On dealing with the prospect of rain
21st July 2009 For all of the Met Office's optimism, this summer feels anything but special at the moment with its mix of sunshine and hefty showers. The current cooler conditions may suit me rather better than the sort of temperatures that some would desire but repeated heavy dumps of rain do nothing for the motivation either. With preparation, you certainly could walk in these conditions but the question arises as to how much pleasure would be gained in so doing. Even I admit that the prospect of repeated heavy soakings causes me to consider indoors activities instead. That's exactly what happened last Sunday when I chose clutter clearance over going out and about. Saturday was the better day but there were things that needed doing, such as getting my bike repaired. Since that was done (professionally, I'll add), I have been out on local roads while the rain stayed away for long enough. Yesterday's offering of rainless wads of clouds allowing some sun to come through was the cause of many going out on their bike around lunchtime though things were far quieter when I got to get out on mine after work.
When it comes to going out on wet days, I am always after some dryness to offset the wetness and, even better, to help me dry off. Last August, I embarked on my Scottish island hopping escapade hoping for a little sun among any grey wetness only to be granted a goodly number of sun-drenched days instead. Looking for a little had earned me a lot on that occasion but yearning for a steady improvement after a damp start can prove fruitless too as I found with two trips to Argyll. Then, the rain ended up becoming an irritating nuisance so my buses back to civilisation were very welcome when they came. Whatever preparedness there might have been with regard to gear and experience did nothing to take away from the fact that, when there is no pleasure anymore, it is time to exit. Those who were walking along the West Highland Way in torrid conditions last autumn might know how that feels.
In contrast, there was a time when grey mornings might have kept me at home; using it as a device to allow other important stuff to get done was all very fine but it went far too far. Now, when things look mixed, I take to looking to see how things might develop over the course of a day. Only for that, we might never have got to the hills around Gougane Barra or the cliffs about Kilkee while I was in Ireland last month. It pays not to be too picky, even if trying to discern how things are going to go over the course of day is tricky when television news is all that's available to you.
With all that in mind, I am casting an eye towards the weekend. Right now, it looks promising so I may get in a longer outdoors outing rather than snatched evenings as has been the way recently. Of course, any predictions of fair weather need not become reality and I don't need to be told that, especially after a hike took me among clag-bound and damp Cumbrian fells when they were supposed to be clear. Forfeiting a yomp over Fairfield seemed all the more sensible when I later saw the route that I was planning to take on a clear sunny day. However, you have to live in hope...
An evening stroll
14th July 2009 With all of the computer goings-on (there have been some confidence-deflating mishaps this year) and the need to give my house a good tidy (it is that time of year for me), I wasn't able to get away for a longer outing over the weekend. So, I opted for a more freestyle amble on Sunday evening than is my wont. Anything that allowed me a short break could not be dismissed.
Very unusually for me, maps were left at home as I explored the greener ways, many of them off-road cycle paths serving local schools, around Macclesfield town. Most of them were metalled, but one took me on an about-turn through muddier terrain. Opting to stay on better known thoroughfares after that, I followed the road towards Gawsworth before turning left onto a quiet lane that took me right around that village. The number of times that I have visited the place might explain how I knew my way around so well.
While I was minded to stay on tarmac all the way until I joined the Macclesfield canal near Oakgrove, memories of a previous wander about the area caused me to take a chance and leave the road again to test my memory. It didn't fail that test as I found my way to and through Danes Moss wood, a Wildlife Trust reserve and part of a cutaway peat bog, to a crossing over the troubled West Coast Mainline to reach the aforementioned canal.
That was followed until Gurnett where a towpath closure caused me to follow roads from there back home; I think that the closure is due to a collapsed wall, but it will continue until early October anyway. Though devoid of sunshine, the evening had been fine and pleasant, and it would have been foolish to dismiss its possibilities. It is the longer hours of daylight that allows quieter strolls like the one that I enjoyed, making something of the torpor of summer after the wondrous rush that was spring.
New photos of Inverness added
11th July 2009 This morning, a new box arrived, and the subsequent attention devoted to it took up the most of the day. The result is that I have set up a new main home PC offering a home for the various bits and pieces that have been scattered about the place for the last two months. Laptops and external hard drives are all very fine but I prefer to have a next to everything in a single place if I can. Now that I am more organised again, I can settle things in at my leisure and without any encroachment on taking advantage of whatever walking or cycling opportunities that come the way.
