My little village

I can’t think of it as town, officially it is. But whatever you call it, Whaley Bridge in the High Peak of Derbyshire, is facing is biggest ever crisis. The  dam of the reservoir above the village holding 300m gallons of water, has started to fail.

and the town has been evacuated. We are safe, well above the flood zone, and we’ve family, two dogs and a rabbit staying with us.

It’s a fast changing and unprecedented situation.

More info here

And so to work…

Back to work tomorrow. I have a beautiful commute.

It’s 14 years since I worked in retail, but the novelty of being able to have a long break at Christmas and New Year has still not worn off.

Tomorrow I think an extra layer of clothing may be in order, our office can be chilly on a summers day. Two weeks of the office heating ticking over on thrifty frost setting, may mean there is an unseemly dash for the fan heater, first thing. Lets call it an office huddle, we can at least try and look like we are back in harness.

Weighing Things Up

Serious,  weighing things up, at Hope  Show.

Social, chewing the cud

Aspirational, a young handler with his cade lamb

Salted Seasons.

I pulled in the car park at the top of Holme Moss for all ten minuets today and watched four seasons of weather whizz by.

There was hail, sleet and a dash of show

Emly Moor mast,  briefly sparkled in the sun, it stands at over a thousand feet in height and is a Grade II listed building, it puts the wind turbines in the shade.

These dark satanic looking  turbines emerged out of the swirling hail, they brought to mind the film, War of The Worlds, as the seemingly marched across the moors.

Back over the county boundary from Yorkshire into Derbyshire, I met the gritter lorry climbing the steep hill casting its cargo of salt. That’s a shame I thought, I’d have liked a photo of that,  I rather like the bleached grass, the empty road, the tar black winter heather, the flash of orange; but  there was no where to pull over. 

Then it occurred to me that it would, being a Derbyshire county council lorry, turn at the summit and county boundary, and come back down the hill again,  so I swung into one of the big laybys (designed I suspect for when in heavy snow, the gritter lorry can’t make it up the hill and needs to  turn and retreat).

Got it! 

Magpie Mine

Magpie mine, an ancient and historic lead mine, near Sheldon in the Peak District, here having a bit of a winter solstice type moment. 

Lead smelting has been going on in Derbyshire for 3500 years  It a fascinating place,  let me give you a tour round, but let’s take care.

There is something about the place that doesn’t feel quite right, I think it is the lack of accoutrements to the working life that once thrived here. It would have teamed with life,  there would have been noise, smoke, the rattle of harnesses as horses turned the gin wheel. But now It does feel rather eerie.

You can almost feel the life it once had but not quite. It’s as though there is a life inside and below that we can never know.

Something going on behind these locked doors.

As though the shadow of the gallows frame, might start to turn.

Mr Uphilldowndale however is less fanciful than me, he wants me to point out to you, how the lower section of  the chimney in this image is out of plumb* and when a later  brick extension to top has been built they’ve built it vertically, he’s forever the engineer.

We both admired the tunnel flu to this chimney, now partially collapsed

we admired the view too

All around the site are the remnants of spoil from the mine, a bing 

Spoil from lead mines, still poses a problem for farmers, and can kill livestock .  You can often see  clusters of trees, usually with walls around them,

the trees to cover the spoil with their roots,  and the walls as an added deterrent to livestock

Nature takes its course though and flowers and plants grow here that can tolerate the toxicity of the soil ‘metallophytes’,

plants such as the nationally scarce spring sandwort (known locally as leadwort) and alpine penny cress, and Pyrenean

survy grass and mountain pansy.

 

*Plumb, did you see what I did there? [Middle English, lead, a plumb, from Old French plomb, from Latin plumbum, lead.]

17/2/16 Edit…   Lost and now found, the link that has to go with this post,  Peak District Mines Historical Society

Maiden Voyage

Mr Uphilldowndale and I took our first trip out in our  recently purchased camper van yesterday. It’s all very exciting.

