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April 25, 2006

Wrecks walk

On thursday last week I got a phone call from John Owen, one of the other rangers, asking me if I'd like to help out on a guided walk. I'd agreed before he told me that I'd just let myself in for, a 24km trog round seven of the aircraft wrecks that litter the Peak District. I got in contact with my friend Bob to get GPS coordinates for one of the wrecks I hadn't visited and he mentioned that he'd been having problems getting GPS data into Google Earth, so I decided I'd record the track of the walk with my GPS and see if I could get it into Google Earth. The GPS management I use (OziExplorer) can export data to Google Earth, so I've provided a 'fly through' KMZ file, if you have Google Earth installed you should be able to load the file and then press F10 twice to start the tour. Fortunately Google have just added high resolution photos of the Bleaklow area so you can actually get a fair idea of the terrain. The KML file also includes the boundary of the Peak District National Park as well as the route of the Pennine Way within the park.

Because of the distance involved we started bright and early at 9:00am. For me that just required a lesiurely stroll the 150m from my front door to where the walk started. We had 14 people turn up at the starting point in Old Glossop, some who had come from as far as Norfolk for the walking festival. The forcast was for poor visibility , and it was spot on - there was a heavy overcast sky as we started down Mossy Lea, but thankfully it didn't look like it was going to rain.

We headed up Mossy Lea, passing Shire Hill on the right and Lightside on the left before heading up Doctor's Gate and and up Crooked Clough, climbing up past the footbridge and then stopping for a quick rest before heading up Ashton Clough. This view is west back down the valley, towards Glossop. The high ground to the left is Coldharbour Moor.

This is the bottom of Ashton Clough, a steep gorge that climbs 240m in about 750m, and the sides are even steeper. A Douglas C-47 (Dakota) crashed up on the edge of James's Thorn to the west (left) of this picture. Over the years bits of the wreckage has slid down into the bottom of Ashton Clough - here you can see the cylinder block of one of the radial engines.

This is the location where Douglas C-47 2108982 (Dakota) of 314th Troop Carrier Group USAAF crashed on 24th July 1945, just below James's Thorn. Unfortunately all the crew were killed. If you look at the GPS track just below this point you can see how we zigzagged up the hill, due to the steepness of the slope, some of the folks scrambled up the rocky bottom of Ashton Clough, those with a more nervous disposition took the (only slightly) easier route up the left hand side of the clough. The fence in the immediate foreground is part of the fence that was put around the entire Bleaklow plateau as part of the Moors for the Future project, and the rocky area in the background is Higher Shelf Stones.

Just above the wreck of the Dakota is all that remains of Lancaster KB993 of 408 Squadron R.C.A.F., which crashed 18th May 1945. The crew of six were all killed. This view is looking west back towards Glossop, and beyond that, Manchester. By the time we got here the low mist and cloud had burned off and it was really quite warm - spring is finally on the way!

We then headed over to the wreck just north of the trig point at Higher Shelf Stones. This is Superfortress B-29 44-61999 "Over Exposed" of the 16th Photographic Reconnaisance Squadron U.S.A.F. It crashed on 3rd November 1948 whilst descending through cloud, just days before the crew were due to return home to the USA. This is the biggest wreck site in the Dark Peak, a significant amount of wreckage remains. A couple of years ago a wedding ring belonging to one of the crew was found at the site, and was eventually returned to the granddaughter of the crew member. There is a memorial service here every Remembrance Sunday (the Sunday nearest to 11 November) for the crews of the 50+ wrecks in the Dark Peak area. The smoky mist near the ground is water vapour coming off the peat - as the mist burns off the surface of the peat heats very rapidly as it is so dark, and water starts to evaporate from it, recondensing as it hits the still-cool air.

Due to time constraints we missed out the Botha and Wellington wrecks to the north and instead cut across to the Blenheim on Sykes Moor. This was Blenhein Mk.I L1476 of RAF 164 Squadron, which crashed on 30th January 1939 while on a training flight from RAF Church Fenton. This is hidden in the bottom of a grough and is quite difficult to find, but the GPS coordinates I was given by John Fielding were spot on. Finally we headed over towards John Track Well before crossing over the newly-replanked shooting path to Glossop Low and thence back down the quarry track to Old Glossop. All in all a splendid walk - any day when it doesn't rain and doesn't require thermals is a good one :-)

Posted by alan at 08:56 AM | | Comments (1)

April 11, 2006

New Peak District website

A new website, Peak District News has appeared. As the "About" section as the site says:

Peak District News aims to report on current happenings in the Peak District, and neighbouring area. Please bookmark us and keep coming back.
er .. that’s it.

It's off to a good start - the first story was based on my recent moorland restoration post ;-) I'll be watching it with interest.

Posted by alan at 10:23 PM |

April 05, 2006

Airborne muckspreader

A couple of weeks ago the Moors For the Future folks started up the heather brash spreading operations that I've helped out with before. The aim is to spread a thin layer of chopped up heather (brash) over the bare peat as part of the process of getting it to regenerate. In the past the heather has been airlifted by helicopter onto the moors and then spread by hand. This is a very time and labour intensive process, and it is quite difficult to get an even layer. This year they are using a different technique (and a different helicopter company). Instead of the heather being lifted on site and then spread it is loaded into what I can only descrive as an aerial muckspreader which is then flown under the helicopter.

Here you can see it on the back of the truck - there are a pair of the spreaders, whilst one is being filled the other is being flown over to the spreading area. The bottom of the spreader is a conveyor belt that moves the heather towards the back of the contraption. The two vertical shafts with the disks and tines on them rotate towards the gap in the centre and fling the heather out of the back. The whole thing is powered by a small petrol motor underneath the hopper.

The lift site was right at the summit of Holme Moss, next to the transmitter tower. Being a peat bog means that even though the ground looked frozen it was actually very soft underneath - as they found out when they tried to drive the truck over to the stockpile of brash bags!

Needless to say a cooperative farmer and a large tractor were required to hoik the truck out of the hole it had dug for itself and move it over to the bags.

The helicopter they were using was a Squirrel. They'd taken all the seats out to keep the weight down - each spreader weighs about 1/4 tonne and holds up to 6 cubic metres of brash, so they needed all the umph they could get.

Unfortunately this meant we had to walk the 2.5km onto the moor, and boy was it cold. The spreading area was directly around the trig point on Black Hill - anyone who knows the area will understand just how bleak it is, and it was pretty windy too, which made it feel all the colder. The mast you can see in the background is the Holme Moss transmitter - at one point this mast provided TV coverage for most of the North West of the UK.

