Category: Cheshire
Alterations
18th January 2010 Those of you who are regulars may note a certain change in the colours around here. Another bit of electronic fiddling was the cause of bringing the background colour to my notice. The new year has yet to see a proper piece of outdoors action. That's not to say that I didn't inspect the recent snow, especially given how much of it was plastered on the hills between Macclesfield and Buxton. That viewing took place on the second Saturday of the year from the confines of a warm bus rather than in an attempt to flounder through fields hosting feet of snow. Hearing and seeing how much was up there, thoughts were attuned to the need for snow shoes in such circumstances. It's little wonder that folk took to skis and going downhill on unexpected slopes like those of Kerridge Hill near Bollington. Drifting snow was starting to impede traffic while I was on my little excursion and it later closed the A537 Cat and Fiddle road almost completely. Buxton looked very pretty in its white coat on a bright day, but things were duller by the time that I reached Bakewell. It all made for an enjoyable spot of reconnaissance but a fuller bout of hill wandering is in order now that things are calming down, though there is more snow on the horizon for the middle of the week. It would appear that 2010 is getting an interesting start.
A longer winter break
6th January 2010 We have had the cold winter mixture of snow and ice for so long now that it almost is no longer newsworthy. It was there before I set off on a winter airborne crossing of the Irish Sea and remained to welcome me back on my return. That's not to say that it isn't causing disruption, with travel being a casualty from time to time. It also explains why I was out on Christmas Day and the day after (Boxing Day to some, St. Stephen's Day to others) breaking ice to clear tracks so that those with older bones than mine didn't go breaking them. There was a useful thaw thereafter that allowed things to dry up before the next round of frosts and I took my chance on an afternoon stroll around by Springfield Castle in the winter sun. Traffic, thankfully, was light on the roads that conveyed me much of the way and most of the ice had gone. In fact, I found more of that on the back avenue of Springfield Castle than anywhere else, including the front avenue. The latter allowed me to escape from a sizeable bunch who were engaged in pucking sliotars (hitting hurling balls with hurling sticks to the uninitiated) along the road from Broadford to Dromcollogher. Apart from that collective, places were otherwise quiet with only the occasional soul encountered along the way. It was a useful escape from worrying about the effects of slips on those who really could do without a knock.
The only other trot of note was an afternoon jaunt around by Kilmeedy on an increasingly foggy New Year's Day. Though I gained some height, the lack of visibility meant that wide-ranging views were out of the question so I contented myself with decent progress along largely ice-free and dry roads with little or no traffic on them. It was, but an unremarkable few hours out in the cold air apart from the sight of a pair of swans in the River Deel near Belville. Even so, it was a good way to let the mind loose to lose any stresses and strains that had been collecting.
Apart from those bursts of road walking, the countryside journeying was largely virtual with some books capturing my attention. The first of these was found around my parents' house and caught my eye. Tales of canal boating do not normally attract my interest, but Gerald Potterton's In the Wake of Giants kept me occupied for a few hours with its mix of modern-day anecdotes and historical interjections. Ostensibly, it is a tale of someone fulfilling an interest in journeying along the Grand Canal and the River Barrow with its numerous canal cuttings for the avoidance of weirs. Naturally, this took me around by locales that wouldn't have crept too high up my list of places to visit and told me a little about them too, adding to my knowledge of the "Old Country". The tale may have stuttered to life like a marinised old Ford diesel engine that is used as a power unit for a canal boat, but the narrative soon got going in its own inimitable manner and went to show that there can be more to tillage farmers than meets the eye.
The second occupier of any free moments was a volume that I picked up a while back and lay on my reading list before I got around to it. Joseph Murphy's At the Edge does fit in rather better on a blog full of walking trip reports than a tome on canal boating and it has its own soul too. The backbone of the thing is a walk along the coasts of Ireland and Scotland from Kerry to Lewis made by someone who feels that he has lost a little something of his Irish heritage. Along the way, he gets to pondering Gaelic culture and the differences between Ireland become apparent with the emptiness of Scotland contrasting with an Ireland peopled with obliging folk; interlopers who fail to engage with their Scottish surroundings stick out like sore thumbs later on in the narrative. While I may have developed a beady eye with all my online scribblings, there were times when perceived typographical errors intruded on any sense of reverie (I know that I'm only human, so please let me know privately about any failings of my own making). Clearly, a spot of improvement on the proofreading side is needed on the part of the publishers and the author. Even with intrusions, the explorations of exile and connectedness drew me in as the journey continued; I suppose that my being an Irishman living and working in England had something to do with this, though my affinity for the places visited along the way may have helped too.