We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.  However Spud the dog was a little disappointed in the lack of sofas, or at least sofas he was allowed to lie on.

First though we spent the morning trying to figure out what and where we wanted ‘stuff’ in the van. Had we got everything we needed? My friend Mrs Ogg would rightly say it is a lot of faff.  However in the end we threw stuff in and set off. This plan worked at treat. Historically we do tend to over engineer things.  We didn’t travel far,  just down into the soft landscape of the White Peak and camping at the fabulously named Foufinside Farm at Parwich which was just the ticket.

It had been a glorious day, and I suppose I was a wee bit sad to have missed the best of the day with our faffing, we stopped by at Magpie Mine,  near the village of Sheldon, an ancient lead mine that was last worked in the 1950’s. I’d stumbled upon it before a long time ago, in fact  it was a very early post  on this blog.  But in the way proper adventures, you never know what you might find,  and the late afternoon light turned out to be rather fab and flared through an old window, just for me.

Spookily, I first posted about this somewhat eerie place on the 11th Feb 2008 …

Theories Welcome.

In a bit of a dash between dental appointments and a Macmillan Cancer Support coffee morning, I squeezed in a couple of photo stops.

Well who could resist? It’s near Wildboarclough, Macclesfield Forest.

There is a lovely little holiday cottage, just around the corner and a cosy pub.  what could be nicer?  (Doug’s Dad should take note… )

Then, chasing the light, I zipped  off down towards Derbyshire Bridge, the light was too fast for me. But this caught my eye.

I’m not sure how best to explain, the terrain is rough moorland, peat and heather, as you look at the next photo, you can perhaps see (or imagine) how there is a clough, or gully, running from the  ‘10 o’clock’ position towards the centre of the image, where it opens out into a boggy area, full of rushes, I’d expect the rushes to look like the swath of bright green in the centre of the image, 

but something has laid them flat, like a thatch, a surge of  water maybe? Or a vortex of wind? its a very exposed place.  It did make me think of crop circles.  Maybe at a certain point in the year, the rushes need a lie down?

Come along dear reader, what do you make of it?

Hope Show

I was out and about at Hope Show yesterday, an agricultural show in the glorious Hope Valley.  The weather could have been finer,  but people weren’t going to let a little rain dampen their day.

After all, it is a day off from the usual chores.

It’s always great to see young people being so proud of their livestock.

working really hard to show them at their best,

It takes team work.

A winner  eats it all.

Out early, and down the dale

I decided to set out to work early this morning, so I could factor a walk into my day.

I met a bunny before I could get the camera out of the bag

The majority of the cows were still in the milking parlour

There some beautiful bees and colourful thistles

It was all rather glorious

The walls meandered as much as I did

a view down  the dale, Chee Dale to be precise

I’m still after that elusive crisp wagtail shot.

An afternoon with added value

Yesterday morning, it rained and rained, it was hard to imagine anything much could be salvaged from the day, but I was wrong, about two PM the clouds parted and the sun shone through. I grabbed the camera and shot off to Mam Tor, we’ve been there before. The sun gods turned on the charm.

and gave me a much needed blast of lumens, to keep the blues away.

The Edale valley.

came complete with a bedraggled looking film crew, something to do with a man on a bike, but more than that I can’t tell you

Love how the bonfire smoke is flowing off down the valley.

The reason for my visit was that I’d been to a presentation about the geology and scenery of the Northern Peak District,hosted by Derbyshire Wildlife Trust; and I wanted to see if I could identify some of the features I’d heard about. However an added bonus was an encounter with a stoat

He bounded along by a nearby wall (stoats bound, weasels hunker down to the ground)  at times  airborne

  

it looked in good form, weaving in and out of the tussocky grass

its coat had a conker gloss

In the end it was chased off by a rook, and it slunk away under a fence in to a marshy field (you can just see the stoat by the fence post).

Well that was an unexpected treat.

By the time I worked my way back to the car, the sun was low enough to catch the marsh grasses,

and some very large puddles,

I’d have been wise to take a change of footwear.