Once on site two people stood either end of the swathe they wanted the helicopter to cover and the pilot flew over them, turning the spreader on at the appropriate moment. It took about 30 seconds to dispense the 6 cubic meters of heather. The area on the right of the photo has already been covered, and the area on the left is not yet treated. Depending on the height, each run covered a swathe about 5 - 8m wide and perhaps 100-150m long. This was at the start of the day and the pilot was coming in relatively high, by the end of the day he was coming over us at about 2 - 3m above head height.

Here's a view of the contraption in action - you can see the stream of heather being flung out by the counter-rotating spreader shafts at the back of the hopper. The aerofoils above and to the side of the spreader shafts are to keep the whole thing stable as it's being flown under the helicopter.

And here's the net effect when you are stood underneath acting as a human marker flag. And yes it does itch when you get a load of heather down your neck, although the helmet and the goggles keep most of it off of your face :-) I was initially a little skeptical about the likely efficacy of this technique, but it was really very impressive. It gave a much more even coverage than hand spreading and is obviously far faster. The only problem was that the heather bags had been standing for some time, and the combination of them being stacked on top of each other, compressed, soaked in rain and then frozen meant that a lot of the brash was in solid lumps that jammed the spreader. However on subsequent days they got a machine up to re-shred the heather to get the lumps out and solved that problem.

As with the spreading done last year this is still very much an experimental technique, it will be interesting to see how effective it has been over the next couple of years.

Posted by alan at 11:12 PM | | Comments (3)

February 01, 2006

Nuclear Glossop

bunker.jpeg

I was futzing around on the web looking for something else entirely when I found this site which catalogues all of the 1563 Royal Observer Corps bunkers that are scattered over the UK. The history of the ROC is fascinating - they were originally set up in 1925 to visually report and track any enemy aircraft flying over the UK. At the height of the Cold War in 1957 they became part of the United Kingdom Warning and Monitoring Organisation (UKWMO), the intention being that in case of a nuclear attack they would report the location and extent of the bombs that were dropped on the UK. To this end a chain of small three-man bunkers were built across the UK, so naturally I had a look to see where the closest one was to me, and to my astonishment it was less than 400m from my house! Most of the posts stuck to to a standard design - in the photo above you can see the top of the entry shaft in front of the telegraph pole, to the front and right of the entry shaft is the blanked-off pipe that held a radiation counter. There's also a smaller pipe lower down in the grass which was the input port for the blast overpressure gauge. To the right of that (with the baffles) is the top of the air ventilator. This particular bunker was decomissioned in 1991, shortly before the ROC was itself disbanded.

The bunkers were small and cramped - there was no mains electricity, no water supply and the toilet facilities consisted of a bucket, and quite often they were damp as well. I'm not sure just how effective they would have been had anyone actually dropped anything that went 'bang' in a serious fashion - the telegraph pole in the picture above was in fact the only communications mechanism when the bunker was originally commissioned, and lengths of dead pine tree with wire strung between them doesn't seem to be a particularly blastproof communications system to my untrained eye! Perhaps the most unenviable job in the post was that of the 3rd observer who, shortly after the attack, had to climb out of the bunker and retreive the photographic paper from the Ground Zero Indicator (GZI), which was basically a pinhole camera - the fireball of the detonation would burn marks on the graduated paper inside the GZI, and from that the position and altitude of the detonation could be determined. If that wasn't bad enough, he was also responsible for hauling the chemical toilet up the 15 foot entrance shaft and disposing of the contents!

Posted by alan at 06:14 PM |

December 10, 2005

Jack Frost

I was out on Patrol today, and Peter was nagging me because I hadn't blogged anything in a long time, and he's right - nearly three months since my last post - oops! As for my wander today up Tintwistle Knarr and across to Arnfield Moor with Bob, I have nothing much to report other than it was overcast, grey, chilly and dark very early - oh, and the eight hares we saw were all getting their snowy white winter coats. Speaking of seasonal things, I was downloading photos from by camera and I found this rather nice wintry scene which I've added a touch of soft focus - fame and glory to anyone who identifies the location :-)

frosty_blur.jpeg

Posted by alan at 09:52 PM | | Comments (3)

September 16, 2005

Drystone walling

"All Derbyshire is full of steep hills and you see neither hedge nor tree but only low drye stone walls"
Celia Fiennes - 1697

Today I got a chance to try my hand at something I've been wanting to have a go at for a long time - drystone walling. For those of you who don't know what this is, it's a technique for building walls using just stone and with absolutely no mortar, hence the name. In Derbyshire the practice dates back to at least 2500 BC, with systematic building starting in the 14th and 15th centuries and carrying all the way through to the 19th century. The Parliamentary Enclosure Act of 1750 saw the building of standardised walls, paid for the landowners wo were claiming the land for their own use. By 1820 most of the existing walls were complete, and since then there has been a gradual decline, with many of the walls falling into disrepair. More recently there has been a resurgence in interest in preserving and maintaining the walls, which form a distinctive feature of the Peak District landscape. The number of professional wallers is beginning to climb both in response to this interest and also because of the availability of government grants for walling work.

The section we were working on was an existing wall that had become derelict, alongside the Pennine Bridleway at Hayfield. The first job was to take down the remnants of the existing wall, laying the stone to one side so we could reuse it. The foundations were OK, so we didn't need to dig right down - when starting a fresh wall the top 6 inches of soil need to be dug out to give a firm footing. Most field walls are 4'6" high and are 2' wide at the base. As the wall rises it gets narrower, the amount is known as the 'batter' of the wall, in our case we were using a ratio of 1:8, so at the top our wall needed to be about a foot wide - we used metal bars at either end of the section with strings between them as a guide, moving the strings up the bars as the wall rose.

The wall is actually made up of several different components. Free-standing walls are double-skinned with each face being built seperately, so they can be thought of almost as two walls leaning against each other. The components of the wall are as follows:

  • Footings. These are the largest (and heaviest!) stones and take the entire weight of the wall - there can be between 1 and 2 tons of stone per meter of wall - and my back says that's probably about right!
  • Face stones. These make up the two outside faces of the wall, and start off with the largest ones at the bottom. Narrow stones are placed with their long edges into the wall, not along it in order to give the wall strength.
  • Hearting. This is small stone used to pack the middle of the wall between the faces. Soil isn't used as it would wash out over time - a well-built wall will last for over 100 years.
  • Throughs. These span the entire width of the wall and tie the two faces together. On a 4'6" wall they are about 2' from the ground, spaced about a yard apart along the wall.
  • Copestones. Usually semicircular, these fit vertically on top of the wall and again tie the two faces of the wall together.

Here you can see the base of the wall, showing the two faces and the heartings between them.

