Slitt Vein and a new sub-Hewitt

This blog post is entirely about having a walk up  Slitt Wood in Weardale to have a look at the Slitt Vein (nothing suicidal, its a mineral vein wot you can ackcherly see cos all the ground around it has been quarried away ) – and the bagging of Black Fell a 604 metre top designated as a sub-Hewitt in http://www.hillbagging.co.uk/, and which I’ve only just noticed…. pause for breath….and nothing at all to do with the launch of http://www.ukhillwalking.com/, in which there’s a small article about hillbagging from yours truly. In fact I won’t mention http://www.ukhillwalking.com/ ever again.

Appropriate, though, I suppose.

So, being completely unaware of the launch of http://www.ukhillwalking.com/, me and superdawg parked neatly by the phone box in Westgate and wandered up through the ever lovely Slitt Wood, just as far as the mines.

Now these mineworkings have just had a lorra lorra money being excavated and restored, to some extent. For interest, there’s the bargain steads – big containers for each mining team’s production, the excavated smithy with it’s  rock drill holes in the floor – presumably to prove they worked – a deep, deep shaft, fenced off, a wheel pit with a water supply from a dam up the hill and the footings for an Armstrong hydraulic engine, which replaced the wheel in the wheelpit – used for pumping water out of the mine. Plus some interesting and wet culverts.

if you walk up the hill on the newly created permissive path (like wot me and the dog did), you follow the edge of Slitt Vein and, at the top of the hill, there is the vein, stripped bare of it’s surround of ironstone, and with it’s galena mined out from the middle – but big and proud and strong, a damn great lump of quartzy rock. So that’s what a vein looks like…

After this, we wandered up the road (the beck being too lively to cross today) – and lunched in some forest in a warm and bright spell. The forest has lots of old pits and heaps in it – still being on the line of a lead vein, but this stuff is full of purple flourspar. I borrowed a couple of pieces. I’ll put them back if requested… 

And then we wandered over the moor alongside a wall that’s shown on the map as derelict, but which, according to an inscribed stone at Black Hill summit, was restored by the Golden family in 2001/2. They seem to have done a cracking job.

As the sun came out, we retreated to the Dale and followed the river downstream to the start. Bruno had a paddle and a bark in a deep salmon pool. We had no idea about http://www.ukhillwalking.com/, obviously and I’m not going to mention it.

10 miles and 1500 feet and one sub-Hewitt bagged.

Black Chew Head and Black Hill

Today, with superdawg loaded in the back, I squirted the knipemobile down the M1 to Crowden and met up with Tony Bennett and his girlfriend Christine for the bagging of Black Chew Head, the highest point in Oldham and a Dewey – and a walk up Black Hill and back via Westend Moss.
Tony did the TGO Challenge this year with his pal Steve and I first met them lounging with bottles of beer in a hostel in Newtonmore.
The TGO Challenge has a habit of increasing the number and quality of my hillwalking partners and so it appears that its happened again. I do like to walk with lots of different people. Cos they’re all different, innit?
Anyway, we followed the Pennine Way Northwards up to Laddow Rocks, where a number of rock climbers were setting themselves up for a rock climb. I wrote about my experiences of Laddow on Doodlecat a while back, in my trip report of my 2006 Pennine Way walk. For anybody with time on their hands its at http://www.doodlecat.com/mikeknipepw/index.html
From laddow, we crossed a little bit of rough moor to find the top, or at least some of the tops of Black Chew Head. Its one of those places where you stand on one spot and decide that it’s a bit higher over there. When you’re over there, it looks higher where you’ve just come from, or somewhere else. Or both. So we passed over them all.
Thence, back on the Pennine Way up to the summit patio of Black Hill. Black Hill gets greener and less black every year. What caused this? When I was alive, there was no grass at all. Not a blade. It was all sloppy sucking slutch. Not any more.
We pontificated a bit about this and then headed back to Crowden over Westend Moss and Hey Edge.
The eta van on the road to Barnsley had knocked off.
Back up the M1. Its 117 miles from our house to Crowden but takes a bit less than 2 hours to drive. I must get down here more often.

We did 11 miles and 1600 or so feet of ascent.

Weardale Black Hill

Brian rang last night and we arranged this little trundle up on to a nice North Pennine top. We’d have to have a late start because he was due to have his bottom pac ked by the lovely nurses at Alston hospital
If you ever feel the need to have your bottom packed, by the way, I can think of no better team to do it than the nurses at Alston Hospital. And it comes out of general taxation and NI contributions, and various long term, loans from the Royal Bank of Scotland.
We arranged to meet at Charlie’s house in Westgate. Westgate was just –1C at the appointed lunchtime rendez-nous.
The walk was a blast – we played on a frozen waterfall and climbed up to the 559 metre top (sort of…) of Black Hill and then played a bit more on a frozen pond. And Charlie gave a brief lesson on how to salt-glaze things such as the broken salt-glazed sink we found in use as a water thingy for the local sheep.
The wind chill on the top was enormously negative and the view included some rainbow-effect, but very small clouds..
Interestingly the South side of Weardale has a thin snow cover and is white and the North side is just frozen, but green. That’s sunshine for you, I expect.
Afterwards, we put the world to rights in the pub in Westgate mainly concerning the efficiency of the local gritting services, how dangerous and scary it is on the motorways nowadays and what the enormous bang was that scared the poo out of Weardalers last week (We settled on a sound barrier breach. They do that sort of thing every now and then)
We only walked about four miles, but it’s a New Year duck broken.