Special Christmas Discount Maps Offer - A-Z Adventure Atlas

Most pieblog readers will be familiar with the A-Z mapping concept.
I was a bit sceptical when I was offered a copy of an A-Z atlas of OS maps for review but more than chuffed when a small cardboard container plopped through the portcullis at Knipetowers this morning and which, when opened, revealed a neat little book containing an  A-Z Adventure Atlas of the Northern Lake District at a scale of 1:25000 and even more chuffter (made up word) to find that I could now fit the equivalent of Outdoor Leisure Maps OL4 and OL5 in a small pocket.
The first of the series of these Adventure Atlases
are now available with a special price of £5.45, with free postage from A-Z Mapping Co. Those with children studying arithmetic will be able to calculate that if the full price is normally £7.95, this is a discount of just a bit over 31%.
But what are they like, I probably would hear you ask?
Firstly – OL4 and OL5 have been somehow fitted into a small booklet 14cm x 24cm and weighing 150 grammes which is around half the weight of the OS maps.
The maps appear to be exactly the same as the OS maps at a scale of 1:25000
There’s a key, as on OS maps.
There’s a key to map pages, so you can find which page to use (provided you have a vague idea where you are!)

There’s an index of place names with grid references. This seems to be an very useful innovation since the list of places is extensive and appears to cover even fairly obscure Birketts, for instance.Want to know the grid ref for Heckbarley?  It’s NY766142 ! Tap this into a GPS and Robert is your mother’s brother.
There’s a page and a half of Safety/Security info – the usual stuff, but good advice for many who don’t seem to appreciate that heading off up Snowdon at half three on a November afternoon dressed in jeans and a jumper is the thing to do….
And there’s a section of QR codes for national park info, Ramblers, Weather, Access, Advice on map reading (possibly a bit late!) Danger areas and Mountain rescue.
Maps currently available are:
South West Coast path
Dartmoor
Lake District North and South
Dark peak
White Peak
Snowdonia
Norfolk Broads.

The offer expires on 31 December 2012
The website isA-Z Mapping Co and the discount code to be entered at the A-Z cart is TRMK250
I’ll be trying mine out on the hill as soon as I can….

Technorati Tags: adventure atlas,a-z,OS maps

Progress in Kitty’s Wood

Me and the Dawg did another reccy today for an advent walk which circumnavigates Crook and ends with Festive Pies and Hot Coffee (important capitalisation here) at St Catherine’s Community centre in Crook – just to start off the hiking Christmas (I just like Christmas…) and I made a discovery that cheered me up no end…
Most readers probably won't remember a blog post I made last summer about Kitty's Wood in which somebody had bought this wood from the County Council and had barricaded it off, I presumed, to use the wood as a pheasant shoot. The good people of Roddymoor have been using the wood as a recreational facility for yonks and it has a long history, being the site of Roddymoor Pit, a huge industrial site which employed thousands of men and boys from Crook, Roddymoor and Billy Row, some of whom lost their live there. So, as you can imagine, the locals weren’t too chuffed about all the barbed wire and there was a kerfuffle about it, to say the least, some of which was organised by fellow outdoor blogger and Roddymoor resident who blogged about it here and organised the submission of rights of way claims concerning two main routes through the woods.
This is what one of the barricades looked like in the summer:

And this is what it looked like today

This looks like progress. I checked out the other termini of the main paths and they all appear to be open and useable. I’m not sure when all this happened – my eye hasn’t been on the ball.
It looks good, though. I’ll be having a little doggy walk through there quite soon….

Two North Pennine Guided Walks

It can’t have escaped many people’s notice that it’s been pretty wet recently. Unfortunately (although I could be persuaded to enjoy some of this…) the November monsoon coincided with two of my County Durham guided walks and their reccies, which were specially wet in a properly damp kind of way.

Lone tree on Bolts Law in the driech;  waiting for local cyclists to decorate it for Christmas
Number One Walk was entitled Bernie the Bolt and was yet another excursion to the summit of Bolt’s Law – this time from Blanchland. Me and the dawg did the reccy on a specially wet day last week. The rain lashed horizontally and the howled vertically, or however wind might howl. We finally solved the problem of where the fence crossing were on the descent to Ramshaw. other than that the walk was uneventful unless you count soggy socks as an event.

On the day (last Sunday), six people turned up, along with the stewards David and Ian and the weather the night before had been even wetter, causing flooded roads and general slop everywhere. It occurred both to me and the stewards that it was unlikely that anybody at all would turn up, but they did. At some point in the afternoon it stopped raining. I put in a few small diversions to avoid the worst boggy bits but, generally, the atmosphere was driech and dank. Just like late November, in fact.

This is the intended route – we cut off the bit by sikehead dam to avoid superslop

In between these, I reccied a walk at Rookhope. Instead of rain and wind, I got a hard frost. This was good, apart from the nithering cold, which wasn’t so good. Bruno came too. He ate a fair amount of ice, so I guess he mainly enjoyed the experience.
There was a problem, though. Footpath 13 in the parish of Eastgate quickly turned into an obstacle course. It started with some deep and tilted mud – tilted in such a way as to propel a sliding hiker into Rookhope Burn. I was soothed by the thought that at least the mud would get washed off as the victim succumbed to hypothermia and/or drowning.


