Collected Musings of a Hill Wanderer

I was out earlier this evening on an A to B trip on my bike when a shower of sleet came upon me, not a problem with my being appropriately attired. Even if I got snow, the lugs on my mountain bike's tyres would have coped; yes, they are staying inflated so far. Speaking of the fluffy while stuff, there is a plentiful supply of that emanating from the sky right now and it is coating everywhere in white. Getting about on foot now looks like a job for my North Face Hedgehogs and any wondering about a pre-Christmas outdoors outing could have snow-covered countryside on the agenda. Methinks that I need to decide where to go, a task that may or may not be made easier by my adding an at a glance collection of Met Office mountain weather forecast summaries on here. After all, there is a need for preparation for the prevailing conditions as last Friday in Cheshire proved by its feeling like being in a chest freezer with fans turned on. Without any wind, daytime temperatures were around freezing in the lowlands anyway and below that (-2.5° C) in Buxton and Leek. With temperatures like those, it's best not to be rushing out to become a mountain rescue statistic.

In recent days, Mapyx has brought out OSNI 1:50000 Discoverer mapping data for Quo with 1:25000 due to follow. Having found some free time, I got a quick chance to metaphorically kick some tyres. As with OSi maps, you cannot have OS maps and OSNI maps open at once but there is no bar to shuttling over and back across the Irish border in the digital world. Tiles for either provider are £1.99 each with the entire OSNI set going for a not unreasonable £39.99.

However, there are no grid lines on the NI maps that I have in my sample. That surprised me and makes rough and ready estimations of distance a non-starter; you need to use Quo's route planning tools to get a handle on distances and to determine grid references. However, you'll be glad to know that the OSNI's paper maps do not have the same feature as my copy of Sheet 29 (covering the Mourne Mountains and published in 2008) is well crossed with those ever useful lines and feeling very like an equivalent OSi specimen, albeit with townlands superimposed on the back of the sheet. The digital counterpart to the same looks bleached in comparison but it may have been decided that all those greens and browns obscured the contour lines anyway. In contrast, the OSi have gone for faithful reproduction instead but there's merit in both approaches.

Because Quo's overview map for Britain and Ireland is only available with the OS coordinates system, you could find OSi and OSNI tiles lying on a white background. Adding the OSi's 1:600000 overview map of the island of Ireland to your collection for £4.99 does help to bring together an incomplete tile collection and get around it. Also available for £4.99 is a copy of the OSNI gazetteer that allows to search for places on NI like you'd do for mainland Britain with the OS Landranger gazetteer database.

All this perusal of Northern Ireland maps sits uneasily with the lack of attention that I have given the province. The Mourne Mountains certainly look promising and there are the Glens of Antrim too along with the Sperrin Mountains; lack of choice clearly isn't a problem then. Now, when might there be a visit?

My last visit to Scotland was with tempered expectations but only visited voluntary dampness upon me. Sunday's trot in Derbyshire was predicted to be dry but turned wet from the east when I might have been hoping for a bit more in the way of sun. Was it an example of the weather playing up at weekends or hill country confounding predictions yet again? Whatever might be the answer to that teaser, I was in no mood to let a bit of dampness spoil a good day's walking and it didn't.

The yomp started at Edale's train station and it looks now that I must have been displaying signs of a sense of purpose. Was that why two young ladies thought that I knew where I was going and asked where short strolls might be found? Whether I should have done so or not, I pointed them towards the grassy stuff beyond the Nag's Head inn where there is gentler walking than on the nearby moors. That might have been my trusting their possession of good sense but I thought that I saw them again on the train back to Manchester so I can't have done them much in the way of harm.

Looking over maps can trigger moments of indecision that need to be cinched and my pondering this Derbyshire outing was no different. Though my first destination was Mam Tor, the option of going directly heading for Hollins Cross was in the back of my mind too. once I put a stop to any indecision. As it happened, I stayed on a bridleway for the "shivering mountain" that I should have used on a previous hike from Castleton to Edale but didn't for some reason lost in the gathering mists of time. My course followed Harden Clough before I detoured around by Greenlands to make my way the not inappropriately named Cold Side; it is north facing, after all. There were occasional parties of walkers and cyclists going the way but these were nothing intrusive and spotty sunshine did its bit for the hillsides.

Going up on Mam Tor meant encountering a mix of occasional walkers, regular ramblers and spots of rain. There had been signs of murk upon the Ladybower and Derwent moors even as I started out but I paid them no heed. The plan was to make the best of the conditions, come what may. That murky dampness did make me don waterproofs but it was no real encumbrance to the prepared. In any case, an escape from Hollins Cross was always a possibility if things ever got too annoying. They never did and I took a chance on getting to Hope train station.

Back Tor looked more impressive than my memories of its crags would have suggested. The occasional hang glider was out and about but a fine sunny summer day would have drawn more of its kind. Later, the air dried up and the sun made vain efforts to light up the land about me. Even so, any designs that I may have had on engaging in aerial photography of Castleton and Hope would have to await another day.