The wall is a bit higher here and you can see that it is starting to narrow. Although the stone is all irregular, it is considered to be cheating to dress it to shape. The aim is to build in regular horizontal courses (as far as possible), and to overlap the vertical joints in the same way as is done for brick walls.

Here the wall is at full height, with the top being levelled up with small face stones so that the copestones will sit evenly across the wall.

The final stage is to add the vertical copestones that tie the top of the wall together.. Some walls have dressed semicircular copestones of a regular size, but here we are going for the rustic look - actually, we didn't have any dressed stone!

Job done, and I have the aching back and bruised fingernail to prove it! As I said I'd always wanted to have a go at walling, and I was lucky enough to have a fine bright autumn day (and pleasant company to boot!) for my first attempt. Many thanks to Terry for showing me the tricks of the trade, and I can't wait to go back to do a bit more. Hopefully the wall I helped to build today will last considerably longer than I will :-)

Posted by alan at 10:12 PM | | Comments (2)

May 10, 2005

The Snake and the Somme

I hadn't been back along the footpath throught Snake Woodland, which had been badly damaged by floods in 2002 for over a year, but this evening I went back with the family for a walk, thinking it must have been fixed up by now. How wrong could I be, it's even worse:

Apologies for the poor quality of the photo, but it was so dark and gloomy under the trees that's the best I could do. Now I don't expect there to be no muddy patches at all, but this is a wayposted path close to a main road, so it's reasonable to expect that not all visitors are going to be equipped to deal with conditions more akin to those of the trenches of the Somme. Apart from a few desultory patches of gravel that have been put down near the entrance, virtually nothing has been done to the path, despite it being three years since the floods. What's even worse is that there is no clear signage at the entrace that the bridge across Lady Clough is still in severe danger of collapsing into the river, and you are 30 minutes round the walk before you get to the bridge.

snake_bridge.jpeg

The sign is rather amusing:

Warning Foot-path closed
Bridge due for repair

It's a miracle it is still standing - "due for repair" when? Forestry Commission, this is unforgivable - as it is now three years after the damage there really is no excuse for the repairs not being completed. Bah.

Posted by alan at 11:16 PM |

May 09, 2005

Mount Skip stamp

stamp.png

As I was googling around to find the information for my last post on Bob and Len's letterbox, I noticed that all the sites mentioned something along these lines:

These boxes normally contain a visitors' book and a rubber stamp. On finding the box, hunters use the stamp to record the find in their own books or on a series of cards, and then mark the visitors' book in the box with their own personal stamps.

There are many letterboxes placed on Dartmoor, the majority of which are hard to find. Collecting letterbox stamp impressions is an enjoyable and challenging pastime.

Bob and Len's box is sadly lacking in the rubber stamp department, so I set about making one. There are bazillions of references on the web on how to do this, the basic technique is to carve a plastic pencil eraser with the design of your choice. I'm not particularly artistic so I decided a simple place name would be the best - the letterbox isn't particularly near anywhere, so I chose 'Mount Skip' as it is reasonably close, and it has the fewest letters to carve ;-) The easiest way to do the design is to edit it on a PC, then print it on a laserprinter, or photocopy it. You then put the paper face down on an eraser and with a cool iron, press the paper for a few seconds. Let it go cold, and gently peel the paper off - hey presto! the toner has transferred to the eraser. You then set about hacking away everything but the design from the eraser - in my case 'hack' was the operative word! I used a scalpel, and a set of jewellers screwdrivers for small details, e.g. the center of the 'o' and the 'p' - you can twizzle them around and drill out small details - you can see the final result above. I carved a cavity the size of the eraser into a bit of wood and glued the eraser in to make it easier to hold and to give it a bit of protection - it's my first effort so I'm not sure how robust it will be, but I can easily make another. If I was doing this on a regular basis I'd certainly consider get hold of a stand-mounted magnifying glass and some linoleum cutters, which seems to be the standard recommended toolkit for eraser carving.

I popped up to the letterbox this afternoon and put the stamp in the box, so I'm now eagerly awaiting the first visitor to use it - if it's you add a comment below to let me know!

Posted by alan at 10:28 PM | | Comments (4)

May 07, 2005

Bob and Len's Dark Peak letter box

Ages ago, Bob asked me to put some information on my blog about his and Len's letterbox and I've been very laggardly in doing so - sorry Bob! By letterbox I don't mean one of these or even one of these! For those of you who are now thoroughly confused, letterboxing started on Dartmoor in 1854, and involves hiding a box containing a logbook somewhere (moderately!) accessible and challenging people to find it. There's a far newer form of this activity called geocaching that gives you a GPS coordinate to walk to, which is quite a bit easier to do, whereas letterboxing requires a fair degree of navigational expertise.

Bob's letterbox is on Mount Skip in the Dark Peak, and I've reproduced his map below:

letterbox_map.png

And here are his instructions:

  • Map: The Peak District Outdoor Leisure Map No. 1. Scale: 1:25000.
  • Bearings: All bearings are magnetic.
  • Area: Rough moorland and should only be attempted by experienced hill walkers.
  • Letter Box: Maintained by Bob and Len. Please leave the box covered as in photo, thank you.
  • Clue: A small isolated peat hag.

The photos referred to above are these ones below:

And if you are wondering what Bob and Len look like, you'll have to visit their letterbox to find out, there's a photo of the dodgy duo inside ;-)

Posted by alan at 09:38 PM |

March 26, 2005

Morons on the moors

Well, I've just been on what must be the most depressing patrol of my time as a Ranger. Not only did the weathermen get it completely wrong and I got completely soaked, but I had the disheartening task of recording the serious and systematic vandalism of the new fence that has been put around Bleaklow as part of the attempt to regenerate the moorland. When I got to the Briefing Centre this morning, Fiona said that one of the local Gamekeepers had reported that a fence had been cut above Salter's Brook on the A628, and she asked me if I'd check it out. Sure enough, it was the new stock exclusion fence that had been chopped.

The vandalism started at Far Small Clough Head and I counted 38 places where the fence had been cut between there and Swain's Greave, a distance of about 2km - and that wasn't the end of it, I could see more cuts in the fence as hit headed east towards Barrow Stones. God knows how much further the damage goes but I'd run out of time and had to head for home. I temporarily fixed the first dozen or so sections, but whoever did it had quite clearly come prepared and has spent some considerable time performing their vandalism - the holes are every 50-100m, and they've cut the fence either side of two adjacent posts and entirely removed a section. In some places they've cut it by stiles, and in some places even next to the notices that explain that the fence is to keep stock out and not people. Needless to say, the sheep are already inside the fenced off area.

