Outdoor Discoveries

A curtailed Easter escape

At the end of January 2017, an idea came to mind. Preceding years had seen holidays being little more than elongated weekends and I fancied a little longer. Also, the idea of feeling ensconced in Edinburgh for a longer period of time appealed to me. Both thoughts came together to get me thinking of stretching the forthcoming Easter weekend by taking the preceding Thursday and the trailing Tuesday to make for a six-day trip to Scotland’s capital city.

The days were booked off from work and bookings made. An early train ticket purchase got me a great deal using advance purchase tickets, which was just as well given the cost of the hotel booking. At this stage in the year, the chance of a springtime sabbatical was a tenuous prospect though it had been discussed with my manager. The longer time off, unpaid as it was, required approval from more senior management and that took until March. That lack of notice meant that grander plans could not be made, which, in retrospect probably was just as well.

Circumstances

Though what I really needed was quiet time at home, I could not help myself and spent a pleasant weekend on the Isle of Man at the start of April, just before the Easter weekend. In hindsight, returning from there on Monday and departing again for Scotland on Thursday within the same week probably was asking too much and an Irish matter was to prove that. It threw me into indecision and pulled someone else through the proverbial emotional wringer as well. All was sorted in the end and there have been no lasting consequences, but such things did not half the weight on my mind at the time.

The result was that my Thursday departure was aborted, my non-refundable advance purchase ticket forfeited and my hotel booking cancelled. Though there was some money lost, there also was more money gained. A quandary descended on me at the same time and I ended up booking a journey to Edinburgh with National Express for the forthcoming Saturday morning as well as rebooking the hotel for fewer nights. Such an act still left me unconvinced but I went through with it.

Though there might have been an element of resolution regarding the piece of Irish business, there was a raw emotion evident during my journey north. The longer journey time was spent reading Mary Beard’s SPQR and taking a phone call from my brother. Some hot nourishment was enjoyed at Tebay motorway services as well.

When I reached Edinburgh, it was not as bright a day as the one that I had left in England. Occasional rain showers were a threat. Before I made for my lodgings, I pottered around St. Andrew’s Square and Princes Street Gardens. After settling into my room, I attended an Easter event in the heart of Edinburgh before retiring for the night.

A Wet Day around Glen Sax

Easter Sunday came wet in spite of suggestions of rain clearing away in any weather forecast. Even sitting out the morning in the hotel was to no avail. At other times, a day indoors might have sufficed but I felt other needs and braved the damp weather.

There were phone calls and text messages regarding a neighbour having passed away, and useful conversations were had on the bus to Peebles. Once there, a little wait by the Tweed seemed to be rewarded by a partial clearance of rain so I set off along a drove that I had not trodden for a good while. Grey skies lay all around and there was none of the pleasing light witnessed on the first Monday of June 2002 or what was to be savoured on a hot sunny day in June 2006. Nevertheless, I continued and others were out walking so it was not just any aberrant activity on my part.

If there were ever any ambitions to complete a round of the Glen Sax hills, poor visibility put paid to such an idea. Still, there were visits to Kailzie Hill, Kirkhope Law, Birkscairn Hill and Stake Law so I had gone further than any previous encounter with the place. As expected, wet ground was my lot and it was soggy in places too. Still, the walk was much needed regardless of this.

With the signs of any path becoming ever more tenuous and visibility declining all the while, I thought it to be best to return to the saddle between Stake Law and Birkscairn Hill to commence a descent down some steep slopes. These were negotiated more liberally than the path suggested by the OS map would have done. Zigzags were added to my course to ease the task sufficiently for the avoidance of any sense of cragfastness. Water entered my boots as I did so and wet feet were the result, another hint that my boots needed reproofing.

