Collected Musings of a Hill Wanderer

The duller weather that we have been having recently has allowed me to stay away from the hills and engage in a blizzard of website updates. Since the holiday year at my work starts in July, I took some time off to use up my allocation and got through a few things. I’d probably have headed off somewhere but for the weather forecast and my needing a breather after all these weekends that I have been away over the last month. Even so, I did get out on my bike when the sun came out yesterday evening.

Last December, I got to York to do a spot of Christmas shopping (yes, that!) and my camera came too. For a few months, a picture of the York Minster taken from the city’s old walls graced my desktop. Now it graces www.johnhennessy.co.uk and my desktop features a view of the Isle of Arran (more on that later).

Ribblesdale in the Yorkshire Dales features some of the wilder country in the area. It is also home to Yorkshire’s Three Peaks. Although, they are not peaks as such, the three peaks in question are among the highest in the Pennines, that hilly English backbone extending from Derbyshire to the border with Scotland. There was a time when one of their number, Ingleborough, was thought to be the highest point in England. That honour has since gone to Scafell Pike in the Lake District.

My acquaintance with the Three Peaks started with a view from a train window while on journeys between Yorkshire and Edinburgh in 2000, while I was working in the former. It wasn’t until 2004 that I scaled Pen-y-ghent, the one that I first saw four years earlier.That day started off cloudy, a bit like what’s outside my window right now, before the cloud broke up to give a fantastic evening.

However, it wasn’t until earlier this year that I surmounted the other two: Ingleborough and Whernside. Apart from meeting slushy snow, my day out on Ingleborough was as uneventful as my exploration of Pen-y-ghent and nearby Plover Hill. Also, the sun showed its face as I neared Ingleton (Ribblehead station was my starting point). After this, I decided to complete the trio with a yomp over Whernside, the highest of the lot. The trek has everything going for it: views of the Howgill Fells and the country around Ribblesdale. However, to see all this you need the weather. It started well and I had ample opportunity to sample views of Pen-y-ghent and Ingleborough but there was plenty of grey cloud up north. This was a sign of things to come: as I contended with iced-up flagged paths (I preferred the snow covered banks by the side) on my final approach, the clag came in. Armed with a good map and provided with a clear track and an almost continuous wall, I was safe (my concern for safety meant that I missed out on the trig point atop the hill: a minor point in the circumstances). In addition, there were other folk about (a mad bunch, us hill bums). Apart from the odd snow flake, everything remained dry. Going down, though, I encountered rain and it was a damp trudge back to Ribblehead station (and a cold wait until the train home arrived: need to get a new waterproof jacket; the water resistance of the one I have has given up the ghost).

Following that experience, you’d think that I wouldn’t return but I do have designs on a ramble from Ingleborough to Dent. There is more to see in these parts yet.

Over the last few weeks, I have been tweaking the appear of the navigation bars on www.johnhennessy.co.uk to make them look a little more contemporary. The buttons have been tarted up and pop-up boxes (not windows) replace drop-down menus. Please let me know if this is not as clear as it was. I have also taken the opportunity to check my web page code (XHTML and CSS) against the web standards at www.w3.org. There remains a little work to be done in order to finish things off and I am sure that standards compliance, including keeping web page code semantic, will remain an ongoing task. Even though this is a very visual site, accessibility (a hot topic at the moment) is still a consideration so I hope to be able to look into this too.

I have just added a few photos to my online photo gallery from a number of rambles in the Peak District. The first of these was last September when I walked from Edale to Glossop, over Kinder Scout on the Pennine Way before following the Doctor’s Gate path to my final destination. It is country that I have walked before, though not maybe using this route. The day was glorious, even if the sky was more milky than I would have liked.

The other occasion featured is from March of this year when a planned trip to the Derbyshire Dales was cancelled when I saw the snow on the hills between Macclesfield and Buxton. I got off the bus at the Cat and Fiddle Inn and headed around Shining Tor into the Goyt Valley and on to Buxton on the Midshires Way. Last winter, my boots saw more snow than usual and the powder dry snow underfoot on that day was a joy to walk on, even if I had misgivings about leaving footprints on a pristine white coating.

The Peak District is on my doorstep and I get to experience it when the distractions of more distant destinations are not so strong. It covers parts of Staffordshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire and it should come as no surprise that the area is well frequented thanks to its being surrounded by the cities of Manchester, Sheffield, Derby and Stoke-on-Trent. Good transport links help as well. Britain’s first national park was established here to manage the development of the area so that it can be enjoyed by future generations.The quality of the countryside and its industrial past mean that this is a very important need.

The last two weekends have seen me revisit southern Scotland. This weekend saw me among the Southern uplands. My base was Lockerbie (of Pan Am 103 fame) but my walking took me in and around Moffat. One of my rambles was a circular route involving the Southern Upland Way. I was returning to Moffat by road when a friendly motorist offered a lift to Moffat and I took him up on the offer (not something that I’d normally do for obvious reasons…). That gave me more time for exploring and I got a glimpse of the Devil’s Beef Tub to boot. I also got to Lochmaben, four miles from Lockerbie. All this got done yesterday but, though pleasant, the day was largely cloudy and the sun came out just as I had to leave Moffat for Lockerbie (sod’s law, really): a later bus would have been perfect. The threat of rain today brought me home on the first southbound train of the day. Nevertheless, the scenery was wonderful and a return is very tempting.

Last weekend, I planned to savour the hills of Northumberland but accommodation availability in Berwick-upon-Tweed changed my plans: it was still useful for a Friday night arrival. Next day, I took myself off to Galashiels and dropped off part of my load at the Abbotsford Arms Hotel (Abbotsford was the name of Sir Walter Scott’s home in the area) before heading for a ramble from Peebles to Innerleithen by way of an old drovers’ road and the Southern Upland Way. Unlike yesterday, the sun was very much out and it would have been quite hot if a useful, if strong, breeze hadn’t blown up. Sunday saw me take a short stroll around Galashiels before heading home.

As promised, here is an account of my trip to Pembrokeshire last weekend. An article in TGO and the gift of a fine weekend propelled a somewhat hastily arranged visit. The fact that I was in Ireland on what turned out to be a gardening holiday (yep, work rather than leisure) didn’t give me any more time to pull myself together. As if that weren't enough, a Friday afternoon meeting threatened to derail an already precarious plan.

Nevertheless, I did get there in the end. After work, I headed southwest on a journey that took me around by Birmingham. Bristol and Swansea. Defeating the conspiracy of a late First Great Western express to scupper the last leg of the journey, I got to Carmarthen almost as planned (even if I was 20 minutes late!); the provision by FGW of a taxi from Swansea helped towards that end.

Next morning, I got to my Pembrokeshire base of Haverfordwest. That might come as a surprise to some but it functioned as intended and I got to sample the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, which was my main reason for coming all this way. Public transport options allowed me to savour the delights around St. David’s, Marloes and Newport before I made my way back home on Monday. That gave me plenty of walking and sea air to enjoy, even if things got a little too hot at times. The up-and-down nature of the stretch between Newgale and St. David’s left me feeling a little “cream-crackered” but the walking around Marloes was a lot easier on the legs. Only having an hour or two meant that I only got a brief taste of the hill country around Newport but a return is a definite possibility.

My journey home took me through Cardigan, Aberystwyth, Shrewsbury and Crewe but this was more direct than the way that I came and could be way I would go if I got the opportunity to return again. After all, there is much more to see. For instance, the Preseli hills are definitely worthy of exploration and I only sampled a fraction of the 186 mile (299 km) length of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path (though the heavily-industrialised section around Pembroke and Milford Haven is an acquired taste).