Speaking of the laptop, one of its last acts before its role of main PC was usurped by a desktop computer again was to prepare some photos taken on that stroll in Inverness last month for the photo gallery. You'll find them in the Northern Scotland section after being deposited there with the new machine. My mind has been set to wondering what other new additions might follow them, but no decisions have been made just yet.
Though heavy rain is passing through, today wouldn't have been bad for a walking or cycling trip; rain arrived later in the day in my neck of the woods. Also, once the dampness has moved on, tomorrow may well offer its chances for escape out of doors. After all, one whole day messing with computers at a time has to be enough for anyone.
Pondering midsummer torpor
6th July 2009 With all the attention given to winter hibernation, it is easy to forget that there is summertime laziness too. Regular readers will realise that I prize the period of the year between the winter solstice and its summer equivalent highly and especially the eruption of verdant vegetation that gives us the wonders of May. The trouble with that is that the wind can evade your sails after the longest day of the year and you get to wondering if the year has passed its best like I did on here about this time last year. This time around, I am less bothered by the matter and I am seemingly more open to the attractions of the time of year and the observation that the countryside still delights even with cloudy skies.
Speaking of last year, July was a quiet month with a perhaps foolish walking trip to Welshpool on an oppressively hot Sunday at the end of the month. Apart from that, it was left to bike rides to capture any episodes of dry or sunny weather because of other preoccupations and distractions about this time; some involvement with dramatic activity in the world of WordPress was only partly to blame.
It's all too easy to have a bout of mid-year lethargy round about now. For one thing, feeling that you have made ample use of any opportunities that arose can only dull the hunger for thrusting oneself into hill country. That can place your motivation at the mercy of other things like the weather. On one end of the spectrum, you have heavy rain showers like those that we have been seeing recently, the type that makes the idea of mobile roof appealing and the heat emphasises the advantages of umbrellas over raincoats in certain conditions. Then, there's hot sunshine and my running hot means that I favour cooler temperatures than some. Also, classic summer weather isn't the best for photography, another mechanism that gets out among those hills. Saying that, pleasant mornings ahead of a rain or wonderful evenings after one often offer the most. These circumstances offer a certain freshness and clarity that is missing from heat haze obstructed equivalents that abound during a heatwave.
The myth may indicate otherwise but July can be a very unsettled month, even in a year not known for a rubbish summer. In 1999, for instance, it was very grey in Edinburgh until the end of the month when a sunny propelled me onto Skye on a multi-day outing that sowed the seeds for many more. Speaking of Scotland, you end up awaiting the departure of the jet stream before settled weather is visited upon the country. In 2003, I called it wrong and had my week up there far too early. Though it felt that I was getting a constant soaking at the time, looking back does highlight its brighter times: a wonderful day spent beside Loch Etive and a dry if dull trot from Kinlochleven to Fort William along the West Highland Way. Staying with hindsight, it might have been better off sticking with reconnaissance on the damper days, but the soakings that I got while travelling between my lodgings in Banavie and Fort William couldn't have been avoided by this approach. However, I did keep it in mind for my Western Isles escapade last year and foul weather alternatives will be placed on file for any trip in August. That isn't to say that July is always damp but 2006 saw a scorcher visited upon us and I extricated something of value amid the uncertainties in 2004 and 2005 too. Last year and the year before were far from inspiring, but dry sunny weather was there to be enjoyed too and that's how I'll remember them.
All in all, that mixture should tell us that it's best not to expect much of July and this year seems to be following suit after the dryness of June. Last weekend mixed in downpours and sunshine so I grabbed the opportunity for a day sailing trip from Liverpool to the Isle of Man. As it turned out, I left a grey Liverpool for a damp Douglas that made me glad that I hadn't committed to spending a lot of time on the island. Along the way, I learnt a little more about what is on offer over there and thoughts are turning to longer trips, more realistically to be occasional but a useful entry on the ideas shelf nonetheless. From what I have seen so far, there seems to be plenty of coastal walking and there's hill country to be savoured too. Public transport on the Isle of Man looks workable too with a good level of service on offer. Sunshine may have been encountered in Liverpool rather than my destination but I am not so easily discouraged. If I was, I might have stopped exploring the British and Irish countryside long ago.
