A Wanderer's Country Amblings

If you are a magazine publisher, it helps if you can do so to a regular schedule. Walking World Ireland has fallen foul of that more than once within the last year and it has taken five months for the current issue to arrive, both to subscribers and to shops. Last year’s annual featured multiple walking routes taken directly from Collins Press’ series of walking guides instead of coming from regular contributors such as Dennis Gill and Tom Hutton. That left me wondering if financial troubles were the cause of that though the content wasn’t any less useful as a result.

For any struggling magazine, an irregular publishing schedule is the sort of habit that needs breaking. It also was one that afflicted the now defunct Cycling World magazine and it leaves a gap in the marketplace these days. If you were after a magazine that prioritised route features over cycling kit, then this would have been the one to have. Now that it’s gone, it seems that coverage and reviews of new bikes and other pieces of equipment is what sells and that the experience of getting out in the countryside to clear your head is playing second fiddle.

Thankfully, walking is more about the experience of being out of doors in the countryside than about the kit that you use. The result has been that we are keen to read about new routes and the experiences of others. Walking World Ireland has done well on both counts for as long as I have known it and gives prominence to a country whose countryside deserves it. Reassuring, the latest late edition has something of the character to which I have come to expect of the magazine. There are two routes from a longstanding regular contributor (Tom Hutton) and Andy Callan is doing gear reviews. EastWest Mapping still supply route maps so things feel as if they may be returning to normal.

However, there are changes afoot too and these are described in an otherwise apologetic editorial. The publishing frequency is set to go from bimonthly to quarterly and a digital edition is planned too. Hopefully, that will be available for Android tablets (there is a Nexus 7 in my possession) and that blinding by iPad isn’t witnessed as has been the case for other magazines. It sounds as if the last few months have been difficult ones for a magazine that has been with us since 1993 so I hope that it has a future in uncertain economic times. Hopefully, the ample amount of satisfying Irish walking will continue to have a place on newstands because it is more than deserved. With subscriptions priced now from €18, the offering looks more attractive than it ever did.

Update 2013-05-20:  Cycling World magazine has turned out not to be as defunct as I thought that it was; the May issue is out now and I have a copy in my possession after a visit to the Macclesfield branch of W H Smith on Saturday. However, the Walking World Ireland website is down as write these words so that’s not a happy harbinger for its continued existence after there being a troubled year for the magazine.

It’s been quiet on here since last February and part of the cause has been a life event. Within the last few weeks, my aged mother passed away after a short illness. There were other underlying medical problems too so we couldn’t expect the increasingly frail lady to be around forever. Yet, she went quicker than we would have grown to expect. In fact, it was my father who was of greater concern with his nearly dying on us at the start of January. Miraculously, he came from that but still needs round the clock nursing care. That has placed him in a nursing home and it’s not something that he is accepting easily; ever so often, we have the pain of him inventing schemes to get away from there and it’s very far from being a bad example of the breed. Loneliness, grief and perhaps a certain amount of homesickness may be behind his ever more desperate and worrying suggestions. He cannot live as he did before so it would be great to see him settle where he is.

It’s at times like these that a good natter with a friend can mean so much, especially someone who intimately knows a little of situation that is being faced. Also, there’s trotting through countryside. Most of these are short strolls in nearby parks in Wilmslow and Macclesfield. There is something about purposeful striding that gets stress out of your system (much better than taking it out on someone else anytime) while also allowing a bit of head clearing thinking. Amusing encounters with other folk’s dogs lift the spirit too.

There was a longer trot in the sunshine of last Saturday from Hayfield to Glossop via Coldwell Clough, Kinder Reservoir, William Clough and Doctor’s Gate. It was the prospect of going through a less peopled countryside that was the cause of drawing me there. There wasn’t complete desertion though even if there was more than plenty of space for everyone. It granted me the long episodes of solitude that allowed for gazing upon the surrounding moorland and dealing with any unevenness in the terrain; the Doctor’s Gate footpath was a little tricky due to subsidence and areas of banked snow but most of my course was less taxing than this, even those snow banks I found higher up William Clough. Mostly, I wasn’t concentrating much on where my legs needed to travel and more on enjoying the experience of being out and about, of feeling that not all life comes to a stop when a loved one is lost.

Hopefully, there will be more of those longer outdoor escapades. My mother may wonder at where I went but she loved the outdoors too. Scenic parts of counties Kerry and Cork were particular favourites but Connemara and Wicklow saw their way into her canon also. She was the one who most appreciate any souvenir volumes of landscape photos that I ever brought as gifts. The last of these that I ever gave to her came from a trip to Isle of Man, a gift for Mother’s Day. Of special delight to her was the exposure to sea air with many a trip to Irish seaside destinations such as Ballybunion, Beale, Ballyheigue and Banna (all in County Kerry as it happened and she a Corkwoman) resulted from this desire. Though I do coastal walking, I never have been a seaside person with my own preferences causing day outings to Gougane Barra and Killarney. In fact, the best ever visit to the latter also had the best weather of a hot sunny Sunday in May 2010. With a decline in my father’s wellbeing, that was our last such trip like that together and its memories are all the more important now.

