The County Tops project exists so I can find excuses to get about the country, and this won’t be my last trip to South Wales by any means. These lumps of rock and grass will get me back again: these slopes eventually culminate in Pen y Fan (its summit obscured by mist in this shot), highest of the Brecon Beacons and the highest point anywhere in the country south of Snowdonia. I was just driving past today, though — it can wait.
Sometimes you just stumble across places. This old, ruined mine sits above Blaenavon in the south Wales valleys; I found it while bagging my latest County Top. I would argue it was not only the most interesting but also the most attractive thing about the day. There have been points of time in the past where something like a quarter of the iron and steel production of the entire world was based around south Wales. Believable as that stat is, this is what’s left.
Today marks the end of the 12th full year that I have been doing this blog. In that time I have engaged in plenty of travelling, though there’s been less of that in recent years, for various reasons. But the attractions of my local area are still just about enough to sustain the interest. For now, I’m carrying on…. year 13 starts tomorrow.
Took a different road home, at least between Edinburgh and Carlisle, and was rewarded with many magnificent landscapes, particularly with the mix of sun and cloud that characterised the day. Not that there were always places to stop the car and take advantage. Had I been able to stop on the Forth Bridge, I might have been able to capture the photo of the year (OK, I know it’s early in the year): sun rising behind the other two bridges, wreathed in mist etc. But this one will do, taken from the point at which the A701 starts its drop down into Annandale and the town of Moffat.
In this case the “White House” is a pub, up on the A58 road above Littleborough. Normally my journey to and from work would not take me near this place but thanks to the long and sorry litany of reasons why no one responsible for the UK train network was in the slightest bit bothered about running a service this morning, I ended up driving. Passing this point at 6am, all was still dark, but at least when I returned later, the sun had come out for a while. The hill on the horizon is Brown Wardle, at about 401m or 1,315 feet above sea level.
The title of this post is not ironic: despite appearances, this place really is called Skiddaw Forest. I don’t know if other parts of the world use the word or its equivalent to describe places that are as vastly treeless as this is, but we English do pride ourselves on our sense of wry humour, do we not. (For more pictures of this and nearby places, see my Lake District walking blog.)
Until the 1500s St Helena was covered in forest. Then humanity arrived, and even if people didn’t cut down the trees themselves, they released goats onto the island, which munched away at any new shoots for the subsequent half-millennium. Although some recovery has been made recently, in places, a lot of the lower parts of the island look like this as a result. It’s attractive, in its way, but it’s also dead land. Only about 21% of the island is cultivated with another 11% afforested. 54% is classed as ‘barren’. Two years ago today I was in Java, another steep volcanic island; but one festooned with terraces, every inch used to support the population. The contrast is notable.
With no disrespect to the people who are sharing this life with me (Clare, Joe), things have a drabness to them at the moment: all the diary contains are work events, there is nothing communal beyond some football matches (and even they are visited alone), no parties, no gigs. This is what the world has become now the Great Fear has been used as an excuse to kick us all into a digital semi-prison. If things are different where you are, then embrace that. At least from my house the view is quite good, particularly when the afternoon sunlight catches the hills in the distance.
I see little prospect of my leaving the UK for the rest of 2020, to be honest. But luckily, this is a diverse and beautiful island, and there are plenty of bits of it that I have not seen yet. Up until today, that included the Hope Valley, which heads into the Pennines west of Sheffield, and can be reached on a train from there or Manchester. I rectified this omission today, and had a grief-free and pleasant day out there, and a dry one, despite the showers which seemed to be affecting everywhere else in the north today. I hope the couple pictured here enjoyed it too.
Left New Zealand today and was mildly grumpy about it. Wanted more time in that beautiful country, where the climate is more agreeable and the beer better than in Australia (well, it is). Wasn’t particularly motivated about going back there to go to work tomorrow morning, wasn’t bothered about spending yet another few hours in a plane and then coming out into some little town stuck out in corn-chewing country.
And then as we flew in – bloody hell. What a glorious evening. What a brilliant view. Happy to be back.
Being 42 