Revisiting his childhood haunts during Covid inspired Mark Leah to develop his love of storytelling, art and photography, as Steve Brown discovers
A regular festive season question in quizzes asks what Christmas decorations the Royal Family never use.
The answer is tinsel but how many would also know that this is how the village of Tintwistle, at the very extremity of North West Derbyshire, is affectionately known to its inhabitants?
Located at the West end of Longdendale, “Tinsle” has been a home to and the constant background of the life of Mark Leah, now a Hadfield-based ranger for the National Trust in the Peak District, the author and illustrator of three books of children’s stories and an up and coming local photographer.
Mark grew up in the village, played with his friends in the village and the surrounding countryside, went to primary school there, has/had relatives there and now helps to look after and conserve the landscape in the nearby Peak District National Park. He is rooted in the place and is inspired to write about the places and people in his life in stories and with drawings from in and around “Tinsle”.
Back in the 1970s and 80s, before the age of the mobile phone and the internet, Mark and his childhood friends played out in the local fields and woods and, even at that early age, the bonds between him and the local area were being forged.
He recalls damming streams – and how he is now doing the same thing professionally on the Peak District uplands as part of the moorland restoration projects! The extended Leah family, including both sets of grandparents, were in the village to dispense wisdom and knowledge to the young Mark and he fondly remembers holidays in Wales with them as well as his first expeditions out into the Peak District when youth hostelling with the Boys Brigade.
He first became fascinated by drawings at primary school when one of the dinner ladies would produce images to colour in when the children’s dinner hours were interrupted by rain and they had to stay indoors to play.
After his time at the local primary school, Mark went to Hadfield Comprehensive school (now Glossopdale) and, while he continued to be quietly interested in drawing, making up stories and creating characters, he saw himself becoming a professional footballer as he progressed to have trials with local teams in the North West.
He also thought about getting into the world of animation and cartoons which were very popular on TV at that time. However, on leaving school he went to work in a factory making louvre blinds in nearby Hyde. During this time, he met and married his wife Lindsey, started a family and set up home in nearby Old Glossop.
As a young father in his early 20s, his priority was to look after his family and he worked hard, in and out of jobs, until by chance he found a leaflet in a local job centre about working for the National Trust in the Peak District.
While voluntary, the jobs offered the chance to train in countryside skills and because of this attracted a suitable job seekers’ allowance. Successful in his application, he went to work at Lane Head in the Upper Derwent Valley.
Mark has now worked for the National Trust in the Peak District for 29 years. After working and volunteering as an assistant warden, he joined the National Trust Estate Maintenance Team when a full-time vacancy arose and honed the countryside skills he’d already started to learn.
There was always plenty of work to do, including drystone walling, fencing, footpath maintenance, tree cutting and felling, gully blocking and sphagnum restoration. In the Peak District, different techniques and skills are needed in drystone walling work due to the presence of two very different underlying rocks, limestone and millstone grit.
Tree work required that Mark obtained his chainsaw licence. Mark looks back with pride on projects such as the flagging of eroded footpaths between Burnt Hill over Mill Hill; over Featherbed Moss to the Snake Pass summit; of the track over Brown Knoll and Colborne above Edale and the boggy route along Derwent Edge from Dovestones Tor over Back Tor to Lost Lad above the Upper Derwent Valley.
Mark sees this as a wonderful example of recycling as the slabs were hewn from moorland quarries to form the floors of mills in Victorian times and have now been returned to the hills.
Mark and the warden (ranger) teams were also heavily involved in the restoration of moorland in the care of the National Trust. This included gully blocking to slow water flow and retain the peat on the open moorland summits rather than it being washed off into streams and rivers.
It also involved the planting of water-absorbing sphagnum moss to replace that lost to atmospheric pollution from the industries in the towns and cities surrounding the Peak District; planting native trees in moorland cloughs to reduce downstream flood risk, stabilise the valley sides and improve the biodiversity of the high moorland by providing shelter in an otherwise open area; the stabilisation of the peat and restoration of the vegetation cover on hundreds of hectares of bare and eroded peat bog, preventing it from drying out and permitting it to lock in more carbon.
After 10 years working with the Estates Team throughout the High Peak, Mark joined the Ranger team based in the Kinder Scout/Edale area and has remained there ever since.
His love of drawing and story making had been on the back burner for many years but all that was about to change. In 2020, the Covid 19 pandemic struck and Mark, like many other workers, was put on furlough.
An initial estimate of three weeks eventually turned into seven months. Mark tried to keep to his routines as much as possible alongside those of Lindsey, who worked through the pandemic as a district nurse in Chapel-en-le-Frith. He went out for his daily exercise with his dog Willow and visited the local spots where he spent his childhood days.
Perhaps this stirred his fertile imagination along with the flow of endless conspiracy theories on social media. While walking along Arnfield Lane near “Tinsle” he saw a bee and began wondering why was it there? What did it think? Was it lost thanks to the waves of 4G/5G signals from a phone mast? Inspired and, as a treat for his granddaughters, Mark wrote two stories, one about Benniebee and the other, for balance, about Walliewasp which he put on social media. People liked them and, after a lot of research, the stories were published in a single volume called Tinsle Tales.
Spurred on – and again to delight his granddaughter, Scarlett – Mark then wrote and illustrated The Time-travelling Kurt McCloud about a wandering cloud which visits all the places and times where pandemics have occurred on the Earth.
His latest book is Peculiar Petulia, written about a venerable tree spirit who inhabits Swallows Wood – another place local to “Tinsle” and a part of Mark’s youth – and who battles against the relentless modern day threats to this woodland sanctuary.
Viewers of Mark’s social media are treated to many sketches of characters and scenes inspired by living for many years in and around “Tinsle”. Recently, four new short stories have appeared such as Gladys and Dot of Tinsle Top, Bert and Old Tom. Mark is also writing about a new character called Piccles, an African Grey Parrot who spends his time flying around terrorising the locals, but in a humorous way!
Mark’s presence on social media has also led to the world of amateur photography with local exhibitions in and around Glossop and Hadfield and individual prints in various places including some at the National Trust office where he and his fellow Kinder and Edale rangers are based.
He records aspects of his work such as familiar stiles which have been replaced after years of service by new gates as well as more conventional landscape photography. This, as well as his deft and characterful sketches, is all the more remarkable as he is colour-blind in the red/green spectrum.
Mark confesses he is not planning to give up his day job to pursue a life in the arts while he still loves what he does for a living. But that imagination, that desire to build up characters, to sketch and to tell stories will continue and I am sure that there will be more good things for his friends and readers to look forward to in the future.
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Photography & images by Mark Leah