I'm at a loss to find the words to express my mixture of dismay and fury over what they've done - the damage is not just near footpaths, but right across the open moor. Whoever did this knew the area, had been before and came back with the tools necessary to destroy the fence. I'm sure the morons responsible feel that they were 'justified' in 'protecting their rights' despite the fact the land is actually privately owned and looked after. I'm also sure that if someone came and vandalised their property they'd be the ones baying for the blood of the offenders.

The fact of the matter is that because of their cretinous and downright criminal behaviour, everyone will lose:

  • This sort of behaviour undermines decades of careful liason with the landowners to establish access to the land - if it was my fence that had been destroyed I'd be making a strong case for people to be excluded completely from my land - and yes, despite many people's belief to the contrary, landowners can still get access removed - for example for nature conservation purposes.
  • The fence is there for a reason - to protect and therefore help to repair the moors, and that's now been jepoardised.
  • The damage will have to be repaired, and I estimate that there is at least 5-10 thousand pounds of damage - not only is there the cost of the materials, and the labour to put the fence up, there's also the small matter of having to hire a helicopter at 800 pounds per hour to fly it in as the terrain is too fragile for vehicle access.
  • The landowner is paid for maintaining the fence, and for excluding his stock - if the fence is cut, DEFRA stop paying the farmer, so he get's hit by a double whammy.
  • The repairs will probably have to be paid for by DEFRA, i.e, the government, i.e. by taxes, i.e. by you, me and indeed the prats who cut the fence in the first place.
Bah.

Posted by alan at 11:57 PM | | Comments (1)

March 19, 2005

First t-shirt patrol of the year

Today was really rather warm - in the mid to upper teens (mid 60's fahrenheit for any colonials listening in), so rather than being bundled up like an Inuit I got to walk around in my t-shirt - it looks like spring is really here at last. Unfortunately the warm weather also meant is was very hazy, so I didn't get any decent photos. However it's only a few weeks since we had some significant snowfall - the pictures below were taken on Kinder Low when we were airlifting at the beginning of the month.

I'm particularly fond of the one below - apart from correcting the blue colour cast and contrast problems you get with photos of snow, it's untouched.

Posted by alan at 07:12 PM |

February 10, 2005

Filming finished

Well I've finally finished the filming for my video diary for the BBC Countryfile programme, and the courier came today to take the camera and tapes down to BBC Birmingham. After two failed attempts (due to the weather) I finally got some footage of the Moors For The Future airlift onto Bleaklow. When I turned up yesterday morning at Windy Harbour the cloud was down over Higher Shelf, so it didn't look like we'd get onto Bleaklow. We shifted over to Kinder to see if it was any better, but in fact it was even worse, so about 11:00 we got back to Windy Harbour, and the cloud had lifted just enough - a couple of hundred feet - above Bleaklow Head so we set to and drove up to Glossop Low and were helicoptered up from there to Wain Stones - thankfully I didn't need to leg it onto the moor carrying the BBC kit this time! There were plenty of us there so I got to wander around filming the helicopter, plus a very cooperative hare that sat still for me for long enough to get some good shots. The weather was pretty marginal and quite windy - in fact when I was filming with the camera at right angles to the wind I had to hold it down as the wind would have otherwise have blown it over. However it held off and only started to spit with rain as we were lifted off at 3:45, so at last I managed to get the last part of my video diary completed.

I spoke to Rachel yesterday to arrange for the kit to be picked up, and asked her what would happen next. The slot is only 4 minutes long so she's got to edit the 2 1/2 hours of footage I've taken down to fit - hopefully there will be enough that's useable to fill the time ;-) I don't know when it will be transmitted, but I'll post something as soon as I know. I enjoyed making the diary, and it's given me an insight into how much effort is required to fill even a short amount of airtime. On the other hand I won't miss lugging all the kit around with me, it got a little wearing towards the end, lugging a camera in my hand, festooned with the microphone cable around my neck and the tripod strapped to my rucksack.

Posted by alan at 08:16 PM | | Comments (3)

February 06, 2005

Human donkey

As I posted earlier, I'm doing a video diary for BBC Countryfile, and as I've also posted the Moors For The Future project is also airlifting several thousand bags of heather onto Bleaklow as part of the effort to repair the damage to the peat, so it seemed an obvious thing to do to try to combine the two and get some footage of the helicopter. I was going to film last Thursday, but as I've already said we were fogged in. MFTF were flying again yesterday, so I thought I'd do a normal patrol and walk over to the drop site to do some filming. I popped in to Windy Harbour to find out from the MFTF team where they were going to be before heading off to the briefing centre. They were going to be working around Wain Stones and Hern Stones so Bob and I drove up to Snake summit to walk across.

It was looking a bit murky as we drove up to Snake and just as we got togged up and ready to go Fiona radioed us to say that due to low cloud they'd moved the drop site to Lawrence Edge on the opposite side of the Bleaklow plateau. We got back in the car and drove round to Woodhead dam and parked up. We could see the helicopter as we walked up Bradwell Sitch, and as we got to the bottom of Lawrence Edge I heard over the radio that the heliciopter was going to refuel. The weather was looking a bit dodgy on the north side of Bleaklow as well, so I staggered up Lawrence Edge as fast as I could, weighted down by the camera, tripod, batteries etc.

I got to the top edge and spotted the ground teams just as I heard the helicopter coming back. As it appeared through the murk I saw that it didn't have a load on, which was a bad sign. Sure enough it landed and the team nearest the edge piled in and it took off and dissapeared. Bugger! Having hauled all the kit the 800 feet up from Woodhead dam in double-quick time I was less than thrilled to see them being taking off the hill.

I mooched over to the second team to share my woes. They were hoping for the helicopter to come back to pick them up, but then the weather dropped right in so we all sat there while they waited for radio confirmation of whether they needed to walk off or not. 20 minutes or so later we heard the helicopter off in the distance - the weather hadn't perceptibly changed, so it didn't seem like there was any way he could get in. A message came over the radio asking the team to get as close as possible to Lawrence Edge, and as they were moving the rotor disk of the helicopter appeared up through the murk from under the edge of the crag, smack bang where he'd picked the first team up. The wind was blowing along the valley, so he came up from below the edge and across the moor sideways to the landing site and everyone piled in whilst I tried to get some footage on the camera. Once everyone was aboard he took off and crabbed sideways across to the edge again, about 20 feet above the ground before dropping back down below and very quickly out of sight into the clag. I was chatting to Fiona later on and it appears that the cloud base was a few tens of feet below the edge of the plateau, and he'd flown along the valley edge below the cloud level before popping sideways up the face to pick them up - a very slick piece of flying. It would have been impressive enough if the pilot had done this as part of a rescue, but was really staggering was that he was so matter-of-fact about it - he even offered to come back to pick myself and Bob up! The helicopter firm are based in Scotland so I suppose they are used to these sort of conditions, but still - way to go, PDG Helicopters!