Ideas for that week in August are collecting and they aren't all Scottish either. For one thing, there's always the Pennine Way, but Connemara has come to mind already and now the Isle of Man. Scottish proposals like the Rob Roy Way, extending out from Mallaig, the Cairngorms and the north-west Highlands remain in the running. The options may be more open this year but it's good to have them too. Hopefully, something can come of them.
Irish journeys
3rd July 2009 Last weekend saw me across in Éire for a few days and some chances for spending time among its quieter parts were fitted into what was in essence a social visit. The first one was to Gougane Barra on a day that started out looking grey and damp before continual improvement began to become noticeable. That guaranteed some sunshine whenever the clouds got out of the way. Those clouds kept a lid on the temperatures but it would have been nice to have had more sun for photographic purposes. The second escapade took us across the Shannon estuary to Kilkee in West Clare on a day when the weather predictions were even more dubious. Because I was away from the world of Internet connections, television and radio forecast bulletins became important and the trick was to keep an eye on those flashes of time resolved displays and they are never there for very long. For the Gougane Barra outing, the trick was to have the band of grey dampness continue to the north and it didn't disappoint. The reason for heading to Clare was to salvage some satisfaction before a more concerted band of rain arrived from the south and south-west. Hoping for blue skies and sunshine was out of the question but some pleasant coastal strolling along the cliffs more than sufficed. There may have been drops airborne in the strong breeze but you can cope with that. In fact, steady rain did arrive around 15:00 so we left for home after a good few hours taking advantage of what was on offer; we had got something from the day.
Since the real travels, virtual roving has been going on in my mind. Much of this has been driven by curiosity but poring over maps has increased my awareness of the Irish countryside too. For instance, I have been casting my mind over the area round about Clifden in County Galway. Of particular interest are the Twelve Bens in Connemara (some call them Pins but be aware that others cannot abide that naming) and how walks can be made possible by use of public transport. What led me to this was my discovery of Citylink's Galway-Clifden-Cleggan/Letterfrack service. It seems far more user friendly of the alternative offered by Bus Eireann (services 419 and 421 if you're interested), who well may save time, money and effort if they standardised their timetables a bit more in place of the hotchpotch that is there at the moment (even going for a "stopping at anywhere safe" modus operandi would be better than the seemingly overly formal state of affairs that exists now). What really caught my eye was the way that the N59 rounds the Twelve Bens and the stopping points on any bus services that would provide access points for walking; Canal Bridge and Letterfrack both look promising. As you might have been able to tell, Connemara is not a part of the world where I have ever been before so all of this action is building up the picture for a possible future excursion. For now, it will remain on the ideas shelf until an opportunity for making something of the proposal comes to pass.
Freed of the constraints of temporal reality, the brain can course back and forth in time at will and so this posting ends up with my casting my mind into the more distant past. The cause was my collecting up a number of island ferry websites for the Miscellany. The more well known suspects like the Aran islands off the coast of Galway and Tory island off the Donegal coast coast come to mind though they also aren't places where I have been. In fact, I am of the opinion that I have only ever been on one Irish offshore island and that Sherkin island off the coast of Baltimore in West Cork. It was also a while back when I ended up there as part of my first ever school trip, something that was full of new experiences that didn't mean very much to me at that young age. Lengthy coach rides, ferry crossings and walking around an island won't phase me these days but it was a big jump for a small lad on that sunny June day. Descriptions such as enjoyment and suffering wouldn't have been appropriate but it all went rather over my head at the time. Thinking about it now, it's ironic that these are the kinds of thing that I seek out these days and last years escape to the Western Isles had all of those ingredients. To a point, things have come full circle but you have to be ready for opportunities too.
I have already made one leap from the past to the future in this piece and I am now set to repeat the feat. Looking at Sherkin, Cape Clear Island and other bastions of Irish language and culture has me pondering an Irish island hopping trip for sometime. Unlike some of their Scottish counterparts, the islands aren't big so there's no need to bring a car and any of the ferry services that I have found on the web have been for foot passengers only anyway; smaller vessels with a mixture of open and closed decks seem to be commonplace. Even with smaller sizes, the prospect of appealing mixtures of sunlit seascapes and landscapes can only cause one to find out more and I'll be popping onto the ideas shelf to be pulled off for more inspection from time to time.
One use for all of this mental meandering through the Irish countryside and around its shores would be for that longer summer trip that I have every year. However, I haven't counted Scotland out of the running at all and I have too many ideas if anything. All in all, I think that setting down a list is in order. The next task is to whittle my way through the options in readiness for setting off...
