Allt Coire Thoraidh – Cry Me a River

Eas Urchaidh waterfall on the River Orchy.

Early March, time for our annual get together in the Highlands. This started many years ago as a ‘boys’ weekend, to get as many of us as possible on one place to meet an old friend who was visiting from Denmark. He still comes over from Denmark for the weekend, but we long since abandoned the idea of it being a for ‘boys’ only, so the group has, if anything, swelled over the years. In addition, as our kids have grown up, this has been a good opportunity to introduce them to the delights of winter hill-walking. This year we were joined by A and her friend, the Tower Captain’s daughter S. Imperative then, that we had some decent weather so as not to put them off.

Eas Urchaidh waterfall on the River Orchy.

Eas Urchaidh video – click on the image to open it and play it on flickr

Unfortunately, on the Saturday, we had one of the wettest days I can remember. We tried to get out for a walk – thinking that staying down in the forestry might be a good idea. We’d spotted a Caledonian Forest Reserve in Coire Thoraidh and thought we would go and have a look, then continue up to Lochan Coire Thoraidh and possibly down the other side beyond the Lochan.

But it really was chucking it down. The Allt Broighleachan was a raging torrent, which I didn’t recall from our previous visit to these woods. We crossed a slightly awkward ford and had just reached the reserve when we encountered…

Ford (!) through Allt Coire Thoraidh.

…a ford too far!

I seem to remember that there was some discussion of ‘practising river-crossings’ in threes, or some such lunacy. Andy went off to look for somewhere to jump across.

Drowned Rats.

But ultimately, sense prevailed, and we turned back.

Allt Coire Thoraidh ford video.

Watch to the end to see how put-out Andy was by the situation. Doesn’t seem too bothered does he?

Waterfall – Allt Broighleachan.

When we retraced our steps it was to find that the ford we had already crossed had become more of an extended pool and were forced to divert across a very wet boggy area, guaranteeing wet feet for all.

Waterfall – Allt Broighleachan – video.

After we got back and hung up all of our drenched gear to dry, it actually briefly stopped raining. It didn’t last too long, but it was sufficient to entice me out again, for a wander towards Inverveigh.

River Orchy at Bridge of Orchy – looking north.

The map shows another ford there, so I ought to have known how that outing would end.

River Orchy at Bridge of Orchy – looking south.

I didn’t get far, but the views of the river were worth it.

River Orchy

Later, the girls played Ticket to Ride in their room, whilst the Tower Captain and I watched England beat Wales at Twickenham on the little telly in ours. Then to the bar where we were staying, the Bridge of Orchy Hotel, for a slap up meal, a few bevvies and the usual mix of silliness, rehashed stories, daft gags and such like.

Not a bad day, considering.

Andy’s account of the day is here.

My own account of our previous visit, when both the river and the waterfalls at the top of this post were frozen over and we climbed Beinn Mhic Mhondaidh in testing conditions, is here.

Now,  a tune in different guises:

I’m presuming that everybody knows the original Julie London version. I’m very fond of that. There’s a great version by Dinah Washington too. The song was originally written for Ella Fitzgerald, but she didn’t actually record it until well after it had already been a hit. Unusually, I’m not overly-struck by her take on the tune. Too lush an arrangement, I think. Having said that, I really love this live rendition, which throws in everything but the kitchen sink and couldn’t be further from the spare, melancholy original…

It’s my favourite tune from Joe Cocker’s brilliant live album ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’.

The Unattended Moment

The Bay from Castlebarrow, late evening.

Millennium Bridge over The Lune, Lancaster.

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.

Daffodils at Far Arnside.

High water in the bay again.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.

The view from Park Point. With added whitecaps.

Looking to Grange-Over-Sands.

Looking south along the coast.

River Kent from Arnside Knott. Lake district hills lost in cloud.

River Lune. Ruskin’s view.

St. Mary’s Kirkby Lonsdale.

The Bay from Castlebarrow.

Arnside Tower.

Whitbarrow from Arnside Knott.

The River Kent from Arnside Knott again.

The bay and Humphrey Head from Arnside Knott.

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

Looking south along the coast.

Sunset from Emesgate Lane.

These last two images are actually videos. I don’t think they’ll work, because I’m too tight to fork out for a premium account. But click on the pictures and that should take you to the relevant flickr page where you can hear the sound of the wind and the breaking waves, some of the many voices of the sea, should you wish.

