A Little Trundle Up the Hush

I visited Brian today and we had a little wander up Dowgang Hush at Nenthead. We only did, maybe a mile and a half, but with 400 feet of ascent and lots of poking around.
Roughly at the top of one of the branches of the hush are the remains of an old coal mine.

I noticed that the coal mine shop or, maybe it was an office  or a workshop (it has a fireplace) was covered in bright orange lichen. I’ve not seen this before. Any lichen experts out there?

Secondly, Brian was turning over bits of the spoil heap, which was mainly lumps of shale, when he announced that he’d found a fossil. On closer inspection, the spoil heap was, in fact littered with oval-shaped rocks with ripples down the side. These were fossilised trees. The ripples are, or were the bark and these things were just a bit thicker than sapling size. I took a photo. In fact, I took a fossil.  Its about ten inches long by two or three inches wide and weighs about four kg. That’s the wife’s Christmas present sorted out anyway.

What?
Look, it’s 350 million years old…..

We returned by a different route and only slightly disturbed the couple of kids camped by the pond near the mine.
Aren’t the kids supposed to be at school just now?

What Forest Harvesters Do

We parked a car in a pal’s farmyard, mainly to gain a little bit of height, and wandered up through old pastures, seeking out hidden mineshafts. We found one, with a mat of grass covering five or six concrete sleepers with little in the way of cracks to allow depth to be gauged.

We entered a bit of forest. The landowner came up on his ATV and we chatted for a while. Various Alston Moor issues were chewed over. It rained heavily for a short time.
Upwards through the thick forest. This is a public footpath and you’d only know by feel. The actual routs has had the lower branches snipped off to provide a comfy way through – but its not obvious. This wood is doomed, though. Within the next few weeks the trees will have gone and all that’s left will be piles of brash. This will probably block the path.

We exited the wood on the far side and walked around the top end where the harvesters were working. Brian started a conversation with the chap working the lopping machine whilst I went off to investigate a line of spoil heaps – discovering each had a concrete-covered shaft. There were lots of other bits of diggings and old pits and so on. You can trace the vein reasonably well…..
Meanwhile – Brian had discovered that the harvesters were a family concern from the Borders, that the machine was about as complex to operate as flying a helicopter, that the wood here was heavier than in other places due to the short growing seasons which leads to narrow tree rings, that the price of timber is £40 a ton and that 26 tons had just been transported away, and that the wood had 40000 tons of wood in it. That’s a million and a half quid. And its not a very big wood – you can walk around it in twenty minutes…. 

The machine cuts a tree, strips off bark and small branches, cuts it to size and piles up the timber for extraction by another machine.
We gave them the phone number of the campsite at Westgate for their caravan and Brian offered various bits of local help, including a photo a day of the wood slowly disappearing for their website. You can see the wood clearly from his front room window.
The wood is occupied by a few deer and some small birds, all of which will find alternative accommodation close by.

For anybody about to bemoan the loss of a bit of woodland – this is commercial forest, planted about forty years ago for the purpose of providing timber. It has to be harvested like any other crop, otherwise there’s no point. Inside the wood is  not a specially nice place to be anyway – its dark and progress off the cut path is difficult and, in some places, impossible. It’ll get replanted in due course.
This little corner of Nenthead will be a bit colder this coming winter, though….

Its all downhill from here

It seemed like a perfect plan. We would leave a car at the bottom of the hill, drive another car to the top, sledge down and retrieve car number one after a long descent of 1800 metres horizontal (er….tilted…) and 150 metres vertical (ish)

The maths should have told us it wasn’t really very steep, although, from Brian’s house, it looked quite scary. White and scary as it happens.

So thats what we did. We left a car at the bottom and drove to the top of Killhope Cross – at 627 metres above mean sea level – and we walked another ten metres of ascent before beginning our individual luges.

This is where it went wrong. The snow was too soft and deep. The sledges didnt so much hurtle down the slope complete with screaming bearded geriatrics, but rather they slid very very slowly, powered by pairs of rotating arms and cries of “faster, faster….” It was difficult. There was blasphemy and the snow was cursed.

The slope even levelled off a bit, just to make it a bit harder. Then came a steep bit. We had a short hurtle. A very short hurtle, as it happens.

And then we arrived at the little dam. Ice covered, it was. There was a foot of snow on top of the ice and the ice had sunken and collapsed in the middle due, no doubt to it not having rained liquids at Nenthead since the 12th of December.

This gave a few minutes of slippery sport.

A gully gave two fast and scary runs into a beck, but the effort of climbing back up the sides was too much.