Soon enough, I was on the floor of the glen for a crossing of Glensax Burn to reach the sheep pens where I joined the track leading back towards Peebles. Though the air was heavy, the rain had stopped, and steady progress left me marvelling at how fast I was going. In fact, I hardly felt the length of the five kilometres to the gate near Gallow Hill where I again was on tarmac for the last stretch into Peebles to await the next bus back to Edinburgh.

The day had been satisfying and I still would like to complete that Glen Sax Round at some point. This needs an early start since the walk will be a long one but I now have some sense of how to make it happen. Also, a better day with plenty of daylight hours will be in order. Having a less cluttered life could help too, but the Easter Sunday 2017 walk started an emotional recovery that was much needed. The following day would take things further.

In Better Spirits along the John Buchan Way

Easter Monday got the benefit of a better forecast. Fancying the prospect of walking somewhere anew, I plumped for the John Buchan Way; another attempt at going around Glen Sax could wait. My choice also involved a hike from one place to another, something that I prefer to the idea of an out and back venture. Much like Glen Sax on Easter Sunday, it also offered much needed solitude and felt a world away from the usual run of my life.

There was a bit of dawdling around Peebles as I sought the actual route that the trail took on the way out from the town. Though grey, the morning was dry and I was to escape rain for most of the day with cloud breaking to leave bright sunshine holding sway before a late afternoon rain shower made a visit.

Once I had got as far as Peebles’ extremities, the next task was to go around Morning Hill and the path on the ground took a slightly different course from what my map suggested. The line taken was good enough for me so I was not about to pursue the matter. The course became clearer as I shadowed the Cademuir Plantation to reach a lane that would convey me around a hill topped with a fort.

The up and down course continued to take me through pastoral surroundings laden with signs reminding drivers that pregnant sheep were all around there. The hint was that they should slow down, but that naturally did not apply to pedestrian stravaigers like myself. Crossing Manor Water, I continued towards The Glack where I would leave tarmac tramping behind me for a while. That a pesky pothole had nagged an ankle was more reason for going over softer ground.

The way to Stobo took me through many fields as I threaded my way along Glack Hope and over the lower slopes of White Knowe and other neighbouring hills. As the route went this way and that, a certain amount of attention was needed so as not to wander off it until matters became simpler after Easter Dawyk. Any height that had been gained was being lost all the while as the A712 grew ever closer. Eventually, a second crossing of the River Tweed (the first had been in Peebles itself) was to reach the road and seek out another escape from tarmac.

If I was seeking a bus stop from which to get back to Peebles, there might have been some uncertainty about such a plan but I was seeking out the trail for Broughton. That was to shadow Easton Burn for much of the way to Hammer Rig. By then, any vestiges of pastoral living were petering out and I could feel that I was in wilder terrain though civilisation never was that far away.

It also helped that sunshine lit up the surrounding hillsides as I crossed some of their number. This was where hilltops like those of Hammer Knowe, Hog Knowe and Hopehead Rig acted as progress indicators while I wondered at how far I was going up Stobo Hope to reach the isolated output of Stobo Hopehead.

Dark grey cloud was gathering from the east while my surroundings remained sun-blessed but it was not about to last. Just beyond Hopehead Rig, the rain caught up with me to ensure a damp finish to my walk. It might have been nice to have retained sunshine for the descent beside such heights as Clover Law or Cat Cleuch Head but I hardly felt denied because of what else that have been there to savour.

It was dry when I reached a dampened and quiet Broughton and the bus stop was easy to find and I was there in plenty of time before the next departure. That meant I could stroll about the village a little and note the laid-back youths who were hanging around with one of their number set to be a fellow passenger on the bus back to Peebles.

Once in Peebles again, there was time for strolling about the banks of the Tweed but the sun was not being so co-operative so photographic opportunities were limited. Maybe that was just as well given my need to return to Edinburgh before a southbound journey the next day.