The photos here are mostly from the ‘leap day’ weekend at the end of February and the start of March, except for the first which is from earlier that week.

The quotations are all from ‘The Dry Salvages’, which is the third of T.S.Elliot’s Four Quartets. To be honest, I stumbled across it when looking for something about the sea – or so I thought. It turns out, what I was really looking for was that passage about ‘the distraction fit’, ‘the unattended moment’. I’m sure I’ve read the poem before, but I’ve never been struck so forcibly by this section as I was on this occasion.

I remember trying to capture something like this idea in a post way back in the early days of the blog. Perhaps, in some ways, it’s always the ‘unattended moment’ I’m writing about, or seeking when I go out for yet another walk, or crawl around taking yet more photographs of orchids, or of leaves, waves, clouds etc when I have thousands of images of exactly those things already.

It seems entirely appropriate to me that Elliot’s examples of ‘distractions’ should end with music – anyone who’s been to a gig, or clubbing, with me and watched me throwing my ample, uncoordinated frame around, grinning like a loon, might have caught me in one of those moments, if they weren’t too lost in the music and the moment themselves. But equally, they might have shared a moment like that during a wild day in the hills, when, despite, or perhaps because of, adverse conditions, our enthusiasm bubbled over into unexplained laughter and broad smiles; equally I think of a few ‘wild’ swims which sparked the same kind of happy absorption, or quiet moments around a beach bonfire. I’m heaping up examples because I can’t really put my finger on what I’m driving at, but I know it when I feel it.

Usually happens when the horns come in during this tune, for example.

Walk, Eat, Sleep Repeat.

Daffodils on the bank on Cove Road.

Primroses in the same spot.

February half-term brought lots more rain. I know it did, because I remember the flooding…

View from by Arnside Tower of the flooding by Black Dyke.

…and how it steadily got worse. But I have lots of photos showing blue skies and sunshine.

Arnside Knott.

The explanation for that apparent contradiction is simple: because the weather was poor it seemed a bit pointless to drive anywhere to walk, but there were pleasant interludes between the storms and, being at home, I was poised to take advantage of them.

The flooding extends into the woods.

Scarlet Elf Cup.

Eaves Wood.

Because of the extensive flooding of Silverdale Moss and the adjoining fields between the railway line and Arnside Tower Farm, the circuit around Middlebarrow and Eaves Wood became a bit of a favourite – and has remained so actually.

Not that I neglected my other favourite local wanders…

Sunset from the Cove.

Chickens!

Woodwell.

The path near Woodwell, flowing well.

Lambert’s Meadow. You can just about make out the new bridge in the foreground – it was thoroughly submerged.

Arnside Tower.

But I kept coming back past the tower to see the expanding lake below its slightly elevated position.

The flooding again – it was getting wider every day.

Until, this day, when I met a former colleague who was out walking her dog and chuckling to herself as I approached.

“You’ll need wellies”, she explained, glancing at my shoes.

Flooded woodland.

Including over the path.

I managed to get dry-shod past the flooded section of path, but it was surprisingly difficult to do so.

Flotsam at the Cove.

Eaves Wood.

My first attempt at Pain de Campagne. Sadly, it didn’t taste like the wonderful bread we bought in France, but it was still very palatable.

Daffodil at Far Arnside.

I had a stroll over to Far Arnside to check on the wild daffodils there, but only a few were  open.

Green Hellebore at Far Arnside.

The Green Hellebore was all flowering though, in several patches on both sides of the path – I can’t decide if it has spread or if I just missed all but the largest patch on previous visits.

I’ve been racking my brains trying to remember what else we did during half-term, aside from me making bread and getting out for local walks. I’m sure we did do other things, but if I didn’t photograph it…..Oh – we decorated B’s room, that occupied a fair deal of time. In the process, I discovered the Radiolab podcast which does science, history, human nature, all of it in a very engaging way. Perfect for when we have time on our hands, you’d think, which makes it all the more inexplicable that I haven’t listened to any episodes for a few weeks. Actually, I think that’s because I got into the habit of listening to it when I was doing boring quotidian tasks – ironing, painting, etc none of which I’ve been doing much of over the last few weeks.