We had managed an 1800 metre "journey" with a 150 metres drop, though.

So we went back to Brians for soup and regroup.

After, we had a look at the Yad Moss skiing grounds, which had a few skiers and snowboarders skiing and snowboarding.

(Note: next time take skis to the top of the hill – or at least the ski-bike…)

And then we contented ourselves for a good while trying to snowball a boulder in the stream below the waterfall at Ash Gill. A snowball descent of around 40 metres. We missed. We explored the little cave which can be used to descend to the foot of the waterfall and found it full of water ice and quite slippery. We went to the co-op in Alston.

There’s still a lorra lorra snow on Alston Moor and the North Pennines, and its either very deep and powdery on a deep, hard base, or very deep and soft and heavy on a deep, hard base. The main road is just slightly over single track and the road to Teesdale is single track between walls of snow.

Its quite fab, really. Walking on the moors would be difficult, however.

Snowman abandoned after breakfast party

Team photo including diminutive snowman

My plans for walks are in somewhat of a mess due to deep soft snow which is lying very deeply and softly just about everywhere I’d planned to walk. So I was really pleased to receive an invitation from Brian at Nenthead to join this annual underground breakfast scoffing session. This annual tomfoolery being a bit of a get-together for the Cumbrian Mines Rescue Organisation. A mine may well smell of sausages for quite a while after one of these trips.

I squitterred the knipemobile up Weardale and over to Nenthead, passing two police signs that said the road was closed – but it seemed OK, if a bit quiet – and I arrived safely at Nenthead only to forgo the impossible drive up the steep cobbles to Chez Brian. I walked up the hill. It was very slippery.

Gilda and Brian (before picture…)

Here, Brian distributed helmets and caving suits for me and his partner, Gilda, and we loaded up packs with essential underground stuff such as stoves and gas, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, tomato ketchup and, generally stuff needed for a short but happy life of soaring cholesterol and cardiac nurses going (Tut!)

After a period of driving around on slippery snow, and a bit of kerfuffle about which hole we were going down, the Nenthead Chapel party were loaded into a land rover for a short and sobering drive over moors deep in snow to arrive a few nano-seconds later at the entrance to Smallcleuch Mine.

Gilda cooks up a storm

And we entered and paddled along, sometimes crawling, sometimes getting a bit dislocated, but finally ending up in a large cavern known as “The Small Ballroom” This is not named after tight underwear such as you might get as a present on Christmas Day, but is the smaller version of “The Ballroom” – a much bigger cavern in which, it is said, a dinner for the local masonic lodge was once held. (around 1906,,,,?)

Jamie Oliver eat your heart out.

Brian unloaded the snowman that he’d smuggled in and it was duly decorated in a festive kind of manner. – And we celebrated to season by cooking and scoffing large quantities of fried breakfast, all of which was really very nice.

Warming the snowman

And so, after a few team photos, we were lead out by an easier way than the one we came in by – which took about an hour, I suppose – it all seemed impossibly complicated to me but we finally emerged blinking into a blinking blizzard.

There is much of interest in the holes – but one of the really interesting buts we came across was the hoof marks of (presumably) the last ponies in the mine for a short section between some rails. The area had been taped off but this had not prevented some prune from walking through the marks in his wellies.

Me and Gilda full of Full English

Once out, our manic landrover chauffuer made short work of the impossible drive back to Nenthead and after a short coffee break at Brian’s, I attempted to get the car back over Killhope Cross – and failed, partly due to the car in front coming to a slithering stop. One of the keys to success is not to stop, y’see….. The headlights/windscreen thing looked like that star wars screen saver thingy…

I ended up driving around by Hexham and Corbridge, which is quite a long way home. I doubt if the car would have made it down the other side of the pass anyway. But all’s well that, well,….ends, I suppose.

But what fun.

We lit a small fire for the snowman, to keep it warm as we abandoned it to it’s dark, damp and lonely fate. Its a hard life, being a snowman.

