Hacked Off

In more than one sense of the word. A walk to one of my favourite spots,

revealed some tree stumps all that remained of some handsome Scots pines.

it’s National Trust land (that’s leased for grazing) so I wouldn’t have expected to see such crude forestry management,

Walking deeper into the stand of trees, I found the reason. Someone’s idea of ‘al fresco’ dining on a summers evening.

Kid’s? well probably older than that, as I suspect they would have driven up there and parked in the layby, after all you wouldn’t want to walk far carrying an axe, booze and BBQ food, but who ever, it really hacks me off. I live in hope that next time they will get more than they were looking for

Numbers Game

 

Preparations continue for Mr Uhdd’s attempt on the fell running challenge ‘The Bob Graham Round’ and whilst there has been a lot of training on the fells, there has been an awful lot of work in the planning, it’s like a military operation, and Mr Uhdd’s running club are seasoned campaigners. You are not alone in this assault on 42 of Lake District summits, each runner has the fell runners equivalent of a Doula, better known as a pacer, well several in fact for, at least one for each of the 4  legs of the attempt, they keep the runner on track, carry gear, navigate and provide support, company and motivation (it’s is as  much a mental challenge as a physical one.) The attempt is an impressive team effort. As well as the pacers there will be welcome support where the route crosses roads, here preferred food and beverage along with pre-packed bags of spare clothes, back up fell shoes and other goodies will be available.

I am struggling a little with the catering, for one thing I can’t quite get my head round how your guts can cope with eating running  and digesting at the same time (and we have planned for the eventuality that they can’t) and then there is the issue of what your body will crave, under such punishing conditions, my brief is tuna sandwiches (tuna, canned in brine, he’ll need the salt) with extra mayo, to hold the thing together, energy bars and gels, cereal bars. But the feed back we get from those who have ‘been there’, is you might ask your support team to prepare a bowl of hot porridge with honey at the road crossing, a plate of pasta, or a bowl of stew; but when you get there you are likely to want to eat things you normally hate, so I am tasked with going shopping, for thing Mr Uhdd would normally never eat, ‘Cup a Soup’ and ‘Pot Noodle’s’ being my starting point.

And what to drink, well this lot for a start

We don’t as a household, use ’sports cap’ mineral water bottles as a one off disposable item, we refill them with tap water until they are worn out, and as there is no way they are going to get left on the fells, the majority of these bottles will retuning home after the event and will be falling out of the kitchen cupboards with annoying regularity for many moths if not years to come

 

Our PC has been groaning under the strain of keeping up with the barrage of GPS way points, maps, spreadsheets, schedules, emails and attachments. So here are some numbers for the geeky.

24 hours to run and climb;

42, peaks, that means if you spend a  minute at each summit, admiring the view it will add you add 42 minutes to your overall time, you can’t afford to fritter that amount of time away, some of last weekends ‘BG’ runners finished with only 5 min to spare; if you want to look at the view, go back another day and take a picnic on this occasion only running and time matter.

66miles to go, at a guesstimate of two thousand strides to the mile that equals 128,000 strides, that’s an eighth of a million

26,500 feet of ascent, not far short of an Everest, from sea level.

Its not a big job it won’t take long.

Unwrapping the present

It was my birthday last week, I was given some beautiful scented lilies and a lens for the camera, I haven’t yet got to grips with the lens, the sensation is not unlike like swapping the family hatch back for a high performance sports car, I am not in quite in control, but I can ‘feel’ it’s potential. More test drives required.

Cliff Hanger

A group of climbers, at the top of their pitch.

All Roads Lead to the Lake District

We’ve been in the Lake District this weekend; Joe’s school had an activity weekend in Brrowdale, Mr Uhdd had a fell race to run and Tom’s school had a choir event in the South Lakes. I played out with the camera.

The Sunday morning dawned bright and clear, Mr Uhdd woke early and felt the need to share this information with me, in fact he was more direct he said ‘You need to get out with the camera, NOW!’ So at 06:00hrs on Sunday morning I was at the Summit of the Honister pass, it was a special place to be.

Despite the ridiculous time, it was so still and tranquil

Well it was tranquil until, I came across a quartet of cockerels at the Honister Slate mine, they were cock a doodle doing as such birds do at sunrise, (take a look at the mines web site for some excellent aerial photos of the area.)

the sound reverberated for miles down the pass, (Kingmagic, you would have been impressed.)

I’ve another busy week ahead, before the children break for half term holidays, so I might just drip feed you Lakeland scenes, watch this space.

Isolated Showers

An away day this weekend, we yomped off on to the moors to help plant thousands of cotton grass plants

on the Kinder plateau;  Joe, Tom and I were joined by a friend and her son ‘the young man’ who is only five.