This pattern of frequent local walks over ground which is very familiar, to both myself and regular visitors to this blog, has continued after half-term, particularly since schools were closed and I have been working from home. Which gives me a bit of a dilemma as to how to organise forthcoming posts. I can’t write a post per walk, since then I will never catch up. I don’t think I have the mental capacity to organise the posts thematically, so I shall probably just amalgamate several walks into a single post as I have done here. Anyway, I’ve taken an awful lot of photos, so there will have be some sort of selection process. Gird yourselves.

Lady Love, Robin Trower. The British Jimi Hendrix apparently. I thought we’d adopted Hendrix anyway. Great tune regardless – dig that Cow Bell!

One upside of working from home is that I can listen to music whilst I’m working. I’ve been listening to things I only have on vinyl and haven’t played for years. This one dates back to a compilation album my parents bought me for Christmas when I was a nipper. I remembered how much I liked the compilation, but had forgotten how magnificent this song is.

Research Flat Earth

The first weekend of February half-term. Pretty mixed weather to say the least. I was out several times none-the-less, first of all on my annual pilgrimage to see the display of Snowdrops near Hawes Water.

Later I was out in the garden and was astonished to see that a Brimstone butterfly had emerged from hibernation. Not something you expect to see on a cold, wet and windy day in mid-February.

(The orange cables are fibre-optic, for a new broadband supply. Might be a while before they get dug in)

With all the rain we were having, the two big seasonal springs had appeared at the Cove:

Between squalls it briefly brightened up…

On the Sunday afternoon, I took B to a kick-boxing class in Lancaster, It’s a bit longer than some of the other classes he attends, so time for me to get in a slightly longer walk.

I followed the Lancaster Canal, as far as the aqueduct…

…where the canal had been drained whilst some work was underway.

River Lune from the aqueduct.

Carrs Billington plant catching the late afternoon light.

Unnamed (on the OS map anyway) Lune Tributary.

On the far side of the aqueduct I joined a slightly submerged riverside path.

I found it quite exhilarating to walk alongside the river as it ran so high.

Skerton Bridge.

The building catching the light here is new. We’ve christened it the ‘Shreddies’ building, which tells you more about the daft conversations we have in the car on the way into Lancaster in the mornings than it does about the building itself. (There’s another building nearby which looks like a Weetabix. No really, there is.)

 

The Salt Path

Another February late afternoon, post-work wander to The Cove, but this time I actually made it in time for the sunset. Some of the winter storms coincided with high tides and reshaped the shingle beach at The Cove, also leaving a heap of driftwood and other detritus at the back of that beach…

Nothing much else to say about this very familiar route.

So, I shall take the opportunity instead to recommend a book I read recently.

It’s a memoir. A couple lose their family home and discover that he has a terminal illness. With nowhere to live, and against all advice, they decide to walk the Southwest Coastal Path, camping along the way. It’s a lovely read, much more uplifting than the grim circumstances might suggest.

Solmōnaþ

The Pepper Pot.

Apparently the old, Anglo-Saxon name for February was Solmōnaþ, or Sol-monath. Which has been interpreted as ‘Mud Month’, but which Bede defined, happily, as Cake-Month. I can’t show you any cakes, but here’s yet more bread pictures…

Pain de Mie

This has butter and milk in it, so I made…

Olive Bread

To keep the vegans happy too.

Post sunset, from the Cove. I’d been at the Pepper Pot for sunset, which was obscured by cloud, but the sky cleared quickly once the sun had set.

Mud-month was definitely more appropriate this year. I’ve read that February 2020 was the wettest on record, in England at least.

Man of the Match.

Astonishingly, B’s game at Garstang went ahead, played in a quagmire. They lost, trying to play flowing rugby when conditions dictated otherwise. B enjoyed it though – lots of tackles to make, rucks to hit and opportunities to steal ball.

This was a wet winter generally, and I had hard things to say about November, but I was happier in Solmōnaþ, because the afternoons were lengthening rather than drawing in.

During the first week of February, I kept just missing the sunset. But I was just glad to be out in some sort of light.

One day, I was meeting A for her Parents’ Evening, so had a chance for a wander around Williamson’s Park in Lancaster first.