Bob and hung around for a bit and had our lunch in case the weather lifted and they could resume the lift, but when I checked with Fiona they'd scrubbed for the rest of the day. Bob and I did some shots of the peat erosion and the steps being taken to try to stabilise it by the MFTF folks before carrying along to Wildboar Clough and off down White Mare where I managed to get some more shots of hares, although they were being distinctly uncooperative and kept running away before I got close enough to get a really good shot - most thoughtless of them ;-) We dropped down onto the Longdendale trail just above Torside car park before heading back to the car at Woodhead dam, taking a few last shots along the valley before we headed back to the briefing centre and then home.

Posted by alan at 10:57 AM | | Comments (2)

February 04, 2005

Me on the telly

About 18 months ago I got in touch with the BBC Countryfile programme with the aim of doing a video diary on the mountain hares on Bleaklow. As I hadn't heard back from them I assumed that nothing would come of it, but late last year they got in touch again to ask if I was still interested. We agreed that early Feburary this year would be the best time to do the filming as the hares are still mostly in their white winter coats and are more active during the day as it is the start of the breeding season. Rachel from the beeb at Birmingham came up a week yesterday to give me a camera and a run-down of how to use it and what they were looking for in terms of footage, e.g. "Plenty of GVs" (General Views) and "Always explain what you are doing to camera"

John, Bob and myself went out last Saturday up Yellowslacks to get some footage of the hares. There were plenty around, but the camera only has a 12x zoom, which means you have to get really close to get a decent shot, and the hares aren't known for being cooperative! After a lot of skulking around rocks and cursing of both the microphone lead and the tripod we did get a fair amount of footage.

That evening when I got home I thought I better check through the tapes to make sure they looked OK. I checked the first tape, them moved on to the second when disaster struck - the damn tape got jammed in the camera which then started beeping and flashing various cryptic error messages at me. A glance at the manual revealed that I should eject the tape and try again, but the bloody camera refused to eject the tape - and it was the one with the hares on it! I eventually managed to get the tape out after about an hour of trying, however I was intending to do more filming which was going to be difficult without a camera. Fortunately I was going down to Hampshire for work on Monday, so after a frantic series of text messages between myself and Rachel I arranged to swap the camera on my way past Birmingham on Monday.

Last ThursdayI was supposed to be doing some more airlifting, but do to the fact that we were fogged in it didn't happen, and as a result I couldn't film anything save the helicopter on the ground (a Lama) sharing a field with a real live Llama. John and I went off to Snake Summit for a wander around Bleaklow in the murk - visibility was down around 50m, and the only person we saw was one of the full-time National Park staff cutting channels in the peat to try to get some of the water to drain off the first section of the Pennine Way - the path is slowly sinking into the bog, as it's one of the earliest bits to be done. Now they use stone flags to lay causey paths as you can see here. In the early days they tried out all sorts of stuff including geotextiles, split paling fencing and even polystyrene blocks! The causey paving works best because it floats on the surface of the bog, and doesn't need anything laid underneath it, so all the paths are done that way now.

I'm off out tomorrow as they are supposed to be airlifting again, but the weather forecast isn't good so it remains to be seen if I'll actually manage to get any film of the helicopter before the BBC want their camera back! As soon as I know what the transmission date of my 4 minutes of fame is, I'll be sure to post it here, so keep checking back :-)

Posted by alan at 05:48 PM | | Comments (1)

January 12, 2005

A walk and a new desktop background

I was supposed to be helping with the helicopter lift of heather brash onto Bleaklow again today, but because of high winds it was scrubbed. As I'd already booked the day off from work, I decided I'd go for a walk anyway. I walked up to Glossop Low, up to Wain Stones then off via the top of Dowstone Clough to Ferny Hole then down Shelf Benches. I was coming down Shelf Benches just before 4:00pm as the sun was beginning to set, and snapped this image - I particularly like the clouds. Apart from running a filter over it to remove the JPEG noise introduced by the camera, I've not manipulated it at all. I toyed with making the foreground a little less dark and increasing the saturation, but I quite like it as it is - it perfectly sums up the mood of approaching dusk on a blustery Peak District winters day. I've set it as my desktop background, the limited number of colours and bold contrasts work rather well.

Posted by alan at 06:49 PM | | Comments (1)

January 09, 2005

An unhappy ending

As I noted in my last but one post a walker dissapeared on Bleaklow on tuesday, and there has been a huge effort to find him by the Peak District Mountain Rescue folks. They were back out yesterday, and unfortunately located a body which turned out to be that of the missing walker, Peter Henshaw. He was found in Yellowslacks, which is only about 2 km from my house, and from figuring out his probable route it is clear he was trying to get off the hill, and he nearly made it as well. I was probably less than 500 m from where he was when I was out on thursday, as I came partways down Dowstone Clough before cutting across Harrop Moss to Glossop Low, in fact I toyed with the idea of taking the path down Lightside to get back home, which would have taken me within a few hundred metres of where he was.

Very sad :-(

Posted by alan at 11:00 PM | | Comments (2)

January 07, 2005

Helicopter in the hills

The Moors For The Future project are back on the job again, spreading cut heather on Bleaklow as part of the attempt to revegitate the eroded peat. I helped out with loading the lift bags last year, and this year I'm getting to help with the second part of the process, airlifting the bags onto the moor. My first stint was this Wednesday - we drove up the track to Glossop Low where we were airlifted by the helicopter onto the moor:

As we were walking to the drop area, a couple of guys and a dog came up to us, the dog was a rescue dog wearing a distinctive NSARDA coat, so we guessed there was a Mountain Rescue callout in progress. It turns out that someone had been missing since the previous day, and a total of six MR teams were looking for him. They asked if they could use the helicopter to help search for him, so as a result we had to mooch around for a couple of hours while they looked for him, without any success unfortunately.

