I LIKE Swindale because it’s not an easy place to find. It’s an even harder place to visit because parking’s not allowed in the valley. Outsiders are obliged to leave their cars on the common at the entrance because the road is so desperately narrow. I don’t like using the word “remote” because it is so often abused. St Kilda is remote. Terra del Fuego is remote. But if you want remote in a Lakeland context, then Swindale is as close as it gets . . . Continue reading
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I HAVE a plan. Tomorrow is my day off because I worked Sunday. I’ll drive across the icy Pennines to the Lake District, abandon the car on a rough piece of land at a charming cross-roads above Dockray, climb Birkett … Continue reading
The Parallel Roads in Glen Roy
GLEN Roy is the place that thwarted Darwin. That’s Charles Darwin – the man who turned conventional knowledge on its head with his revelation that our ancestors emerged from the sea, not the Garden of Eden. Glen Roy is a snapshot in the evolution of the world; it is the original puzzle for lateral thinkers; and it’s the perfect place to spend a wet day in Scotland. That’s why I’m here. Dark clouds have swallowed the Nevis range and Grey Corries. I’m in Glen Roy – walking on sunshine . . . Continue reading
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 where attained 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. 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
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
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
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
