From Gable’s South Traverse to the Breaker’s Yard

Posted on January 19, 2012 by

THIS image of Napes Needle was taken in the late 1970s on a Zenit E camera using Kodachrome 64 slide film. The image was then transferred to print by Maurice Roberts, of Barrow, framed and hung on a wall for many years in order to attain a faded effect. It was then thrust in a cardboard box to spend several years in an attic before being tracked down this week and scanned into my computer to purposely blur the faded effect and give it an air of age and respectability. The original slide is, believe me, quite stunning, but it’s in a drawer with about 3,000 others and there it will remain for the foreseeable future

IT’S 7.45am on Friday morning and I’m standing on the flight deck of HMS Invincible, watching the sun rise over a scarlet Morecambe Bay. I shouldn’t be up here; I should be down in the aircraft carrier’s aft engine room banding cables with a gang of itinerant Glaswegian and Geordie electricians. But it’s such a beautiful dawn that I feel drawn to it like a moth to a lamp. So I stand motionless, cold but thrilled, as seagulls wheel between shipyard cranes and the sky turns gold above 1970s Barrow . . . Continue reading →

Posted in Camping, Climbing, Hiking, HMS Invincible, Mountains, Napes Needle, Walking, Willie Horne | Tagged , , | 14 Comments

The Circles that You Find . . .

Posted on January 3, 2012 by

UP a Land Rover track streaming with water I slosh, to a line of shooting butts on a Pennine moor; then a hundred and sixty paces east through blackened heather to a patch of grass in the middle of nowhere; and now kneeling down as cold rain falls barely noticed, I peel back turf from a grey slab that shines briefly as the sun finds cracks between clouds. And here it is, naked, glistening and strangely unsettling – the elusive carved stone of Barningham Moor, festooned with rock art dating back to the Bronze Age . . . Continue reading →

Posted in Archaeology, Bronze Age, Cup and ring carvings, Environment, Geology, History, Industrial archaeology, Mountains, Stone Circles, Walking | Tagged , , , | 24 Comments

Still Walking in Circles

Posted on December 26, 2011 by

I’M beginning to learn lessons – though it’s a slow process. So far on Barningham Moor, in my quest to locate the Bronze Age carved stones, one disaster has followed another. Today turns out to be no different . . . Continue reading →

Posted in Archaeology, Bronze Age, Cup and ring carvings, Environment, Hiking, History, Mountains, Stone Circles, Walking | Tagged | 18 Comments

Bronzed Off . . .

Posted on December 5, 2011 by

THEY’RE having a laugh, those Bronze Age folk. They’re playing games with me. According to all the books I’ve read, they should have faded into pre-history about 3,000 years ago when their culture was overwhelmed by new people, ideas and products. But they still haunt the high places. They’re up here on the moors, as real as the rocks and the wind in the heather.

I mentioned in my last post that I could feel their presence in the shadows of The Stang forest and hear them sniffing and coughing. Well I’ve just heard one snigger behind a clump of spiky bog grass. And here’s me standing in the wind with my thermal jacket turned inside out and no boots. Why? It’s a long story. Bear with me. Continue reading →

Posted in Archaeology, Bronze Age, Cup and ring carvings, Environment, Hiking, History, Mountains, Stone Circles, Walking | Tagged | 8 Comments

In the Bronze Age on Barningham Moor

Posted on November 24, 2011 by

TIME is perplexing stuff. I’m sitting in my car at the side of a Roman road, waiting for my wife to reappear from the house of a clock-mender. Hanging above his hedge is a white sign shaped like a clock on which is written “Roman Road Clocks”. Lorries rumble by to Catterick, a place older than recorded history and enshrined in the war poetry of the Celts. Once the braying of mules, the chafing of shields and the marching of foreign feet were the dominant sounds. Now it’s traffic. Continue reading →

Posted in Archaeology, Bronze Age, Cup and ring carvings, Environment, Hiking, History, Life, Mountains, Walking | Tagged | 14 Comments

Madeira: The Royal Road to Ruin (Pico Grande . . . nearly)