Next was a bit of shoring that shore no more, followed by a tricky tree entanglement that wasn’t there last time I was here. Then more mud and a bog – a product of the severely wet conditions lately and, finally, a landslip with a large teetering tree trunk to swing off, plus a fair amount of mud.
All this was a bit of a shame because otherwise this is a fine and interesting route with waterfalls and little gorges and stuff like that. I’ve reported the state of the path to the rights of way peeps, but I couldn’t take a guided walk that way. So I didn’t.

And today, after yet another night of torrential, preceded by several other days of downpour and serious floods and closed roads and train lines, the morning dawned bright and sunny and thirteen brave souls turned up for the walk at Rookhope Arch, along with the stewards David (a different David, there’s lots of Davids), Sheila and Neville.

And we had quite a nice walk – sunny and chilly and still muddy. We avoided Footpath 13 by walking along the road, which was very quiet anyway. The mood seemed generally happy and Graeme produced a slug of sloe gin at half time which cheered me up even more and went down nicely with a lump of Sheila’s fruitcake. (This is not a euphemism, there was cake) (and chocolate) I might check out my own sloe gin which is slowly brewing in one of the knipetowers main kitchens…

Anyway, the views were much better today and the upper part of the Dale was bathed in winter sunshine and quite beautiful.
Thanks to the five stewards and the nineteen walkers – it seemed unlikely at times that anybody would turn up at all and there were discussions on Tuesday night about cancelling Wednesday’s walk due to road conditions. (Turned out they weren’t so bad in Weardale as it happened)
Both walks are 8 miles with or without diversions.

Stop Press – A couple of pics from Graeme ( the chap with the sloe gin)

I’m aware that a few peeps who come on the Durham CC guided walks sometimes read the pieblog and, occasionally, I get sent pictures. Soooo…. as this is an open invitation to guided walks customers to have their pics put up on the blog – let’s call it Punters’ Pics. Could there be prizes…..?

Bellowhead Queens Hall Edinburgh

We wuz there... a bit to the right (with a glass of beer..) This is Bellow head's concert at The Queen's Hall, Edinburgh 21 November 2012

Absolutely really fab stuff - much better, in fact, than this video which doesn't quite capture the base lines rubbing intimately with yr arse and the sheer jumping joy of the whole thing.
But anyway, I didn't record it, so I can't whinge and this lass done well and it's the earliest posting of this fabidozy concert.

TGO Route Planning at Buttermere

Just had a few days with Dawn in a bunkbarn at Buttermere, the purpose of which was several fold…

That is to say, we had to plan a TGO Route, we had to remedy Dawn’s cabin fever following orthopaedic joinery to a foot, and to test it out to some extent, and we had to have a bit of a jolly….

There were other visitors to the barn too – notably a pair of Northumbrian The North Face fans and a fork-lift truck driver from Northamptonshire.

Purpose #1 was completed in outline and we now have a route which goes from Inverie (after a ferry crossing from Mallaig) to Mam Barrisdale to Glen Quoich to Glen Garry to Spean Bridge and Glen Roy (thanks to Alan for the grid reference of the camping spot next to falls of Roy by the way…) – to Melgarve and Laggan and Newtonmore then over some high ground (a lot of high ground as it happens) to Glen Shee, Glen Prosen, Angus crematorium and Scurdie Ness. I am specially looking forward to the night at Angus crematorium. The route is 210 miles, which is about average for one of my crossings. I  arrive at Montrose, this will be my twelfth crossing. I won’t do a thirteenth, but will move right along to fourteen.

We now need to decide on a training walk in April.

 

 

Purpose #2 and #3 were discharged by what was supposed to be a gentle walk up to Scale Force and the boggy plateau just beyond, to a circuit of Mellbreak  by heading down Mosedale followed by a pleasant wander along the shores of Crummackwater – about nine miles, so a “moderate” walk, ideal for a day of duff weather or for those days when you just can’t be arsed slugging up a big hill. Its a nice walk, if a little soggy underfoot and you can have a little scramble alongside the lower bit of Scale Force which gives access to a deep gorge. Take my advice and climb back down facing inwards. If you face outwards, you get a wet bum.

Next was a trip to the coast at Allonby for a few miles along the shingly beach and back. This was cold and windy…… but good views over to Criffel and a very nice off-shore windfarm for those who enjoy windfarms. I decided to forgo my usual coastal bathing frenzy.

And then a circuit of Buttermere for a main course of about five miles, followed by what can only be described as a soggy lurch up Hatteringill Head – an unbagged Birkett at the North end of the Loweswater fells. This involved at least two barbed wire entanglements and a lot of very soggy mud. My prediction that it would remain dry and, thus,having  set off with no waterproofs proved disastrously inaccurate on the way back. Dawn amused herself with a ramble along the lane and was reported by a woman who got out of a landrover to be “way up there and heading uphill”  which was a bit worrying for a few minutes. However, she turned up, damply quarter of an hour later, so the search teams weren’t required.

One thing about camping barns in November – even in the mild, almost warm conditions we had at Buttermere, is that they’re perishingly cold and it was due to this factor that I was forced to repair to The Fish Inn on one occasion and The Bridge on another. This was purely a survival strategy, obviously.

There was a dusting of snow on the tops as we left. It won’t last, though. The reason for this mild spell is that I’ve just bought a pair of Khatoola spikes. The last time I bought cold weather stuff – a pair of skis on one occasion and a pair of expensive crampons on another, it didn’t snow for ten years. This was before global warming, obviously, it’s been cold ever since they stopped predicting  a new ice age and started predicting tropical conditions for County Durham.