Afterwards

The day after Easter Monday was when the matter in Ireland finally got sorted and I must admit some trepidation interrupted any peace of mind on the train from Edinburgh to Manchester. Any yapping on a phone by a Scottish NHS IT administrator was remediated before or at Carlisle and was a lesser intrusion in any event. At least, this train journey was one that I had booked back in January. On arrival in Macclesfield, I found out the good news from the other side of the Irish Sea and could look back on my weekend with satisfaction. Emotional rest was the order of service for the rest of the week until I realised how close my return to work was becoming.

Travel Arrangements

Train journey from Macclesfield to Manchester followed by a coach journey from Manchester to Edinburgh. Two return bus journeys between Edinburgh and Peebles. Bus journey from Broughton to Peebles. Return train journey from Edinburgh to Macclesfield with a change in Manchester.

Forthside wanderings

This year’s trips to Edinburgh have seen a developing trend: a tendency to go walking along the southern shore of the Firth of Forth. February saw me pottering along Edinburgh’s northern shores on a stroll that took me from Edinburgh’s city to and along the water of Leith before I headed west as far as Silverknowes where I caught a bus to Waverley train station where I caught my train home.

That necessarily cut off an approach to Cramond but the omission got addressed on a July visit when I walked along the coast west of Silverknowes before going inland along the banks of the River Almond and that was followed by a quick visit to the Cammo Estate before I found a bus stop from where I began my journey home. There was no crossing to Cramond Island because it was a time of high tide so examining tide times ahead of a coastal hike and that lesson was reinforced more recently.

As it happened, this past Saturday saw the longest stroll of the lot with my going west from North Berwick to Seton Sands. Mainly, it involved travel over sandy beaches and dunes as well as rocky shorelines. Many coastal rocky prominences like Bass Rock or Fidra caught my eye and led to photographic activity. Part of the John Muir Way was followed too, especially after a crossing of Aberlady Bay was stymied by the depth of Peffer Burn. That crossing left me wetter than was ideal but thoughts of getting cut off by an advancing tide spurred me along. Next time, a sighting of a beach watercourse on a map will cause me to be more cautious about my intentions than I was on this occasion.

Still, much sunshine was enjoyed and it did wonders for the coastal scenery much like on previous visits to the Edinburgh coastline in February and July. Unlike those days, cloud came in the afternoon and brought a little rain but that did nothing to take from what preceding better weather brought to me earlier in the day. My route had been inspired by one included in The Great Outdoors and offered something very different to other possibilities like the Pentland Hills or the Glen Sax round near Peebles. Both of those await future explorations now that the bracing sea air of the Forth has been savoured and there are other parts that need exploring so return visits to Edinburgh remain likely.

An exceptional summer

The long dry spell that has dominated since April has some thinking back as far as 1976. There are some good reasons for doing so. In the Irish countryside, grass is not as plentiful and farm wells have gone dry. Over there, the extent of this has got farmers worried about keeping livestock fed and brought about water usage restrictions for everyone else. Temperatures soared to 32° C during June and roads melted, causing road closures and even bringing out gritting trucks for reasons completely at odds with their usual usage.

So far, 2018 can be said to have two seasons: winter and summer. Spring scarcely came at all and the northern hemisphere has been treated to a long hot sunny spell like few other summers. Fires have started, either naturally, through error or as a result of vandalism. The last of these defies reason yet it is said to have had a human cost in such disparate places as Greece and California. The moors around Manchester and Bolton had their blazes but these thankfully did not threaten life and limb as much.

My venturing into the world of self-employment had limited my enjoyment of the long sunny spells more than a general inclination to keep in out of the heat. Still, I got to spend a day around Edinburgh that took me by the Firth of Forth and the banks of the River Almond before venturing into the Cammo Estate and the heart of Scotland’s capital city. Any shady spots were relished because of the afternoon heat. The same applied on a day trip to Barmouth that took me strolling towards Cerrig Arthur before returning via the Panorama Walk while enjoy the views all around that part of the Mawddach estuary. The day was long and felt all the longer on a hot crowded train between Barmouth and Shrewsbury. What remains though are newly made good memories and they always outlast any recollections of ardour.