When I reached the top of Lose Hill, I began to wonder whether making the 15:39 from Hope station to Manchester was asking too much. In the end, I amazed myself by getting from hill top to train station in 35 minutes and that gave me a few minutes to wait before the train appeared as well; it was as if I had been travelling by fairy wind. It does leave me wondering about my perception of my own walking speed but that may be tempered by the amount of travel over rough ground that I do. Regardless of my wonderment, it was good way to even a good afternoon out in the fresh air. That I had mixed fortunes with the weather doesn't even come into it.

Travel details:

Return train trip from Macclesfield to Edale with a change in Manchester.

Last Saturday, I had designs on going further afield for a day away but they didn’t happen. That allowed some time to address something that has been looking back at me reprovingly for a while: a flat front tyre on my bike. The cause was a long thorn (around a centimetre or so in length) that had inveigled itself into the tyre to hole the inner tube. It illustrates the trouble with country cycling in the autumn months when many a hedgerow custodian is cutting it down to size after the summer, littering the road with the sorts of things that penetrate even thick mountain bike tyres. Thinner racing bicycle equivalents must be giving grief then.

For whatever reason, the repairing of punctures is a task that causes me to procrastinate. While it is true to say that various attempts at the chore have ended up being so messy as to necessitate the buying of new tubes and tyres, I should be a bit more competent at it these days but it’s never a thing to go rushing. In fact, I find that it’s exactly the kind of activity for which the saying about haste slowing down speed is most apt.

Once that front wheel was put back together again and the tyre well inflated with an Halfords double-barrel foot pump (possibly meant for car tyres really but it does the job so well for my tyres that it must put a stop to braces of punctures like those that blighted my innings with a Carlton racer), it was time for some road testing. By the time that I was ready to leave the house, the sun had gotten to hiding behind big wads of cloud but my mind was decided on a departure, even one that might have involved walking a bicycle home after a failed repair.

For the jaunt, I followed a usual route of mine that goes around by places such as Gawsworth, North Rode and Bosley though without actually going through any of these places. The fact that I hadn’t been out for more than a month was brought home to me by the absence of leaves on next to every tree, hedge and bush. Then there were all the well manicured hedges with their reminders of thorns sprayed all over a road after a hedgecutter. What was also evident was how well November’s tempests had swept away any of that. It’s amazing where fixing a puncture can send your thoughts.

As Croker Hill and its radio tower loomed ever larger in my sights, both were catching more and more of the sun and much more than anywhere else. It looked like the sun was finding a momentary hole in the clouds but there was a bigger clearance to come from the east. That was to be the lure and reward my diverting away from the A523 and into nearby hills. The initial reasoning might have been the avoidance of football traffic around Moss Rose but that doesn’t explain why I would go around by Coalpit Lane, Broadcar Road and Old Buxton Road. All of this may have been on a SUSTRANS cycle route but I’d advise of the need for strong legs and decent physical fitness before giving this one a try. Seeing the steepness of the gradients, I chose to walk them with breaks for photographic capture of the by now well lit surroundings. For that, I should have had fully charged batteries rather than resorting to sticking dying ones in pockets to make an exposure or two. Even so, i cam away with enough images for warding any recourse to self reproach.

After that short satisfying blast of hill country, it was mostly downhill until I got home with tyres still inflated and untroubled by an underpass littered with broken beer bottles; carriage of one’s means of travel was the cure for that and the council has been informed of the state of the footway. Puncture repair testing was successful and a good spell in fresh air was enjoyed too without my bringing more trouble home with me in the form of new punctures. There are some things that really don’t deserve the practice.

From Friday's weather, hopes for clear blue skies, unimpeded sunshine and crisp frosty air were building but a look at weather maps confounded those aspirations somewhat. The lesson is that an anticyclone's ability to pull in cloud should not be underestimated and it was to come quite far west too. In circumstances like these, it is too easy to let the effect of realities on dreams stymie enthusiasm for outdoor activities but, not being in a mood to waste whatever the weekend might offer, I was out and about in Cheshire and Derbyshire.

In truth, I did play with the notion of heading to Wales but that wasn't to be and I stayed local on Saturday to mend a bicycle wheel puncture and then test it out. You may be thinking that puncture repair testing wouldn't take me far but I was out for a few hours with the fallback that there were enough hours of daylight to walk the thing home if needed. There was some walking along the way but the cause was a diversion over steep hills and not my failing to remove a thorn or a similarly undesirable object from a tyre. There was a reward for my risk taking in the form of the dissipation of cloud cover to reveal pleasingly lit hill country. It was just as well that I was out to enjoy it, then.

Sunday was to see me spend an afternoon walking from Edale to Hope, a station to station yomp over the Great Ridge from Mam Tor to Lose Hill (or Losehill Pike as the National Trust name it on their signs; there's also the label of Ward's Piece too but I am as yet unsure of the origins of that name). With Sunday having a verbatim start to Saturday, I was displaying signs of cold feet about the planned venture but lured myself out anyway. As it turned out, I would have been forgiven for having those doubts given that my Derbyshire amble was set to meet with rain. By then, my hand was turned to the proverbial plough so I got on with enjoying the walk, a task that was help by there being some spotty sunshine before the rain that had brought some photographic satisfaction my way. All felt good.