it’s taken Clare and I over a year to get round about four-fifths of the Calderdale Way’s 50 miles, after today. Still a couple of legs to go yet. Today introduced us to the side valley of Shibden Dale, a beautiful spot and, somewhere previously unknown (except as a brief glimpse now and again from the train, as the line crosses the dale not long after leaving Halifax) despite having lived here 21 years now. The cow looked happy to be there too.
Having done Craig Airie Fell the day before, today I continued walking and bagged two more County Tops. This cairn marked the second one of the day, Kirriereoch Hill, high point of Ayrshire. Apparently its name translates as ‘Hill of the Brindled Quarter’, which to me is no translation at all. When I came up over the final slope and saw the cairn sitting next to the vast granitic lump of Ailsa Craig out there in the Irish Sea, the photo was immediately assured. A mild shame about the wind turbine poking up to the right but one can’t have everything.
After coming up the M6 yesterday, we turned left as soon as we hit Scotland, and headed for Galloway, the south-west corner of that country. There were various motivations for doing this, but getting some walking in was certainly one of them. This is the view from 1,050 feet above sea level, on top of Craig Airie Fell — not a substantial eminence in its own right, but it has a great panorama of the surrounding area, as a proper County Top should. Read all about it on the other blog, if interested.
“Please. You’ve gotta get me out of here. I didn’t ask to make my life here, a day’s journey from the nearest grooming salon.”
I might think the same if, like this critter, I was living at Scalderskew in the Lake District — I do not know of a more isolated dwelling in the country. If you’re interested, the most prominent peak in the background is Seatallan.
This trip down to London also offered the chance to pick up a County Top (see the other blog); specifically Bushey Heath, the highest point in the historic county of Middlesex, swallowed up by London in 1965 although at least it still retains a county cricket team. It wasn’t major mountaineering, though. Clare here strolls through the woods near Bentley Priory (an ecclesiastical relic? no, a premium housing estate) in one of those shots that chews up the bandwidth thanks to all the foliage.
The hoped-for walk duly happened — leg 6 of the Calderdale Way was completed, with Clare, over four months after the last one. But we are getting round, and somewhere just before this shot was taken (from Norwood Green, a village on the outskirts of Halifax) we turned generally to the west and started heading back home. There are a couple more days’ walking to do before it’s finished, at some not-yet-determined future date.
This post harks back to Tuesday — not that I needed the ice axe and microspikes on that glorious day, in fact it was laughable overpacking, which in some perverse way may explain why they’ve not yet been put away. I’d rather have been walking today too, but the house, and the marking load, was my prison.
Base Brown lies in the upper reaches of Borrowdale, in the Lake District. I realised today that this place constitutes my third longest-lasting love affair: we’ve been going at it regularly since 2009 and I’m certainly not getting tired of the place.
(Seeing as I mentioned it.. Clare [1996] comes in second and, as I can still be moved to care now and again, Brighton & Hove Albion [1976] being the leader.)
Anybody who thought I might spend a second consecutive day of bright winter sunshine ‘working from home’ obviously doesn’t know me very well. I guess the same applies to these three guys, though they enjoy here a form of sporting entertainment that’s not for me.
This is taken on the west coast of the Wirral peninsula. The river is the Dee, and the land in the background is Wales. Visible on the horizon is Moel Famau, where I spent a rather good day last June, doing the same thing as I did today — bagging a County Top walk. I guess this counts as a photo where one can definitely see the territory of two different countries, as long as you non-Britons accept that England and Wales are different places (which they are, in many ways).
As the country spirals back down into a stupid, paranoid and self-deluding feeling of ‘safety’, I’ve given up trying to talk to anyone about this so will just carry on doing my thing, including all activities which are health-giving and beneficial. The Lake District seems a fine setting for just that sort of thing. This is the National Park’s 150th appearance on this blog; an average of over once a month, which emphasises its value. ‘Work from home’? Bollocks to it. That will kill us all, faster than anything else.
Being 42 