Dowgang Hush and Shrine

I called on Brian at Nenthead today and we had a little radge or exploration up Dowgang Hush at Nenthead.
Nenthead is a village planned and built by the London Lead Company for the sole purpose of the extraction of minerals. So its full of lead mines. Dowgang Hush is a deep man-made gully leading down into the village from the moors also created for the single purpose of extracting minerals, mainly lead. There are the remains of a coalmine at the very top, though along with some more recent channelling of water for the operation of water-powered machineray at the lead mines museum. This stuff is very clever and quite interesting and is a worthwhile expenditure of your resources, in my opinion.
I’d never been in the hush, so Brian agreed that it would be a good place for a bit of a radge.
And so, we explored upwards from the car park. There’s a sort of laid-out trail in the huish with information boards, which was unexpected, and we actually followed some of this and read the boards.
There was quite a bit of evidence of informal camping in the place too – at one point there being a selection of children’s chairs arranged around the remains of a large campfire containing broken glass and squashed lager tins, alongside a large polythene sheet and a wigwam-shaped log construction, presumably the unsuccessful attempt at building a shelter. I suspect that a bunch of eejits had watched a Ray Mears episode of dandelion eating, fire laying and shelter building and that they had probably burned their SAS survival books on getting the fire lit.
Dhuhhh!
After poking around the coalmine for a bit, we repaired to the Miners Arms for a pint of Scruttocks Old Dirigible.
As I seem to be going through a short period of heart-string tugging regarding distressed rabbits, I’ve included a pic of one such youthful specimen apparently asleep on a pagan shrine somewhere on Alston Moor. Actually, the animal is an ex-rabbit. It used to be a rabbit, but now it isn’t. It’s sleep is a permanent state and its only the cool Alston Moor climate that’s keeping it in one piece.
To the ageing Stardust Child of the Universe who believes that the ever-changing contents of this shrine arrive mysteriously from some nature spirit as a yet-to-be-divined special message – its not true. Somebody is having a giggle. Sorry. In point of fact, the rabbit is a recent victim of next door's cat - a friendly, but one-eyed pussy who is currently on a bit of a rampage as far as the local rabbit population is concerned. (Also culls field voles, rats, mice, sparrows, robins, blackbirds, seagulls, crows...... a couple of elderly ramblers...... a Ford Ka........)

Snow Games

Today’s entertainment started as a result of a short phone conversation with my mate Brian from Nenthead.

I arrived at in a sunny but snowy Nenthead city centre just before brunch to the sound of many spades, shovels and those big red plastic snow-shifting thingies. Even the Council was heaving snow over a wall using a JCB. There’s a lot of snow at Nenthead.

Any road up, the day was broken up into a series of short games or pastimes.

Game 1. Having a rant about the lack of attention from the gritters. Brian was wandering around with a video camera taking pics of the chaos that was Nenthead.
He’d rung the gritting people who, for some bizarre reason, seem to be based in Warrington. He threatened them with the BBC. Later, a gritter turned up. You can tell when a gritting service has been privatised. On the first pass they put down the absolute minimal amount of grit possible to still be able to claim they were gritting. On the second pass, they gritted not. Neither did they salt. Neither was their snowplough sullied by snow. They did wave, a bit regally as they went back to the gritting station to return their grit.

Game 2 Consisted of trying to hurtle down a field full of powder snow on a bicycle with skis on instead of wheels. This was very good fun until you had to return the bike to the top. Which was hard work. Nevertheless, several runs were runned. Speed was not involved due to the tendency for the front runner to slide beneath the snow. Some falling off was completed.

Coffee break.

Game 3 Digging a tunnel into the large pile of snow outside Brian’s house. This took a couple of hours and was interrupted by lunch of some extremely nice soup that Brian had made and a cheese and pickle sandwich.
The next door neighbour asked what I was doing.
“Digging a hole” said I.
“What for” said she.
“We’re going to take in lodgers”
“Hmmm” Shuts door. Sound of many locks and bolts…
When finished, the hole was just big enough for two inside, had a plant pot which had somehow got buried a few days ago, a carpet (building supplies bag), an electricity supply, two large icicle decorations, a watering can a “for sale” sign and a “to let” sign, which the coalman misread as “toilet”
The neighbour who had come around to the idea, suggested spraying it with water to preserve it. (ice – the temperature had increased from minus 7 to a balmy minus 2)
We determined to include some fruit cordial in the spray and so, achieve a little pink, orange or red effect. This wasn’t very successful, but was a good idea.

Game 4 taking two enormous dogs for a walk in the snowdrifts on the moor. It was whilst travelling to this particular gig that we discovered that the gritters had only, in fact, been performing their act whilst passing Brian’s front door. They had neglected to plough out the drifts on the road, or to deal with the bit where the dustbin wagon had slid off the road a week or so earlier. The walk went well. The dogs bounced around and we didn’t.
After a feedback and plenary session

Alston Moor radging

I may have explained the concept of "radging" in a previous post. For those unfamiliar with the word, and who can;t be arsed looking back through all the posts, basically, it's aimless pratting about.