It is from my parents that I got the hill country bug that has been the cause of so many excursions. Times may be trying now but they also may be cause of my getting out and about more too. In times past, it may have caused some conflicts of its own but the head clearing properties of a good walk are more than apt right now.

While I must admit a certain partiality to books of the dead tree variety and it’s the presentation that often makes them an alluring acquisition. Of course, that’s why they are made that way in the first place: books of pleasant appearance get taken into a customer’s hands in a bookshop, become read a little and leave with their new custodian following payment. If lapses into temptation happen faster than your rate of reading, then a collection of unread volumes may build. Not being a book antiquarian, I tend to think this not a good use of money even if the outcome befalls me from time to time. Taking my time over reading means that I never got along with two week loan periods from libraries because I always seemed to find other distractions for one reason or another.

The trick naturally is to make some time for reading. Doing it before settling down for the night is what many do and it ends up in so many television and movie dramas too. There was a time when I did that but it has been a habit that I lost. Now, I am more likely to use a book to shorten a long journey but that means bringing one with me in the first place and that has been a weakness in the past.

Computer technology has been the cause of elbowing its way into time that I may have had for watching television or reading books and magazines. Ironically, it also has solved the problem of not having a book with me when I fancied a spot of reading. The rise of tablet computers was something that I resisted until last summer saw me acquire a Nexus 7 from Google. Within the last few months, I have gotten to adding books to it from the Google Play and Amazon Kindle stores.

This started with Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma, perhaps a more serious polemical tome, and then moved to something more in keeping with the subject of this place. It was Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways. This isn’t the first of this author’s books that has come in my possession since I also have a paperback edition of Mountains of the Mind on a shelf that got plucked from its roost to sit on the desk in front of me as I set to writing these words. While getting around to reading books the first time around has been an issue for me, it now feels as if I should re-read this one to see how it compares with what followed it. Currently, I am in the middle of the second member of the loose trilogy, The Wild Places and I first read through Macfarlane’s first book over a Christmas and New Year stretch in Ireland the most of a decade ago now. The passage of time shows up the power of a memory so it’d be good to see what it says again.

In essence, The Old Ways is a series of essays with the ghosts of Edward Thomas and Nan Shepherd featuring in an attempt to thread them together. The resultant sense of connection is not so strong and some have wondered at whether it was a necessary thing to try. The immersive tales of personal journeys draw you along though and make you feel that Macfarlane is good company for a long journey; you can escape your immediate surroundings and virtually join him on his various journeys over land, by sea and over sea. If he is trying to attach a sense of history to the various trails that he has followed, then he has succeeded. However, I am unconvinced as to whether it does so as an attempt to understand the mindset of Edward Thomas before penning a brief biography of the doomed poet. Maybe it’s best to have the sense that paths go in all sorts of directions and that it is difficult to reconciled them into a meaningful whole. That could be another lesson.

Not having read The Wild Places before The Old Ways might have produced the sense of approaching the former from an unintentional angle. The latter’s series of stories is borrowed by its successor and maybe more successfully too. Going through a series of landscapes like moor, forest and river valley creates a sequences that allows even disparate tales and experiences to sit together far better than it might suggest. The sense of history turns up too as do those who have in past times written of those places less influenced by human activity. Still, apparent wildness can result from inhumanity and the Scottish Clearances have become a byword for that (the Irish farming folk of the nineteenth made sure that the same fate wasn’t as easy to meet out to them, so much so that the British parliament acting to finance their buying of land and thus ensuring a more peopled countryside in much of the island). Plenty of immersive experiences draw me along and they work better in short sessions too, an attribute that works well for The Old Ways too. Maybe it might be good for ensuring a re-reading of Mountains of the Mind to replenish the memories of reading that the first time around.

After those, there’s Simon Armitage’s Walking Home too. This follows the Pennine Way and a suitably evocative passage recalling waking up in a YHA hostel got that onto my list too. Covers may begin the selling process of a book but it’s the writing that matters. With the advance of eBooks, it’s the presentation of paper books that is going to matter if we are to continue to have them; you almost are going to have be convinced of the need for a long term sale in some way. The electronic ones are great for portability but they are no so good for holding the hand and dipping in and out of random pages or of seeing how long chapters are, a sort of sneaky peek at your progress. Still, they’re getting me not to forget some reading so long as I manage to organise a WiFi connection for the gadget. A spot of curiosity has seen me locate Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain so who knows what could accompany me next? It would be even better if they came on a journey into hill country as well.