Just as there are Irishmen in England, there are Englishmen in Ireland and Tim Robinson has been one of the latter since 1972. On the return trip to Cheshire, I felt the need for a book and his Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage became my accompaniment as I left the branch of Easons on Dublin's O' Connell Street. It's an intense piece of writing that needs to be savoured away from the vacant prattling of drunken folk on trains. Quite how he can make so much of coastal explorations with only the occasional diversion inland is surprising. Until a few years ago, it was out of print but Faber & Faber brought out a new edition with a forward by Robert Macfarlane. There is a companion volume called Stones of Aran: Labyrinth that also was out of print until the New York Review of Books addressed that situation last year. More recently, he wrote a counterpart pair on Connemara with titles such as Connemara: Listening to the Wind and Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness, both published by Penguin Ireland. The latter of these is in my possession and remains unfinished but it very typically was on the wrong side of the Irish Sea when it would have been continued. Of course, that's a human failing with my not thinking that I'd not be reading that much while ensconced in West Limerick. It's also an unusual one for me, but carriage of paper items is sure to add weight that can prove expensive if indiscipline is allowed to reign. In that light, the extra purchase can be seen as a comparative bargain.
With all this reading about a country to which I haven't done justice in walking terms, you might think that 2010 is set to be a year when Ireland might see more of me. That, however, is not mine to see. The start of any year usually is like beginning with a blank slate, but 2010 seems more wide open than other years. While grand designs are not my style, I am more inclined to avoid them this year than I otherwise might do. It will be a case of meeting the future one day at a time and seeing where things take me from here.
Sticking with what was near at hand
21st December 2009 In those rare times when snow pays a visit, thoughts can turn to going elsewhere. So, it was on Monday after with Sunday's snow covering. In the end, I wisely stuck with enjoying what lay on my doorstep and spent an afternoon among Macclesfield's nearby hills. Traffic may have been free-flowing and public transport running well enough for an excursion to the likes of North Wales to have worked but it would have been shameful to ignore the wonder that lay near me.
The route that I took was a familiar mix of roads and other rights of way. To start, I found my way onto the Macclesfield Canal via a very attractive Victoria Park and followed it until I reached the road near Sutton Hall, a pub near Gurnett, having taken in a section that was closed up to October. Having missed out on one or two public footpath options, I followed the road around by Lyme Green to Sutton where I made photographic use of the local parish church. After that, it was more roadside footway travel until Langley where I picked up a bridleway by Teggsnose Reservoir. As I shortened the distance to the visitor centre and car park at Tegg's Nose Country Park, the views opened up with Shutlingsloe being backed by a bank of cloud. From there, I joined the Gritstone Trail through snowy fields with the hillsides developing a certain alpenglow in the late afternoon sun. On reaching, the A537, the ridge that is Kerridge Hill lay tantalisingly before me but I tamed my ambitions to content myself with a road walk to Rainow, avoiding the steep up and down of the Gritstone Trail alternative. An untrodden public footpath beckoned, but a tight stile persuaded me to stay on tarmac. From Rainow, it was roadside footway travel all the way home in the declining light. There was a tempting bus option but I stuck with the plan of a circular walk from my own house with the street lights coming on as I went.
All of this was on familiar turf but that made it no less wonderful; never discount snow's transforming powers. There was a mixture of uninterrupted reverie interspersed with encounters with snowball throwing and sled riding that remained of the detached observation variety. Everyone was out enjoying the results of the previous day's hefty snowfall in their own way, no bad thing, though there's something to be said for leaving things where they have fallen for the enjoyment of others. After all, the chances of replenishment are not so high these days. In a way, that may make us all make more of what comes when it does and that applies to me as much as anyone. Then there's the chance to add to your experience of winter conditions too.