There has been a week spent in Ireland too with its usual mix of business and leisure. Evening walks took me by Springfield Castle and the village of Kilmeedy and it well bedecked in flowers everywhere you could look. Towards the end of the stay, much needed rain arrived but there was dry weather to savour before that happened. In fact, it may be that the idea of a trip for exclusively leisurely purposes can come to mind and there is a slot when it might happen.

Other than these, evening walks around Macclesfield have made pleasant use of the longer hours of daylight. No longer do I chide myself for not making good use of every sunny day that comes but using enough of them is sufficient nowadays. As long as the burdens of a working life are managed more carefully to leave enough emotional space, the energy and motivation could be enough to keep up my wandering.

The heat may have restrained things this summer but it also had me looking back through previous episodes that had me writing entries on here and that happened in both 2006 and 2007. In 2008, I even got to the subject of warm weather walking. Neither of these compares with 2018 and it even beat the benchmark summers of 1983, 1984 and 1989 that I recall from my childhood and adolescence. This has been a summer that will live long in younger minds as they mature and age. Surely, it will be the better bits that get recalled the most clearly.

A longer reading project

Over the years, I have been prone to buying books with good intentions and then hardly getting around to reading them. This has been known to apply as much to paper books as their digital counterparts, and I have been getting through a backlog of the latter since last autumn.

The reading material itself has been varied with travel writing from the likes of Dan Kieran, Bruce Chatwin and Jack Kerouac seeing inclusion along with other subjects covered by the likes of Clive Aslet and Christian Wolmer. Among these have been works from Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, with the latter featuring through every month from last November until this one.

What I have discovered is that reading nineteenth century prose takes more effort than what is found today. Sentences feel longer and have more packed into them. The same applies to paragraphs that spread from one page to another. Even so, there are rewards in revisiting observations from another time, for the sort of descriptive writing from centuries ago is more of a rarity today.

Returning to the Scottish naturalist and conservationist John Muir, my chosen task was to work my way through an extensive compendium of his collected works along with a volume in tribute, and it is that which is the main subject of this post. In the U.S.A., Muir remains a revered figure and someone who appears to have fitted much into his lifetime, too.

It was not just a childhood spent in Scotland prior to a move to Wisconsin, either. Still, that childhood was severe, with corporal punishment at home and school to go with schoolboy scrapping. Throughout all of this, there was a growing love of nature that was to define him. Engaging in that persuasion often got him punishment from his father yet he and his brother continued regardless. Such things were regarded as straying away from the path of Christian righteousness.

The hardship continued in North America, with lots of hard work to build up a block of farming land from what was wilderness. Still, the appreciation of nature grew, and there even was time spent inventing various clocks and other contrivances. That time was made by getting up part way through the night, an act that bewildered his own father.

The inventions were to see him heading away from home on an early trip to a fair, and that was followed by four years spent at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Though a degree was not gained, there was plenty of mental enlightenment that preceded a time of factory working that was ended by an accident that nearly blinded Muir.

It was after recovery from that incident that he began his long walk to Florida by way of Kentucky and Tennessee. Along the way, he had plenty of time for observing natural beauty before a bout of malaria laid him low. Though he made it as far as Cuba, the intended journey to South America had to be abandoned in favour of one to California that took him via New York.

It was his explorations of the High Sierra that would make his name. Yosemite, King’s Canyon, Hetch Hetchy and other such spectacular valleys would allow him to investigate the effects of glaciation. Mountain tops like Mount Shasta would see him climbing them, even when the weather was not that hospitable. One incident on Mount Shasta got a repeated telling. All the while, his health improved and his strength advanced as he observed grand fauna like the giant Sequoia trees endemic to California. Variations in weather were much experienced too, with storms being relished; when most of us would stay indoors, he would be heading outside. Quite what people must have made of this and his other exploits would have made interesting reading, not unlike what some write in our own times.