And so, today, I went to visit Brian in his chapel home at Nenthead and we did just a spot of lightweight radging around the old coal mines and moors along the North side of the Nent valley (Nentdale??) - unusual, somewhat for us because our normal places to poke around are lead mines.

There's a bit less to see with yer coal mines - the old ones seem to have been "lanscaped" over , leaving only some tell-tale orange-coloured becks, a few black shale heaps and obscure structures. The more recent ones are surrounded by their "modern" heavy machinery, slowly rusting away. And there's a lot of it - diggers, wagons, conveyors, drilling rigs......

I didnt take too many pics today, and the ones I did take turned out a bit blurred. It was due, I think, somewhat to the rather dreich sort of conditions - the apparent approach of a warm front - milky skies, a rising wind and positive temperatures in Weardale. Minus 2 C at Crook, plus 3C in Weardale (big difference forr only 6 miles) and minus 1C at Nenthead - although Brian's house is above 1600 feet, so its expected to be cold. The wind chill, with a freezing temperature and a 25-30 mph wind, was bone-chilling at times

We finished with a couple of beers in the pub in Alston, entertained by Kipper the collie who's obsession was retrieving increasingly soggy bearmats. Kipper's a bit shy when it come to flash photography and the pic included here was the best of a bunch, and the flash cause dhim to go and hide under a table for half an hour, till a bunch of keepers came into the pub and gave him hope for more beermat games.

I expect all the snow will have gone in a couple of days, so these may be the last white pics for a time. Shame. I was enjoying it.

I put my crampons on to walk down the icy tarck by the way. You may consider it overkill. I considered it quite good fun to dance about on the ice.

Underground, not up Skiddaw

Today was the first anniversary of Brian's visit to the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle during which he was fitted with a couple of stents in his cardiac tubes.
By way of celebration, and to provide a photo for the consultant who fitted the stens that Brian was still alive and kicking, we arranged to go to the top of Skiddaw. Unfortunately, a warm, wet Atlantic blow brought hill fog down to about 400 metres or so and it was drizzling and windy in a typical pennine windy and drizzly sort of way. A pic of Skiddaw summit would have been hardly woirth the effort.
So, instead, he fed his neighbours, the gooses (see pic) and we kitted up in yellow romper suits and wellies and forced our way into Nenthead's Scaleburn leadmine. the purpose was twofold
1) To see if we couldnt get some nice fossils from a seam of nice fossils - for which we carried a spade and a lump hammer and a chisel.
2) To visit a horse gang, which, until recently had been blocked off by a roof fall which had recently been excavated.
and ...er ... threefold
3) To take some pics for the consultant (see above )
4) To have a laff....
Objective number one was started, but we abandoned the attempt to prize out some fossils pro tem. I was a bit worried when some big rocks suddenly squashed the rucksack with the tools in it. It would seem that roof falls happen suddenly and with no creaking or rumbling at all - the damn things just go bang - or splash, if they land in water. This was a bit scary, but Brian seemed unfazed.
And so we paddled through to the excavation for the horse gin - a short crawl under scaffolding. No creaking....
The horse gin is a circular cast iron ...er... circle whoch was rotated by a horse, who's job it was to simply walk around in circles. The gin pulled a cable and so, things were pulled up a deep shaft - which was just luking dangerously quite nearby. We lunched and took pictures and went back to the fossils.
We got a few nice ones, loaded everything up and left for a coffee at brian's.
A lass with a camera and her partner, who were interested in leadmines and had been mooching around purposefully outside, helped me get my wellies off. Once they get water in, I can't get the buggers off..
All good clean, wet and slightly muddy, fun.
I used the new Petzl and two backup lights, one of which is a wind-up. A real wind-up.

A short but enjoyable indulgence

I’ve taken Martin’s comments in the previous posting as good advice. So this one is a short(ish) but enjoyable indulgence. (enjoyable for me anyway) I’m in a positive mood as the car has passed it’s MOT (after having had £200+ thrown at it) and we’ve moved one step closer to having my mum’s two doodlecat-type cats rehomed (more dosh...) So, for the time being, they’re safe in a plush cattery run by a woman who seems to be obsessed by cats - always a good sign. And I’m on me hols in Wales from Saturday.

So here’s some less than serious underground pictures taken in leadmines at Nenthead. Such silliness…..

There likely be just one more posting this week and then there’ll be a two week interval. I’m just mentioning this so that you can organise something interesting to do whilst I’m away. I won’t be doing any mobile blogging due to technical difficulties (I haven’t got the kit and I’ve no idea what to do if I had….)