A good covering
19th December 2009 I was out earlier this evening on an A to B trip on my bike when a shower of sleet came upon me, not a problem with my being appropriately attired. Even if I got snow, the lugs on my mountain bike's tyres would have coped; yes, they are staying inflated so far. Speaking of the fluffy while stuff, there is a plentiful supply of that emanating from the sky right now and it is coating everywhere in white. Getting about on foot now looks like a job for my North Face Hedgehogs and any wondering about a pre-Christmas outdoors outing could have snow-covered countryside on the agenda. Methinks that I need to decide where to go, a task that may or may not be made easier by my adding an at a glance collection of Met Office mountain weather forecast summaries on here. After all, there is a need for preparation for the prevailing conditions, as last Friday in Cheshire proved by its feeling like being in a chest freezer with fans turned on. Without any wind, daytime temperatures were around freezing in the lowlands anyway and below that (-2.5° C) in Buxton and Leek. With temperatures like those, it's best not to be rushing out to become a mountain rescue statistic.
Testing a puncture repair
16th December 2009 Last Saturday, I had designs on going further afield for a day away but they didn't happen. That allowed some time to address something that has been looking back at me reprovingly for a while: a flat front tyre on my bike. The cause was a long thorn (around a centimetre or so in length) that had inveigled itself into the tyre to hole the inner tube. It illustrates the trouble with country cycling in the autumn months when many a hedgerow custodian is cutting it down to size after the summer, littering the road with the sorts of things that penetrate even thick mountain bike tyres. Thinner racing bicycle equivalents must be giving grief then.
For whatever reason, the repairing of punctures is a task that causes me to procrastinate. While it is true to say that various attempts at the chore have ended up being so messy as to necessitate the buying of new tubes and tyres, I should be a bit more competent at it these days but it's never a thing to go rushing. In fact, I find that it's undoubtedly the kind of activity for which the saying about haste slowing down speed is most apt.
Once that front wheel was put back together again and the tyre well inflated with a double-barrel foot pump (possibly meant for car tyres really but it does the job so well for my tyres that it must put a stop to braces of punctures like those that blighted my innings with a Carlton racer) from Halfords, it was time for some road testing. By the time that I was ready to leave the house, the sun had got to hiding behind big wads of clouds, but my mind was decided on a departure, even one that might have involved walking a bicycle home after a failed repair.
For the jaunt, I followed a usual route of mine that goes around by places such as Gawsworth, North Rode and Bosley, though without actually going through any of these places. The fact that I hadn't been out for more than a month was brought home to me by the absence of leaves on next to every tree, hedge and bush. Then there were all the well manicured hedges with their reminders of thorns sprayed all over a road after a hedge cutter. What was also evident was how well November's tempests had swept away any of that. It's amazing where fixing a puncture can send your thoughts.
As Croker Hill and its radio tower loomed ever larger in my sights, both were catching more and more of the sun and much more than anywhere else. It looked like the sun was finding a momentary hole in the clouds, but there was a bigger clearance to come from the east. That was to be the lure and reward for my diverting away from the A523 and into nearby hills. The initial reasoning might have been the avoidance of football traffic around Moss Rose, but that doesn't explain why I would go around by Coalpit Lane, Broadcar Road and Old Buxton Road. All of this may have been on a SUSTRANS cycle route but I'd advise of the need for strong legs and decent physical fitness before giving this one a try. Seeing the steepness of the gradients, I chose to walk them with breaks for photographic capture of the by now well lit surroundings. For that, I should have had fully charged batteries rather than resorting to sticking dying ones in pockets to make an exposure or two. Even so, I came away with enough images to ward off any recourse to self reproach.
After that short satisfying blast of hill country, it was mostly downhill until I got home with tyres still inflated and untroubled by an underpass littered with broken beer bottles; carriage of one's means of travel was the cure for that and the council has been informed of the state of the footway. Puncture repair testing was successful and a good spell of fresh air was enjoyed too without my bringing more trouble home with me in the form of new punctures. There are some things that really don't deserve the practice.