Once the helicopter returned we split into two teams of three, and each team took a set of GPS coordinates where the bags were to be dropped. The helicopter can lift six bags at a go and drop them in pairs, so each team member stands where the pilot needs to drop a pair of bags. Helicopters can only hover into wind (and it was very windy and cold!), so the person who is most downwind holds their arms up to signal the helicopter for the first pair, and he works his way upwind dropping bags as he goes. It's quite disconcerting to have to stand there as half a dozen large bags come swinging towards you - the pilot comes in fast and low and drops the bags within six feet of you, sometimes closer - and he's only a short way above your head, looking at you through a window in the floor of the helicopter and a couple of tatty wing mirrors attached to the outside of the chopper:

After he's dropped one set of bags, he flies back to the staging point on Glossop Low and picks up another six, and delivers them to the other three man team. Whilst he's doing that, the first team gathers up the lifting strops and parcels them up into a rope bag so they can be taken back down to the staging point the next time around:

Naturally enough, because we are working in close proximity to large heavy things swinging around at head height we have to wear the appropriate headgear, even if it does make you look like a complete dork. Here we see Terry and John modelling the latest in PPE:

And finally, here's the result of our handywork - all the white blobs are lift bags full of heather waiting to be spread. Whilst we were waiting for the helicopter we spread some of the heather brash - it needs to be spread about 1cm thick over the bare peat, and it's surprisingly hard work - the easiest way, beatring in mind the strong wind, was to toss armfuls into the air and let the wind do the spreading.

We had to pack in about 3:00pm because the RAF declared a no-fly zone over Bleaklow so that they could get one of their Sea King search and rescue helicopters in to look for the missing guy - unfortunately he's still missing, and the search has been called off until Saturday, which doesn't bode well for the individual concerned :-(

Posted by alan at 10:45 PM | | Comments (1)

December 05, 2004

Snow, Hare

A couple of weeks ago we had the first snow of the year - according to some pundits we are in for a cold winter this year. I was out on patrol that weekend, trying to finish my survey of the Bleaklow fence. Unfortunately the snow made it such slow going that by the time I'd reached Grinah it was time to turn around and come back. I finally got the survey finished yesterday, it took me seven days in total to cover the 32Km and record the 153 stiles and fences - much of the time being taken up by walking to and from the fenceline rather than along it.

Anyway, I got some photos of Bleaklow in the snow which I've posted below. The first one is of the 'mushroom rock' at Bleaklow Stones - a well-known example of the sometimes wierd shapes that the gritstone weathers into. I've jazzed the picture up a little, but the sun really was directly behind it ;-)

The footprints in the snow in from of the rock are those of the mountain hares that live up here - you can see the prints even more clearly in the photo below. This was taken from Bleaklow Stones, the western end of the Kinder plateau can be seen to the left of the photo.

Whilst I was at Grinah, I took the following 180 degree panorama looking round from more-or-less due east, south to Kinder and then due west. If you download the full version by clicking on it, the picture will be overlaid with labels describing key points as you move your mouse across it, but be aware it is rather large!

On the same day I was out blundering around in the snow and falling through it into what seemed like just about every rank peat bog in the Peak District, Bob and John were over by Lightside, about 2Km from where I live. John spotted this hare up in the rocks - they often hide up in areas like this as it gives them protection from both the weather and predators - not that they actually have that many predators in the Peak District!

They are normally fairly skittish (well, they are Lepus timidus after all ;-), so Bob and John spent some time carefully approaching it and as well as the superb photo below, John got some excellent video footage. It is just in the process of shedding its brown summer coat and switching into its white winter camouflage - not a particularly sucessful ruse bearing in mind the limeted amounts of snow we get - all the snow that was on the ground when these pictures were taken has long since gone.

If you are interested in more information on Mountain Hares, I can recommend a visit to both The Mammal Society's page on them, and the image collection at ARKive.

Posted by alan at 04:31 PM |

November 09, 2004

The Peak District from space

One of my neighbours, Tim, is a lecturer at the University of Manchester and is doing research on Bleaklow as part of the Moors for the Future project. I chatted to him at length about the work that's being done at Mark's birthday party back in September, and today he mailed some me some interesting satellite photos from a conference held recently by the Moors for the Future project.

The first one is a picture of the UK at night., showing the contrast between the urban (lit) and rural (unlit) areas of the UK. I've outlined the Peak District with a red square (if you click on the picture you'll get a larger version which is a bit clearer). The unlit area corresponds very closely to the boundary of the park. The Peak District is within 1 hours drive for 20 million people, or about 1/3 of the population of the UK, and looking at the sea of light that surrounds the Peak District I can see where they all come from. Surrounding the park from the top clockwise are the lights of Leeds/Bradford, Sheffield, Nottingham, Stoke-on-Trent and Manchester.

The second photo is a daytime satellite image taken on the 18th April 2003, which is when we had the massive fire on Bleaklow with I wrote about at the time. The red square outlines the smoke plumes from the Saddleworth (upper) and Bleaklow (lower) fires. There was a very strong easterly wind on the day in question, and as a result the Bleaklow plume stretches out into Liverpool Bay and is over 100km long.

You can also see the moorland fires in Scotland, both in the Southern Uplands and on the Ardnamurchan peninsula.The Bleaklow fire was almost certainly started deliberately - sobering to think that the actions of just a few morons could cause an environmental disaster that could be seen even from space.

Posted by alan at 08:07 PM |

October 12, 2004

The Countryside Rights Of Way Act isn't just about footpaths

I noticed this interesting item on the BBC news website. Seemingly the number of egg thefts from bird's nests is at an all-time low, and as the report says:

There is no doubt that the sharp decrease in the number of nest robberies is because seven egg collectors have gone to prison since the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 allowed judges and magistrates to impose custodial sentences in England and Wales, instead of just fines.

When we were given our CROW training prior to the introduction of the act we were told that the act was even more important in terms of its wildlife impact than it was for its access implications. However the BBC report isn't entirely good news, it also says that there were 143 cases of shooting and destruction of birds of prey and 91 cases of illegal poisoning. I'm afraid they will largely come down to the landowning and "countryside sports" fraternities - their efforts to portray themselves as the cuddly guardians of the countryside often masks a darker side to their activities. As the report referred to in the BBC article says,

Despite dialogue with landowning and fieldsports bodies, publicity and prosecution, the level of persecution has remained constant ... An examination of prosecutions for offences relating to the persecution of birds of prey (including shooting, trapping and poisoning) between 1985 and 2003 indicates that the majority of cases involve individuals with game rearing interests, predominantly gamekeepers ... We remain concerned that the widespread killing of birds of prey, especially on upland moorlands that are managed for grouse shooting, limits the population and distribution of several species.

Most of the incidents seem to have been in Scotland, although there are two reports of Hen Harriers being persecuted in Derbyshire and also two reports of Buzzards being persecuted. I've seen Buzzards around Bleaklow on several occasions now, I hope they don't become a target.

