Wednesday 23rd March 2022, 4.55pm (day 3,863)

Spring definitely sprung in Hebden Bridge today. Everyone and everything seems to be stretching out to enjoy the sunshine.

Spring definitely sprung in Hebden Bridge today. Everyone and everything seems to be stretching out to enjoy the sunshine.

After 11 days of 11 different places I had no need to, nor intention to, leave the house today. What you see here is what was outside our front door, with the little dollop of variety and ‘free stuff’ to sustain the interest — at least a little.

A brief stopover on the way home from Newton Stewart. If I was filming a classic 1970s British horror movie in the Dumfries and Galloway region, and I wanted an abandoned church as a location, I’d come and use Anwoth’s, just as did the makers of The Wicker Man. (See this page.)
11 different locations in 11 days — Manchester, Burnley, Brighouse, Mytholmroyd, Leeds, Hebden Bridge, Huddersfield, Carlisle, Polbae, Glen Trool and Anwoth. That’s the second time there’s been such a long run of variation in place.

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.

Southwaite services on the M6, just south of Carlisle. This huge crow, possibly a raven, with a beak to strike terror into any smaller and inferior creature, was definitely in charge: principally of waste disposal, but, I suspect, of various other aspects of the operation too.

Driving along roads not taken before, on the lookout for photo opportunities: this was a good one. Huddersfield is apparently Britain’s largest town (as opposed to city), and it looks pretty sizeable from up here.

Eight and a half hours’ work today — almost all spent in online meetings. Even in the depths of lockdown I did not do such a day. These objects marked the limits of my real world. (Yes, that’s a sticker of Graham Chapman’s face stuck to the Macbook.)

Salt stores were once kept in order to preserve food: a matter of life and death, hundreds of years ago. Nowadays we use them to grit the roads — and not even that much, in this relatively mild winter. But I guess this monumental pile of sodium chloride will last until next year, if needed then.