From California, he went north as far as Alaska, while also visiting Oregon and Washington State too. The Grand Canyon was another place that he visited, as was Yellowstone National Park. His trips to Alaska had him exploring glaciers with a view to seeing how their action related to what he saw in California. As well as Muir’s own published accounts, Samuel Hall Young also published his own tribute to the man with whom he too explored places such as Glacier Bay. Muir embarked on a summertime sea journey to the Arctic as well, so he got to know Alaska and neighbouring parts of Russia better than many at the time.

There was one trip back to Scotland later in life, and he also appeared to get to other parts of Europe, as well as Asia and South America. Before all this, he married and settled down to run a fruit farm, though that was not his real calling. His wife often sent him away to mountain country to get his fill of the wild places that he so cherished.

That love of nature must have turned him to conservation, for he was one of the founding members of the Sierra Club, an organisation that continues to exist today. It also was reflected in his writing, for he campaigned for National Parks and decried the effects of sheep grazing on wild meadows. Lumbering was not seen as a legitimate activity always, nor was the building of the railways. It was after an unsuccessful campaign to stop the building of a reservoir in Hetch Hetchy valley that he passed away.

His legacy has persisted, with people still reading works like My First Summer in the Sierra, A Thousand-mile Walk to the Gulf or The Story of my Boyhood and Youth. These are just a small selection of what I ended up reading over the last few months. There was some repetition along the way, but that probably can be found here too. The nineteenth century prose took some effort to read and things undoubtedly have changed since the times in which it was written, yet there was much to enjoy. In their own way, Muir’s books and other writings describe many parts of the world that I have yet to visit, and the effort was worth it for all that. The enthusiasm and alternative approach to life percolated through the narratives too, and the thinking has remained until our own time. Let’s hope that it does so into the future.

A springtime sabbatical

Though the output on here may try to belie it, the month of March was one of exhaustion and a longed for sabbatical from work came not a moment too soon at the start of April. Mostly, it was time to rest at home though there were some escapes. My yearning for rest and recuperation had to be countered for these but it is good for anyone’s state of mind to get out and about too.

The second weekend saw me head to the Isle of Man for the first time since July 2011. Though it was a reluctant manoeuvre in the end, it repaid my efforts with sunshine on a circuit from Laxey that took in Snaefell and on an amble around Castletown. Before I started my return, I took in Douglas Head and Summerhill Glen along with some other sights around the island’s capital.

Strife with insuring a car in Ireland partly ruined any peace of mind around Easter such that I shortened a stay in Edinburgh. In truth, I spent more time around Peebles with a rain-soaked walk around Glen Sax on Easter Sunday preceding a trot along the John Buchan Way between Peebles and Broughton in much better weather on Easter Monday. Thankfully, that Irish obstacle was overcome to allow a few more days of quiet rest before it hit me just how fast time was going.

While it felt as if my time away from work was too short, there still was time for walk from Litton to Buxton that took in several of Derbyshire’s dales. The list included Tansley Dale, Cressbrook Dale, Monsal Dale, Miller’s Dale, Wye Dale and Deep Dale. Wintry weather intruded at times and Chee Dale offered plenty of adventure. Still, it was a good day out with my partly making up the route as I went along.

There was a trip to Ireland too and this allowed more time for myself in between visiting family and neighbours as well as attending to business that I have over there. Evening walks took me on circuits around by Springfield and Kilmeedy village. Though the walking was along roads for the most part, it was a case of revisiting haunts that I have not frequented for a few years now.

On returning to work, I have decided to do things differently and that is allowing me more rest time. My mind is turning to future excursion ideas as a sort of tonic though such flights of fancy are tempered my aunt’s health for now. Still, there is no harm in dreaming a little as I assess how things are going for me after all that has happened during the past five years.