Posted by alan at 11:30 AM |

October 10, 2004

Labrador tea

Yesterday I set about the second leg of the Bleaklow fence mapping. Bob and I drove to Crowden Station car park, then drove back to Torside visitor centre and left the other car there. There was a Endurance GB horse ride taking place, so the car park was absolutely chock-full with horseboxes and appropriately horsey towing vehicles. We walked back down the Longdendale trail to Reaps, then up the Pennine Way along Torside Clough to where I finished off last week. We followed the fenceline across Sykes Moor towards Torside Naze before turning northeast to head up to Wildboar Clough. The first segment of the fence was new, but as we crossed Torside Grain it reused the existing fenceline.

As you can see, the bottom of the wire is now about 18 inches above the surface of the ground, and there's a nice line of sheep tracks plus a wrapping of wool around the bottom strand that shows how the sheep have been getting through the fence. This is a bit of a problem, as the whole point of the fence is to keep the sheep out! It also graphically illustrates the severity of the erosion that the Moors for the Future project is trying to combat - this fence is probably not more than 20 years old, and when it was put up the wire would have been level with the surface of the peat. As we headed along the side of the valley below White Mare, we came across another problem that affects the fence, people with pliers:

I have no idea why anybody should feel it is necessary to cut a fence right next to a stile. I assume the people coming up this particular track know and appreciate Bleaklow as it isn't a well-know route, which makes it ironic that they are deliberately damaging something that is there to protect the very environment they have come to enjoy. There were obvious signs of sheep using the cut, plus two ewes inside the fence line - and if there are two there are doubtless more. Last week I found the fence has also been cut near Ferny Hole, in that case next to a stile with a dog gate so it can't even have been to make it possible for a dog to get through. The new fence is all topped with plain rather than barbed wire as it's intended to keep stock rather than people out, so there really isn't much excuse for cutting it as it's easy enough to climb over if there isn't a convenient stile. Around the eastern margin of the fence there are small signs at regular intervals explaining what it is there for, perhaps we need some along this stretch as well. However, deliberate damage, whilst regrettable is not the most important problem, the fence is more-or-less hopeless for keeping stock out, we counted over 20 points in less than 1km where sheep had been getting through.

As we were climbing up Wildboar we saw a Buzzard. These seem to be increasingly common, apparently we now have a few breeding pairs in the area, whereas 10 years ago there were none. About half way up WIldboar both Bob and I smelt smoke - something that always makes me nervous after last year's conflagration. We got on the radio to ask if there were any controlled burns planned, but as we couldn't see any smoke it was impossible to say where the fire was actually coming from.

According to the outline map of the fence in the office, the fenceline climbs up the SW side of Wildboar Clough for about 750m before heading back towards Rollick stones in a narrow V. Unfortunately, that's completely wrong - we followed the fence for 3km, all the way up Wildboar to Far Moss then across to Black Cough where it finished. This is the old fence that is due for removal so it needed mapping anyway, but it does leave the question of where the fenceline actually goes! Once we got to the end of the fence we started to head back down Black Clough, and on the way Bob offered to show me the Labrador Tea bush (Ledum groenlandicum) that grows to the west of Black Clough.

These plants are related to Rhododendrons, and in fact are native to North America and Canada. This particular one is about the largest I have seen. The leaves have distinctive curled edges, and are covered in red hairs underneath. In summer they have while flowers.

There are about 6-8 of these plants scattered across the Dark Peak and nobody is quite sure how they got here, the best guess is they are garden escapees with the seed being transported by birds. Whilst we were looking for the Labrador Tea I spotted the source of the smoke we had smelled some time earlier, near Shepherds Meeting Stones some 6km downwind of where we had first detected it. A quick call to Fiona confirmed that it was a controlled burn, so we carried on over to Stable Clough and off past The Lodge. The area at the bottom of Stable Clough had always been out of access until the CROW Act came into force last month, and to get to Stable Clough it was always necessary to plough through a bog, along the line of a barbed wire fence. You are now allowed to carry on down the track towards the house, so Bob and I spent some time figuring out the best route across the now-acessible land before heading to the car at Crowden Station and thence back to base.

Posted by alan at 07:55 PM |

October 04, 2004

Moors for the Future and CROW updates

Open AccessThe CROW (Countryside Rights Of Way) Act came into force in the Peak District on September 19th, the picture to the left is the new sign that you'll see on gates and stiles to show you where access land starts. There's a wealth of information available on the web - what your new rights are, where you can and can't go etc. There's even an on-line database showing any current access restrictions, complete with maps. I've updated my links page appropriately, if you're interested in finding out more. I've also noticed that the Moors for the Future website has been completely revamped, and there's a wealth of new information on the site - well worth a visit if you are interested on the whys and wherefores of the Bleaklow restoration. Plus they have a link to this site, which shows they are a discerning bunch to boot :-) I've added a couple of new MftF-related links as well, if you know of any other good ones, please let me know and I'll add them to the list.

Posted by alan at 01:36 AM | | Comments (5)

October 03, 2004

Following the fence

As part of the measures undertaken by the Moors for the Future project, English Nature have erected a fence around the most severely eroded part of the Bleaklow area. One of the jobs that Fiona, the full-time ranger has been asking for us to do it to survey the fence - where it actually goes as opposed to where it was originally planned, and where the stiles and gates are - the fence is designed to keep sheep out rather than people, so that the vegitation has time to regenerate. After much procrastination, I decided to actually make a start on this during yesterday's patrol. Although the fence has only been complete for less than a year, the picture below show that the dramatic effect that it has had already had - in the past this grass would have been grazed down to billiard-table level by the sheep.

The light brown material you can see on the edges of the peat haggs is the geojute matting that has been put down to stablize the peat surface so it will revegitate. As well as measures such as the fence and geojute, there has also been an extensive program of seeding, liming and fertilizing - because of the fragile nature of the terrain this has all had to be done by helicopter. In the picture below, the verdant green grass has been sown as a nurse crop - the idea is to stablilise the peat surface long enough for the natural vegitation to establish itself, at which point the lime and fertilizer inputs will be discontinued and the nurse crop will die off - quite a clever idea. The longer reddish grass is the existing wavy hair grass (Deschampsia flexosa) which under the influence of the lime and fertiliser has grown strongly and seeded - and the natural seed will further improve the ground cover next year. In fact in some places the grass (both sown and existing) is doing so well we joke about it being more like the Serengeti than Bleaklow, and it seems from the picture below that the local wildlife appreciates the change as well.