Posted on November 16, 2011 by

Pico Grande, Madeira

THIS is a tale of bewilderment and defeat in a strange and hostile environment. It started out like any other day in the mountains – one man with a cheery whistle and a bag of food. Then things deteriorated . . . Continue reading →

Posted in Allotments, Climbing, Environment, Hiking, History, Mountains, Walking | Tagged | 12 Comments

Madeira: The High and Mighty (Pico do Arieiro to Pico Ruivo)

Posted on November 8, 2011 by

The view from Pico do Arieiro, with Pico Ruivo to the right and Pico das Torres in the centre of the picture

WHO has not sat down on a rock at the end of the day, wiped the sweat and streaky suntan lotion from their brow with the back of a hand, and gazed out across a hazy ridge of noble mountains and whispered to no one in particular: “That truly was the most memorable of days”? Continue reading →

Posted in Climbing, Environment, Geology, Hiking, History, Mountains, Walking | Tagged | 12 Comments

Madeira: So Let Me Get Right to the Point . . .

Posted on November 1, 2011 by

The cliffs of the Ponta São Lourenço, Madeira

THE sea is scary because it’s deep and stretches for ever. No one has been to the bottom and returned alive. No one knows just what exactly is lurking down there. The sea sinks ships, crashes against the land and eats it away, then when the sun comes out we spread towels on the beach and sit by it. But today there are no beaches – just cliffs plunging straight into the foaming Atlantic and a crazy path skirting along the crest like a rollercoaster that’s taking us into the east . . . Continue reading →

Posted in Cookery, Environment, Food, Geology, Hiking, Mountains, Walking | Tagged , | 14 Comments

Madeira: Walking with Water

Posted on October 26, 2011 by

The high peaks of Madeira from the Levada de Serra

DRIVING through pre-dawn Madeira is like driving through pre-dawn Spain. The roads are quiet; the villages are dark; but in every main street there is a bar where men gather to drink coffee in pools of yellow light before the day’s work begins. I hear their laughter as I pass and catch glimpses of them in their ubiquitous stripy T-shirts. And the aroma of coffee drifts through the car window as I head towards the mountains . . . Continue reading →

Posted in Climbing, Environment, Hiking, History, Industrial archaeology, Levadas, Mountains, Walking | Tagged | 8 Comments

Madeira: Stairways to Heaven

Posted on October 21, 2011 by

GOD, the recurring dream. The path disappearing over the edge of a cliff; the waves crashing against rocks; the circus clown training a seal on a strip of sand no bigger than a karimat; and I can’t move because I’ve lost my bush-hat. Over and over again. The same events . . . Continue reading →

Posted in Camping, Climbing, Environment, Geology, Hiking, History, Mountains, Walking | Tagged , | 14 Comments

Voyage of a Dawn Treader (Buachaille Etive Beag)

Posted on October 17, 2011 by

THERE is something hauntingly primeval in watching the sun rise through a cold mist. And somehow a lonesome lorry roaring over the pass of Glencoe adds to the starkness . . . Continue reading →

Posted in Camping, Climbing, Environment, Glencoe, Hiking, Mountains, Walking | Tagged , , | 16 Comments

Kentmere – In the Footsteps of the Forgotten

Posted on September 29, 2011 by

HUDDLING inside the ruin of a quarrymen’s shelter high on Kentmere Pike as mist creeps in from the north-west bringing that prickly mizzle that soaks everything – it’s not a good day. I glance at the slate slabs in the wall in a vaguely-interested sort of way and suddenly think: someone’s son built that.

Someone’s father blasted the slate from the quarry; someone’s brother knocked it into manageable lumps with a tully and wedges; someone’s uncle split the lumps into slates with a riving hammer; someone’s nephew dressed them ready to be nailed on a roof; and at the end of the day, after they’d sent their produce down the fell on a packhorse, they gathered the waste and built this shelter. That would be about 150 years ago. It might have been further into the past; it might have been more recently. But they built it. And for the rest of their working lives they sat inside it to take their bait or shelter from the winter blizzards . . . Continue reading →

Posted in Climbing, Environment, Geology, Hiking, History, Industrial archaeology, Life, Mountains, Quarrying, Slate quarries, Walking | Tagged , , | 13 Comments