Forthside wanderings
30th October 2018 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 brief 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, more 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.
Thought collection
28th September 2018 To me, writing is a little like sculpting in that it takes a while to craft a report, article, blog entry or other piece. There is creation in action and there often is a first draft that gets taken asunder and reassembled. After all, that has happened what you are reading now and much of what you find on this website.
There have times during the last few years when I felt sufficiently bereft of energy that even writing trip reports was something for which I had no enthusiasm. After all, photos need selection and editing and details need to be extracted from faded memories. Some of this can be blamed by the amount of time that I have allowed to elapse before writing up an outing.
It is easy to blame the passage of one or two years with all that they bring but I think that trip reports need to be more than what can be a route description that might be found on a platform such as Viewranger or Mountain Views. Sights and circumstances help bring a narrative to life but it still takes a little writing time for the words and ideas to come together.
Some ensure this by keeping a journal throughout the time that inspires later writing. Though I am not one of those, I have got myself a notebook where I can jot phrases whenever a valuable thought passes through my mind. Too often, it is the ones that I wish to retain are the very ones that leave me with hardly a trace and the unwanted ones scarcely want to depart at all. Such is the paradoxical way in which my brain works and mine may not be so unique if the growing collection of mindfulness books are any indication.
The notebook may be an A5 sized Moleskine item but it is not destined for the kind of use that prolific author John McPhee apparently made of his. Such will be the terseness of the phrases in mine that there will be little need to add my name and address should I lose the thing and need it returned. That also means that the reward section of that page is surplus to requirements and I am not sure that the notebook will travel with me in any case.
It is true that blogs collect thoughts but these are processed, edited and curated before any reader gets to view them. Raw material is needed and various photos with accompanying photos help but something read in a book or magazine could be equally worthy of retention. Then, there are those thoughts that arise when a mind to left to wander. Now that there is somewhere to keep these from being lost, who knows what might come of them? Only time will answer that question.
Camera repairs
22nd September 2018 Something like this might feature on my technology blog but the influence on outdoors activity causes me to post it here. Within the last twelve months, two of my cameras developed faults and the first of these became the second to be fixed. The order of repair was driven by importance.
In recent months, the shutter of my Olympus PEN E-PL5 was becoming stuck but restarting the camera sorted out the problem until my July trip to Ireland when a brief photography session in Cork city was halted because that no longer worked. An enquiry of Olympus resulted in the five year old camera being sent to them for repair. This cost me in excess of £100 but things were turned around quickly and the camera is back with me again.
Last December, I discovered that my Canon EOS 5D Mark II started overexposing images by in excess of two stops while on a day spent reconnoitring around Abergavenny, Brecon, the Black Mountain and Neath. Needless to say, my photographic efforts that day were stymied by the camera failure though that too occasionally manifested itself in preceding months. The camera was sent to H. Lehmann in recent weeks and was returned yesterday after a repair costing me nearly £200 when you include carriage. The added cost was because of the professional grading of this camera.
Thankfully, my main camera continues to function well and I never really had any problem with the Pentax D-SLR cameras that I have owned so the aforementioned outages were far from critical. That is just as well given the cost of such repairs and I now have two cameras to test to see how they now perform.
That of itself can encourage outdoors outings since I have been quiet on that front recently. The start of of the autumn storm season is upon us and both Ireland and Scotland have been affected already so memories of last year's Storm Ophelia return to mind. Still, there might be sunny interludes to come yet so they could offer a chance and we still have October and November to come while the winter often brings pleasing light. The year is not over yet.
Sharing or sparing?
18th September 2018 Having what is called a bucket list, a list of places that you would like to visit while you can, is common these days but I wonder if such a thing is all that desirable. By the its nature, the problems start when compiling a list of such ideas because chances are that you will select places that already are popular. That applies as much when perusing travel magazines or holiday brochures as it does when using social media.
One consequence of this is that certain locations become too popular for the sake of sustainability and that leads to restrictions that affect the independent traveller. South American destinations like Machu Pichu and Torres del Paine National Park come to mind here but the problem is spread around the world. Scotland's Isle of Skye has experienced problems that never made the news before and you only have to see how many visit well promoted attractions like the Cliffs of Moher to see how many people visit a small number of locations in Ireland at a time during the high season.
This then poses something of a dilemma: do you cater for the visitor numbers or do you restrict them? With wilderness and conservation areas, there is a tendency to do the latter though it does have the consequence of pushing up visitor costs and that may have its benefits for local tourism businesses as you may find on a trip to places in either the Canadian Rockies or Alaska. When you add in short summer tourism seasons, the effect by necessity is more pronounced.
