK’s smallest and largest bats – the Pipistrelle and the Noctule, respectively – along with the Daubenton’s bat which can typically be seen flying low over the water, taking insects from the air.
Another surprise to us, though, and one we only just noticed because of the slightest of movements, was the appearance of terrapins on logs in the lake. I can honestly say we never expected to find terrapins in a Yorkshire lake. It’s likely that these were abandoned pets at some point and it’s equally likely that while it might be difficult for creatures like this to breed in cold climates generally that’s something that’s going to become less of an issue as the global temperature continues to rise.
We continued our walk and I continued to take pictures of the beautiful scenery, and we soon reached the site of the Boathouse which was probably the original location of the mill from which Newmillerdam gets its name prior to being moved around 1633. The Boathouse dates from the 1820s and was constructed merely as a place for entertaining, allowing men to shoot game from punts launched from the site with ladies later joining them for lunch.
Coots aren’t spectacularly rare but their feet do amuse me much to the irritation of my wife who thinks my laughter and pointing will give them complexes. What was unique for us about this walk in the country park, though, was coming across a coot on a nest in the lake with eggs in it. As I’ve mentioned before on this site in other travelogues, we aren’t the sort of people who go out of our way to look for exotic animals when we travel and when it comes to birds, whether in the UK or abroad, we’re okayish if it’s something that would have appeared in an illustration in a children’s book we’d read growing up but after that anything goes. All that said, I am fascinated when we happen upon wildlife no matter how commonplace and will always want to capture the moment and spot unusual or novel behaviour, or admire what evolution has wrought upon the surface of the planet; in that respect Newmillerdam nature reserve really excelled at fuelling that desire.
That more-or-less brought our circuit of the lake at Newmillerdam to an end but there was one more brief encounter with some local fauna when a duck decided to check out my wife before we headed back to the hotel. What was this behaviour about? No idea. We didn’t have food on us and my wife doesn’t resemble a giant breadcrumb so the fascination – and even standing on boots at one point – was odd and amusing in equal parts. Perhaps it was that Yorkshire friendliness again.