The forecast was for ‘isolated showers’. I think the showers decided they needed ‘to get out more’ and had found each other on some sort of  Internet ‘metrological forum’  and decide to meet up for the day, on Kinder Scout: we were on the hills for five hours, it rained persistently for four of them!

It was my plan to show you lots of arty shots of cotton grass planting, but it was just too wet for anything more than a couple of grab shots, and they are of poor quality, sorry; but on with the story

Kinder Scout, is important  both historically and environmentally, in 1932 it was the location for a protest march, that paved the way for the public rights to access to areas of open country; a report from the Manchester Guardian newspaper, dated April 24th 1932

‘Four or five hundred ramblers, mostly from Manchester, trespassed in mass on Kinder Scout to-day. They fought a brief but vigorous hand-to-hand struggle with a number of keepers specially enrolled for the occasion. This they won with ease, and then marched to Ashop Head, where they held a meeting before returning in triumph to Hayfield. Their triumph was short-lived, for there the police met them, halted them, combed their ranks for suspects, and detained five men. Another man had been detained earlier in the day.’

Environmentally, the area has taken a hammering

‘As the environmental pressure on the area has grown over the last 200 years – due to a combination of acid rain, major wildfires and past excessive grazing – the peat soil has become so degraded that, instead of reducing carbon in the air, it is actively releasing it back into the atmosphere.’ 

 

It is a wild landscape, deep black peat, that shakes like a jelly if you jump up and down on it

The cotton grass planting is a National Trust project, to stabilise the area, despite the weather more volunteers had turned out than expected; many hands make light work, so  when we made it up there they had just planted the last plant not 5 mins before. This could have be akin to telling ‘the young man’ on Christmas eve, that Santa was make believe! It was a long walk for one so young, his mum coaxed the National Trust Wardens in to digging a couple of plants back up again, so that he could plant his all important cotton plant.

(Cotton grass on a sunnier day!)

Tom and Joe just had to take the disappointment on their rain drenched chins. 

As made our way home the National Trust wardens, who were no doubt glad to get off the hill and out of the rain earlier than expected, bumped  past us down the track.

The weather and the planting didn’t turn out quite how we expected but the day was something of an adventure.

Feathered Nest

Gusty winds the other day must have dislodged this nest, I found it on the ground

It’s a work of art, dainty, only four inches wide and two deep, it’s constructed from a wide selection of materials, lichens, mosses, twigs, we could identify, both cat and the dog hair and it’s  lined with feathers

We were impressed by it’s craftsmanship and as Tom commented

‘ And just think, birds haven’t got any hands.’

He has a point, you try building that with no other tool than a beak!

Sadly they will have to start all over again, with better foundations.

Fast Forward

Spring has sprung

The weather over the last week has alternated between warm and wet, the result is that you can almost hear things growing, spring is gathering pace, it struck me yesterday evening that the stark, silhouetted landscapes I have been photographing and blogging about for the past few months,  are disappearing fast under a rising tide of ‘greenness’  I am not sure I know how to do ‘verdant’ or if I do, I’ve forgotten.

This morning it’s rained, heavily, but soft rain if you get my drift, ‘growing rain’ my dad would have called it. Earlier on the dandelions were tight shut, but within half an hour of the sun braking through, the field had come out in a rash of yellow spots.

The field next to ours is more intensively managed, it’s had sheep grazing on it, so there is less length of grass and not a dandelion in sight.  But in our field, there is work to be done, but where do you start, one bee so many dandelions..

I must away to to give a little thought, to the Noddy challenge

Gone With the Wind

Little Fluffy Things

Got a bit of a fright yesterday, when taking an empty bottle to the recycling tub in porch, something grey and furry, shot, at speed, round the back of the tub, now we have over the years had all sorts of wild and wonderful things brought in through the cat flap (and into the house for that matter, before mad Moss the dog, became kitchen gate keeper refusing ingress or egress to cat or vermin)  and I was a bit worried it might be a rat,we know they are out there, so very  cautiously  peered around the back of the tub to find this little sweetie

So whilst I caught it, Tom got the camera; the rabbit was so grateful to be rescued from the jaws of death,

that it peed all over my fleece, and it also had (for such a sweet looking little thing) very sharp claws (the rabbit not the cat.)

Tom and I released it back into the field, our dilemma being which field, north, south east, west, we had no idea in which direction it’s burrow lay. We settled on west, although on reflection that might have been a mistake, as that is also the direction, as the crow flies, of our neighbours vegetable patch.

The cats have brought us, wildlife as diverse as bats and stoats, I was sort of glad and sad that the stoat was dead, I imagine they aren’t as easy to catch as a young rabbit and they have very sharp teeth, have a read about such a thing here, an excellent blog, as recommended by the Scottish Officer

 

Have a sublime Saturday.

 

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