Mistletoe and Whine - Xmas Howgills on Doodlecat

The Howgills Diary account and walk description (well, sort of...) for December is now appearing on Doodlecat. Read it here at http://www.doodlecat.com/howgills/index.html

Drama!

Tension!

Passion!

Action!

New Cliff Richards Christmas Hit!

None of these are contained in this account!

Read it before Christmas! Or feel dead left out, like, sorta thing!

Yet another shameless plug....

Incidentally, whoever it is in the Anteeps, down there in New Zealand who is reading the blog - hello and welcome and we are the right way up! Hope you are enjoying the fun. We do requests......

(Pic is a friendly Howgills Fell pony)

Great Whernside in the frost

It was minus six degrees somewhere near Richmond this morning as I drove down to Kettlewell. Seems to be shaping up for a wintery winter...

Me and superdawg and my nephew had this little wander around Great Whernside on what seemed to be a very short day. We took a bridleway on the South side of Dowber Gill, a route that I'd never climbed before despite many, many trips up this hill. From the end of the bridleway, we could walk most of the ridge of Gt Whernside to the trig on the top, where there were lots and lots of people with their dawgs. No other super dawgs, though. It was all very frosty and cold and the air was fairly clear - and there was just a little frozen snow around. Some othe r nearby Pennines seem to have had a bit more...

Anyway, we could see the Lake District hills, and steam from various cooling towers somewhere in Yorkshire (not Drax, surely??) and a nuclear-explosion-type cloud over Teeside. I was assured that no such explosion has taken place today, though as many people would have noticed it and, likely, would have reported it to the appropriate authorities.

We came the short, steep and frozen slippery way down the hill and back to Kettlewell via the Park Rash Brigantian earthworks/defences - aka Tor Dyke - all the while putting the world to rights about the benefits of sitting about on the hills listening to skylarks and pipits and stuff - something I must make time for next summer.... the consequence of all this talk is that I failed to take many pics.

Home earlyish cos it went dark again.

Used me birthday gloves....

New marilyn surveyed

Following a survey, its just been announced on the RHB forum that sail Chalmadale 480 metres has been "promoted" to marilyn status. Sail Chalmadale is close to the West coast of Arran at NR914401. One more hill to tick.

In case there's any marilyn baggers reading my blerg (which may be a bit unlikely, I suppose...)

I haven't got a picture of it I'm afraid, so I've just posted a picture of the dog.

Sorry.

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.

TGO Challenge Planning #4 and some snow

Superdawg was highly suspicious this morning that something was different but couldn't quite put his paw on it...

Its nice to see a bit of snow, but I suppose it won't last till my next walk... ho and hum...

Anyway, Ive just spent the evening drawing a TGO Challenge route on to some 1:50k maps and counting ascent and stuff like that. And I've transposed the route on to a route sheet. I'll put this into an electronic version sometime next week and get it emailed off to Roger.

One of the maps - sheet 42 has just 1.4 kilometres of my route on it. Maybe I won't take sheet 42....