Having glimpsed it from a walk in January of last year, thoughts of strolling along the length of the Goyt valley took until early in last October to become reality. Though the day itself had plenty of sun, the soggy summer meant that there were plenty of muddy stretches to be encountered. After all, the head of valley is a watershed and they hardly ever are dry places to be going even when a drier year comes our way.

My walk started from the Cat and Fiddle Inn and the sunshine had thrown a confusion of decisions my way before I even left Macclesfield at all. First, there was the prospect of retracing my steps along the Gritstone Trail between Bollington and Disley. Though it was a wrench at the time, that prospect happily got used up at the end of the next month. There also was another possibility that involved travelling along paths and tracks that I sampled before: going from the Cat and Fiddle Inn back home again via Shutlingsloe and Macclesfield Forest. The weather aborted that round of indecision with advancing clouds from the south and so I journeyed towards Whaley Bridge. There is another round of retracing of steps in the form of going to Whaley Bridge via Shining Tor, Windgather Rocks and Kettleshulme and that happily was left for another time as was going towards Rainow via Lamaload Reservoir. With the number of excuses for going around those parts, it makes me wonder why I cannot summon the zeal to do so more often than I do; maybe the cares of life weigh on me more than they should and that gaining a little perspective may be in order.

As with a number of those previous trots, I walked by the side of the A537 until I met with a path towards either Shining Tor or the Goyt Valley depending on your itinerary and I have embarked on both at different times. As it happened on that Sunday in October, I made as if for the latter but with a different twist to what I did on one of those previous outings.

That twist was to involve taking a right turn before any of those left turns that I took on those prior explorations. Doing so meant my descent down a slope that became increasingly muddy as I grew ever nearer to Stake Clough and continued in that vein all the way to Deep Clough. It didn’t stop others doing the same as me though they did thin out over time. For those who braved the ground conditions, there were ample rewards in the form of views east towards Burbage Edge and north up the Goyt Valley towards Errwood Reservoir and beyond that again.

Once past the wood surrounding Goytsclough Quarry, it was time to drop onto tarmac again. That dalliance didn’t last long though I might have been tempted to go up the road for a footpath going across Goyt’s Moss. Instead, I chose dropping down to a nearby footbridge and following a less formal path instead. It too had its quieter interludes and granted me views towards the woods on the side of Hoo Moor and of Errwood Reservoir itself too. Naturally, the going remained muddy though I was less surprised by this than others who I met coming against me; one gentleman was wearing trail shoes and I gathered from the few word that we shared that he’d have come more prepared if he’d realised what was ahead of him.

Over time, the cloud cover was progressing on its northbound journey just as I was. Sounder ground was my lot as I rounded the reservoir to meet a track that was better again. Maybe that is how some were deceived into going further than perhaps they ought to have done. My course took me along the lower slopes of Wild Moor and involved a dogleg around by a bridge over Wildmoorstone Brook. Around there, there was a minor profusion of right of way signs luring me into seemingly isolated countryside that felt as if moorland extended in all directions. It’s amazing how less tame corners exist surrounded by man-made intrusions like roads and reservoirs.

With a course set in my mind, I left those other itineraries for another time to join a right of way for the rest of the journey to the dam of Errwood Reservoir. Though I was going along its side, tree cover meant that it wasn’t in sight all of the time either.  Advancing cloud cover was overtaking me by now too though that didn’t perturb me unduly. Any pleasing photos from that dam would need another day and provide a useful excuse to come and visit these parts again.

The going along that public wasn’t anywhere near as muddy as it was further up the valley and conditions underfoot were set to become even more solid when I met the road going down to the reservoir dam. This had a former life as part of the original course of the High Peak railway from Cromford to Whaley Bridge that took an uncompromising line around Buxton and down the Goyt Valley. The remains of the old alignments are still in place to be seen near Buxton and I have been passing some of them without realising their significance. They date from a time early in railway history with a mixture of horsepower and stationery steam engines were the way of things until self-propelled steam locomotives overtook both.

One across the dam of one reservoir, it was time to meet up with another: Fernilee. My crossing of Errwood’s dam meant that I had declined sticking with the old route of the High Peak Railway to follow a track through woodland beneath Hoo Moor. The last time that I had been along here, I had been following the Midshires Way from Buxton to Whaley Bridge of a showery summer day. That got a little complex and needed map reading in the rain, not a good combination when you only have a paper map and no map case. That the sun emerged from clouds every time a shower came upon me was a perplexing experience that cut down on any photographic efforts.

Not being in the mood for a navigation test, I stuck with low level path right by the shore of Fernilee Reservoir. There wasn’t much scope for photography either because of the overcast skies but there can be another time for that activity. However, lunch still was a possibility and I stopped at a useful bench for that. Folk were out and about with a loud child noising on the opposite bank, leaving me wonder why some folk feel the need to shatter peaceful silence. There was irritation or rancour in my mind cause by this since there was plenty of space for all of us.