Anyway, back to the fence survey. Dave and I got dropped off at Snake Summit and started to follow the fence line towards Crooked Clough. The first leg across the flat moor just east of Urchin Clough wasn't too bad, but once we crossed Doctor's Gate and started to traverse along the side of Crooked Clough it got considerably tougher. The survey technique is quite simple - I use a normal GPS, and use the track log to create a 'crumb trail' of where I've walked. As long as I stay within a couple of metres of the fence, the track log will record the path of the fence closely enough for our purposes. I also record a waypoint at every gate and stile, and then when I get back to the ranch I use OziExplorer to plot both the track log and the waypoints so I can overlay them on an Ordnance Survey map. For those of you that know the area, the segment of the fence that we surveyed starts at Snake Summit, crosses over Crooked Clough, skirts around underneath Shelf Stones and James Thorn before crossing Ferny Hole and plunging down Yellowslacks, up out of the other side and crossing Harrop Moss towards Torside Castle before crossing the Pennine Way in Torside Clough. Although we only walked about 9km, all the upping and downing plus the fairly rough terrain meant we'd both had enough by the time we reached the Pennine Way. We then walked off down the Pennine Way to Torside car park to wait for our lift back to the briefing centre. Bearing in mind the fence goes as far east as Grinah, I expect that it will take another 4-5 patrols to survey the whole thing and close the loop. While we were waiting at Torside we were talking to Diane who runs the cafe on the site - she's going to be open from 11:00am to 4:00pm from now on, so if you're passing that way, drop in for a cuppa!

Posted by alan at 09:46 PM |

September 21, 2004

Vandalism, repaired

I've dumped my photo album onto my laptop, and today, whilst I was waiting in the garage for my car to be fixed, I started to sort them out - the problem with digital cameras is that it's far easier to take photos than it is to keep track of them! I've found some stuff I should really post, so expect it to come out in dribs and drabs over the next few weeks. Here's the first installment. Anyone who has visited the front page of this website will see a picture of two 'kissing stones'.

These are more properly known as Wain Stones, a famous Dark Peak landmark, and an ancient land boundary marker. I have an enlarged version of the picture as my desktop background as well, so I'm quite fond of them. Last year, the farmer who's land they are on (Bob Clarke) sadly died. Someone - goodness know who - thought it would be a good idea to hack his name into one of the two rocks.

I'd only met Mr. Clark once or twice and briefly at that but Mossy Lea Farm was always immaculately tidy, as was the rest of his land - and tidyness isn't a trait farmers are known for - so I can't think he would have approved of the crude and thoughtless way his name was hacked into the stone. Needless to say, nobody who saw it was happy, and one of the other Rangers came up with a way of ameliorating the damage as far as possible. He carefully smoothed away the rough edges of the letters and then painted over the raw yellow of the fresh rock surface with a mixture of peat and used engine oil.

As you can see from the photo above, from a distance it's barely noticable - if you get up close you can still see it, but it's far better than it was.

As an interesting aside, if you look at the stones you can see they are pockmarked with small holes that look just like the bullet holes you see in the walls of shot-up buildings. Well, local rumour has it that during WWII bored pilots would strafe the stones as they passed over, so they are in fact bullet holes, softened by the passage of time. So thoughtless vandalism is nothing new...

Posted by alan at 11:57 PM |

September 08, 2004

Wildlife roundup

August was a busy month, and September wasn't much quieter, so I've been neglecting my blog - naughty me. I've had the following wildlife photos floating around for a while, and I've finally got round to posting them.

I spotted this humungous caterpillar whilst I was out on patrol. I'm not sure what it is (possibly a fox moth caterpillar?) but I thought it was kinda pretty against the heather

This leveret that I spotted near Wain Stones was quite unconcerned, and let me get pretty close before lolloping off. I'm sure that if it survives its first winter it will be far more wary next year!

I took this whilst I was on holiday in Scotland, on the Kintyre peninsula. This is a Peacock butterfly (Inachis io). There are some beautiful pictures of other British butterflies on Stephen Cheshire's website.

This cooperative dragonfly perched long enough for me to get a couple of shots of it, this is the most in-focus of the bunch! I'm no expert, but it looks like it is probably a Hawker dragonfly, Family Aeshnidae. Feel free to look at the British Dragonfly Society webpages to see if you can figure out which one it is!

Posted by alan at 11:22 PM |

August 12, 2004

Three hot days and a thunderstorm

There's an old joke that says that summer in Britain consists of 'three hot days and a thunderstorm', which is exactly what has been happening with the weather over the last week, as a results of us being slapped around by the tail end of Hurricane Alex - on tuesday we had over 100mm of rain in a day (that's over 4 inches for my colonial friends ;-). In fact only a couple of weeks ago I was out walking and the conditions were more like late October than midsummer - this shot was taken from the top of Lawrence Edge, looking west down the Longdendale reservoir chain.

One of the consequences of the long-standing pollution of the Dark Peak moorland is that it kills the plant cover on the moors, which exposes the bare peat underneath. When there is heavy rain the peat gets rapidly eroded and washed away, as you can see by the colour of the water going down Wildboar Clough:

The Moors for the Future project is trying to repair over 100 years of damage and revegitate the bare peat surfaces. This is partly funded by the Water Authority who have a vested interest, both because the peat silts up the reservoirs, and because it costs money to remove the discolouration from the water.

Now that the fence around Bleaklow has been completed and this year's helicopter reseeding and liming has taken place, it's astonishing how rapidly the vegitation has recovered, especially after last year's disastrous fires. I think the major factor has been the fence, as existing grass which was cropped flat is now 30-40 cms long and covered in seed heads. I've always suspected that the real cause of the problems was largely due to overgrazing by sheep, and the way the vegitation has bounced back proves it. So much for the farming fraternity being 'The guardians of the countryside', as they are always fond of telling us! For a long time they've pointed the finger at walkers as being the cause of the erosion, but it's quite difficult to see how that could be the case - people prefer to walk along well-defined paths, and the moors suffer mostly from widespread surface denudation rather than footpath erosion, which has been reduced anyway since most of the more eroded path has been resurfaced with stone flags.

One benefit of the damp spell we've been having is it keeps everything moist, allowing things like these rather splendid fungi to grow, the big one at the back was 20cm (8") across.

However, it hasn't been raining all the time, last weekend I took the kids out for a wander around Tintwistle Low, the picture below is looking southwards across the valley, over Valehouse reservoir and towards Glossop, which is just out of view over the hill in the foreground. - my house is about 4k (2.5 miles) away from here. The ridge on the far left skyline is the southern edge of Kinder.

Posted by alan at 02:45 PM |

July 02, 2004

Lyme Park

I took these photos a few weeks ago - we'd taken the kids to Lyme Park, a stately home near where we live, for an evening stroll and I took these on the way back from the Cage (a medieval hunting lodge in the grounds) to the house itself.