In other destinations, they add in facilities for the extra visitors with some decrying the effect that this has had on Spain's Mediterranean coastline because of hotel and holiday apartment construction. Parts of the Alps are afflicted like this but in a different way: it is the infrastructure of skiing resorts that hardly help appearances in mountain country during the summer season. Both examples make you wonder at the appropriateness of such developments and they must tug at the heartstrings of anyone who adores mountain and coastal scenery.
Another aspect of any overdevelopment is that you can install something that encourages the otherwise unprepared into wild places without realise the possible dangers that are there. For instance, I seem to have inherited my father's unease at cliff edges and my knowledge of how slippery limestone can be almost made me shout at people to keep back from the edge on a damp day hike around the Cliffs of Moher and Doolin. It is little wonder that staff are equipped with whistles to direct the unaware away from peril.
There is overcaution too and one example is the boardwalk on Cuilcagh Mountain and how incongruous it looks in the landscape through which it conveys people to the top of the hill shared between Cavan and Fermanagh, between Éire and Northern Ireland. It also does not help that it stops short of the top too but the boggy morass deters most. Another location where path development attracted adverse comment was at Sliabh Liag in County Donegal but it might be that some sense prevailed there in the end.
Hillwalking is a growing pastime in Ireland so there remains a lot to learn in a country where there is neither experience nor tradition of path and track building in such places. Thankfully, organisations like Mountain Meitheal and Mountaineering Ireland together with initiatives like Helping the Hills are starting to address this so lessons are learned from places like Scotland and applied to get sensible solutions to the growing problem of erosion on popular hills. It is something that needs attention as much as securing access for hill wandering in the first place.
The mention of countryside access brings me to another factor that causes some places to feel overloaded: a lack of alternatives. It is not everywhere that has the liberal access rights that are enjoyed in Scotland and across Scandinavia so there can be a very really reduction in the number of places where you can explore. The options may not stop you going to those better known places like Norway's Preikestolen before finding other quieter hikes nearby as knowledge grows and maps feel more confiding.
It is this last point that inspires the title and the theme runs through Fiona Reynolds' The Fight for Beauty, a book that I read last autumn. It is not for nothing park rangers in Denali National Park tell you not to walk one after another in a group so a path never develops and that everyone's backcountry journey is their own. When there is plenty of land for all, we can spread out and find our own space to recharge weary spirits. That is easier when we are not retracing the steps of others all the while and it can have a lighter impact on the countryside too with less erosion caused by many feet and much path widening. While it can be true that we get confined by or own lack of knowledge, physical restrictions caused by not having enough other places to go hardly help either. Overcoming both might be the ultimate answer to the visitor management conundrum.
Journal keeping
14th September 2018 One thing that I do not keep myself is a written diary, though photos from various outings act as prompts for my memory at times. Until his health no longer allowed him, my late father used to keep a diary and often referred to it when trying to unearth what happened on a particular day. After his passing, they were put somewhere more discreet for the sake of maintaining a sense of dignity.
It is not recent encounters with lapses of memory that has brought this to mind but recent reading. Over the summer, I caught up with Chris Townsend's Rattlesnakes and Bald Eagles, where a long hike along the Pacific Crest Trail from thirty years before was recounted lucidly. That was followed by Hamish's Mountain Walk by Hamish Brown, where mentions of journal keeping appear in a narrative that includes reminiscences from twenty or so preceding years of wandering about Scotland's hills. Going back further in time, I then read Mary T. S. Schäffer's Old Indian Trails of the Canadian Rockies, where journal keeping again must have made the retelling of summer expeditions from several years before a little bit more successful.
Thinking about it now, I find myself wondering just how much travel writing needs a supporting diary or journal to make it work. Currently, I am making my way through Bradt's Roam Alone, with its tales of solo travelling that read so fresh that you have to wonder if some contemporary notes assisted the various short stories.
All this probably should make me consider if scribbling a few notes at the end of each excursion might be worthwhile, given how long I have tended to leave things before writing them on here. It is true that less adventurous rambles leave less of an imprint on anyone's memory, as I found with one more recent trip report, so that might be a hint that new experiences should be sought on a continuing basis. Meanwhile, my memory often beats others, and that might explain how I never got thinking these thoughts before now.
Life's journey has followed that trail in recent years and new things have been tried. Maybe, it might be no harm to keep doing that with my wanderings too. Revisiting old haunts brings satisfaction, but exploring new places keeps things from feeling stale. Adventurous thoughts lead to roaming North America, New Zealand or Australia in my mind's eye, yet there are other possibilities closer to hand. It is a matter of making some time to uncover them and then make the most of what is there.
