My latest rucksack for city breaks, the Eurohike Ratio 18.
Trekking around Town
Category: Walking
Buttermere
A rainy morning’s walk on the shores of Buttermere is the perfect opportunity to try out our new Craghoppers’ AquaDry Waterproof Systems jackets. It’s a tough contest, as we’re just five miles from Seathwaite, in Borrowdale, the wettest inhabited place in England, which gets 11 feet of rain in a year. Most of it this morning.
High Stile looms out of the low cloud as we walk through Burtness Wood on the south-west shore of the lake. High Stile, at 807 m, 2,648 ft, is topped with Eagle Crag Sandstone, a sandstone derived from volcanic rock, from the Ordovician Period, 450 million years ago.
Ennerdale Granite
Sourmilk Gill cascades down the hillside at the lower end of the lake eroding into the medium-grained Ennerdale Granite.
Read more: Buttermere
Felspar crystals give the rock its fleshy pink colour. Shards of dark ‘country rock’ – a geological term for the surrounding rock – were incorporated into the molten intrusion of granite as it forced its way upwards. Some of these fragments appear to be partially melted and the top fragment has a lighter halo around it.
These fragments are called xenoliths, from the Greek meaning ‘strange stone’.
Crottle
Crottle, also known as the salted shield lichen, Parmelia saxatilis, is a green-grey lichen here growing amongst mosses on bark.
If you look closely you’ll see a network of white veins on its upper surface. Crottle was used to produce a reddish brown dye, used in Harris Tweed.
Snockrigg
From the furthest slope in this photograph we’re looking north across the lake towards:
- High Snockrigg
- Low Snockrigg
- High Bank
- and Pike Rigg along the shore of the lake
Snoc is ‘a projecting piece of land’. Rigg means ‘ridge’.
Polypody Fern
Growing amongst polytrichum ‘haircup’ mosses, a polypody fern.
Common Polypody Fern, Polypodium vulgare, doesn’t have glossy fronds . . . except when its raining.
And talking about rain, I’m afraid that the Craghoppers’ Aquadry jackets didn’t live up to their name. Discussing it with a local we feel that the Lake District rain managed to get in via the seams, so an additional improvement might be – in addition of the dual layer waterproof membrane of the AquaDry system – to tape the seams.
Our jackets have always stood up to the worst that Yorkshire can throw at them but Lakeland rain is something above and beyond that.
But we did finish our walk at the perfect place for drying out . . .
Sykes Farm
Wherever you go in the Lake District there’s an opportunity to see the local rocks in the walls. I’m guessing that the opaque white mineral under the tea room sign is fluorite.
Herdwick Wool
Yesterday we caught the opening day of Ian Lawson’s exhibition ‘Native Spirit, The Herdwick’ at the Rheged Gallery which, alongside the stunning photographs, included these samples of Herdwick wool, dyed in colours that you can see all around you in the Lake District landscape.
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The Walking Season
It’s a lovely time to get out walking in West Yorkshire and my friend Heather, now living in exile in Staffordshire (which she tells me is also brilliant for walking) has ordered a couple of my walks books for a friend of hers who lives on the fringe of Pontefract’s liquorice country, as featured in my full colour booklet, All Sorts of Walks in Liquorice Country.
I want the one with the walk from the Chantry Bridge to Featherstone. I think it a splendid walk, and the book will make a lovely present for my friend.
Heather
The Robin Hood booklet, also in full colour, also includes walks around Pontefract and in Brockadale, Wentbridge, where Sayles, a rocky outcrop overlooking the old Great North Road, features in the earliest surviving Robin Hood ballad.
I’m posting these booklets to her friend with a bookmark with a message from Heather and an artist’s impression of Heather on a recent trek she made up a hill.
Addingford
A walk through Addingford, Horbury, alongside the River Calder this morning.
Halfpenny Lane
John, who was doing well this morning after a not-so-good weekend, has a view of a grassy bank with cherry trees from his room on the sunny side of the Prince of Wales Hospice, Halfpenny Lane, Pontefract.