These reservoirs provide drinking water for the town of Stockport, a surprise to see that one of them (Errwood) hosts a boating club. More in tune with its use, Fernilee hosts no such antics and I suppose that water treatment plants take care of the differences even if signs around the likes of Trentabeck Reservoir near Macclesfield have signs on their banks advising against messing up a water supply. After the foot of Fernilee Reservoir, there was one more dam to be crossed before embarking on a gentle walk by the River Goyt.

Dropping down from the dam, I left the course of the old railway to pass more industrial workings before emerging into quiet fields once again. There was a sense that the day was darkening noticeably at this stage as I picked my way from field to field and across stretches of woodland too. The last of these was Shallcross Wood and it was around hear where my OS OL24 should have been followed by my OL1, if I had not neglected to bring the latter with me. However, the A5004  was near at hand anyway and a little stretch of following my nose was enough to get me on there at Horwich End.

The rest of my trot was by the A5004 as it took me into the heart of Whaley Bridge. The timing of that last half mile meant that any designs on catching the next train to Stockport were extinguished; legs only can be pushed to go so fast at times and this was one of those. By train station, folk were waiting at the nearby shelter for the next bus towards the same destination, and onto Manchester Airport in some cases, so my walk happily finished there. However, the Goyt Valley cannot be ticked off as if on a list so there could be more exploring to do around there yet.

Travel Arrangements:

Bus service 58 from Macclesfield to Cat & Fiddle Inn. Bus service 199 from Whaley Bridge to Stockport and train from Stockport to Macclesfield again.

Last night, I saw BBC video clips about the phenomenon that has been behind our cold spell. Apparently, a mixing of air between the troposphere (up 10 km high) and the stratosphere (10-50 km high) in the atmosphere has disrupted the usual polar winter vortex and had an effect on our weather too with the usual Atlantic jet stream getting blocked and winds drawing cold air from Europe over too us. Part of this whole thing is something called sudden stratospheric warming and it gives weather forecasters a hint of what is to come even if it doesn’t become an Arctic spell of wintry weather like what we are getting now.

Macclesfield’s nearby hills have been getting their share of the white stuff but its hold on the town is more tenuous. In fact, there was a semblance of a thaw earlier on today. Many pavements were clear of ice and snow as I popped down the Riverside Park by the river Bollin for a short taste of the winter conditions. There were plenty of folk out and about too and many of them were walking dogs. Not everywhere was coated in white and the river was flowing well too.

The sights of green grass with which I was surrounded could be changed though by what is falling from the sky as I am writing these words. It is nowhere near as heavy as some places though the Met Office is forecasting near constant if light snowfall for tonight and tomorrow so who knows what could build up on us? Still, we are not expecting dumps like what south Wales and southeast England got or what has been predicted for both sides of the Scotland-England border.

Funnily enough, times like these used to have me wondering about seeing hills and they coated in white but the excitement of snowfall appears to have been lost for me for whatever reason. It might have been those cold spells in the winters of 2009/10 and 2010/11 when I got my fill but there may be other factors. After all, having ageing parents means a certain amount of worry in times like these and there is the obvious nuisance factor of snow and ice too. Or is it the general greyness that seems to be accompanying this cold snap where I live? Still, the mix of white snow and grey skies can be a powerful one in photos so that could liberate me for whatever is jaundicing my outlook right now. It’d be no harm leaving the cares of the world behind me for a while to enjoy something that usually happens to be ephemeral in our climate.

As it so happens, my eyes have been feasting on sunlit greens and not grey whiteness. The cause has been a catch up with trip reports from last summer and autumn. There should be more to come and I may have one from this year in the form of a walk along the Macclesfield Canal from Congleton to home from last Sunday too. The one long walk a month plan remains and I am hoping to be among hills more often too. Of course, that depends on how life goes this year and that is a story yet to told and may have a few unexpected twists and turns too. January, normally a quieter month, has been a roller coaster ride already too so I’m keeping an open mind as to how things will go from here.

Update 2013-01-21: Overnight, Macclesfield (and its nearby hills too since keeping the roads from Buxton to Macclesfield and Congleton is quite an effort) did get quite an accumulation of snow until it stopped around midday. Some of it has melted since but there still is a lot of whitening with snow sticking to trees now too. With the cold week ahead, it looks like it’ll stay a while too so a weekend escapade may come to pass. It’s not likely to be too adventurous and a train journey along the Settle to Carlisle railway line came to mind last week. Making a loop of that outing using the west coast mainline popped into my head too. It’s a far cry from the heights where you’d need an ice axe and some avalanche awareness. Maybe I might get to the foothills yet like I did in previous cold snaps; today’s whitening certainly brightened my day in its own way.