My All Sorts of Walks in Liquorice Country features a walk along Halfpenny Lane and my Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire also has a Pontefract connection. Now available on the Prince of Wales Hospice bookshelf!
Five weeks ago this morning, while I drew Canada geese, John and Barbara walked around Newmillerdam Lake, a circuit of about two miles. Four weeks ago he wasn’t feeling so good and they walked by the duck pond in Thornes Park. This morning walking to the other side of the room and back was quite an achievement.
Sitlington Parish Map
I feel that I know my home patch pretty well but when I drew this parish map for Sitlington I realised that there were one or two paths that I’d never set foot on.
I drew this in 1995, working with Wakefield Council’s footpath department and the Parish Council.
Keep Fit!
Twelfth night has just gone but the WI won’t be ready to replace our Night Before Christmas display in the Redbox telephone box gallery until February so we’re doing a bit of set dressing. We’re keeping the fireplace but out go the paper chains and the tinsel from fitter Redbox display to make way for leaner, fitter display for the new year.
The Countryside Unlocked
Fifty or sixty years later, our local patch of countryside down by the river and canal in the Calder Valley near Wakefield isn’t the place where, as a boy, I could wander at will with my friends. There were no public footpath signs in those days, so the presumption was that we were free to explore any well-worn path.
As an art student, I shot a short and suitably arthouse Standard 8 film on location in the valley, including a scene in which my brother and his friends, who were roped in as the cast, run along the top of the derelict colliery railway embankment that straddles the floodplain between the river and canal.
A few years later, as I started trying to make a living as a natural history illustrator, I painted a detailed acrylic of a bramble bush drawn on the embankment, which was then greening up enough to attract local wildlife, including a rabbit and a song thrush that I included, life size, in the composition. I exhibited, and immediately sold, the painting at the Ruskin School in Oxford, and the painting was featured on the cover of The Artist magazine, so the old mineral railway provided me with inspiration, some welcome publicity and a much-needed financial lifeline in my attempts to keep my head above water as a freelance illustrator.
So do I think that it’s a shame that I can’t now walk along what is now could be a short railway walk nature trail? Not necessarily: as it’s now out of bounds behind a high and spiky security fence, it acts as a pocket-sized conservation area where birds can nest with minimum disturbance.
In so many ways, my local patch has improved since my childhood. It’s hard to look over this view from The Balk, Netherton, and remember that in the 1970s the recently mown field, below the sandstone ridge of Hartley Bank Wood, was an opencast mine with just the pylon left in place, standing on a pillar.
You wouldn’t now guess that the spoil heaps of Hartley Bank Colliery extended over most of this southern side of the valley. Now restored to farmland, the naturalist in me still kind of wishes that the barren slopes of red shale and muddy gulleys between could have been left to natural regeneration. I suspect that fifty years later, we would now have wall-to-wall birch, ash, sycamore and oak woodland, rather than the patchwork of heath, wetland and meadow that it might have become in my imagination.
At the old lock-keeper’s cottage, the Rottweiller is really as intelligent as those graffitied reading glasses suggest but although he’s better looking than in his security guard mugshot, he doesn’t sport a handlebar moustache.
High Summer
It’s a perfect midsummer’s day for our walk from Wetherby alongside the River Wharfe, past Flint Mill Grange to Thorp Arch but we appreciate the shade of the Sustrans route along the old railway on the return leg.
Each bird has its favoured habitat. The song post for the yellowhammer in open farmland is on a phone line in contrast the blackcap makes a call that sounds like pebbles clacking together from the foliage of a tree in a deep, shady railway cutting. The warbler (willow?) prospects elegantly in the shrubs of a burgeoning hedgerow while the red kite swoops through parkland as we reach Thorp Arch.
Shortest Day
Monday morning on the shortest day of the year but it’s so overcast today that we don’t stand a chance of seeing the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter this evening. Even so, on our regular walk around Illingworth Park, Ossett, this morning it didn’t look quite this grim: I’ve reduced the saturation of the colours when editing the iPhone footage in Adobe Premier Pro.