The following weekend, I had a pleasant enough wander round to Arnside, despite a poor forecast and then an even more pleasant afternoon in The Fighting Cocks watching the Calcutta Cup with some of the other dads from B’s rugby team. After the match, I walked home in the dark, with the added delights of a howling gale and torrential rain and hail. For once, I had reason to regret my habitual adherence to short trousers through the winter.

The following day brought some blue skies…

…but more rain too…

A taste of what was to come.

Men at Work

There was work going on, necessitating traffic lights, on the main road through the village. I was a bit surprised to find that it was deemed necessary to put out signs on the unsurfaced track which goes past our house – including one in the strip of flowerbed by our garage.

Raisin bread.

I’ve been aware of the new Fairfield nature reserve on the outskirts of Lancaster for some time, and the boys Saturday morning BJJ session gave me a chance to go and have a wander.

The weather was a bit grim though. At some point, when I can go back to Lancaster, I shall have to have another look.

It seemed to me that the Snowdrops were a bit late in appearing this year.

Stinking Hellebore.

This is very early to flower, I think it must beat the Snowdrops every year. We have some in our garden and unlike the Snowdrops it keeps flowering – ours are still flowering now.

There’s a bank on Cove Road which is always the place where I expect to see Primroses appear before anywhere else. This year they were even earlier than usual; flowering before the end of January.

A very grey and damp weekend, which finished with a very grey and damp trip to The Cove.

And, because my last attempt to include songs by Bill Withers failed, here is probably my favourite:

And a fairly astonishing cover of the same, for voice and cello:

Sussed

Eaves Wood from the Coronation Path.

I don’t know if you’ve played the card game Sussed? It’s like the old TV quiz show ‘Mr and Mrs’, if you’re old enough to remember that: on your card are various multi-choice questions on a wide-range of subjects (and there are numerous editions available), the other players score points for correctly guessing what your answers will be. I’ll never win it, not when I’m playing my family anyway, because they are entirely too good at anticipating what I will say. Apparently, I’m completely predictable, or so they tell me.

Early sun in Eaves Wood.

I can see their point. I’m certainly a creature of habit. Take this weekend back in January.

On the Saturday I was up early and at the Pepper Pot a little after sunrise…

The Dale.

I took the boys to their BJJ lesson and had a wander around Lancaster, as I did most Saturdays, when such things were allowed.

Then later, I was back at the Pepper Pot…

…and down to The Cove for the sunset.

On the Sunday, I was out and about early and…

…you guessed it, at the Pepper Pot again…

The frosty Dale.

Took B and his friend E to their rugby match as I do most Sunday mornings…

Rugby pitches somewhere in Southport. Note the clear blue sky.

And when we got home? Well, of course, I went out for another walk, this time a circuit of Eaves Wood and Middlebarrow.

Arnside Knott and Arnside Tower. The Knott, all 150 odd metres of it is partially veiled by clouds.

That’s me. Steady-Eddy, predictable, unswerving, humdrum. The weather, on the other hand, was far from predictable that weekend, particularly on the Sunday. We had sunshine and frost in the morning; dense fog most of the way to Southport; glorious sunshine, clear blue skies and a biting wind in Southport; and finally rotten gloom and low cloud when we got home. Fickle and capricious as it is, I wouldn’t swap our weather for a totally settled climate. How dull that would be!

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

John Ruskin

I’m not sure I can agree whole-heartedly with this much repeated old saw. Rain gets tedious after a while. I’m much more in agreement with this one…

Bad weather always looks worse through a window.

Tom Lehrer

A tune, which isn’t really about the weather…

And, just in case anybody hasn’t heard this…

Might be useful if you are home-schooling Chemistry? I was tempted to include his song “We’ll All Go Together” but thought it might be too bleak in the circumstances.

Tide is High

Arnside Tower.

Another January weekend and another three walk day. First an early circuit of Middlebarrow and Eaves Wood.

Later, Jack Scout and Jenny Brown’s Point.

Cow’s Mouth.

The tide was high, and unusually, there were even some small waves.

I remember standing behind a rock trying in vain to photograph the mass of Oystercatchers which were perched on the remaining stub of the old land reclamation wall which wasn’t submerged. Since I was using my cameraphone, that was always doomed to failure.

Although the water was still high, it had clearly been higher still and there was plenty of evidence that the salt-marsh had been inundated.

I often take photos of posters advertising events which interest me, hoping that they will serve as a reminder and spur me on to get out and attend.

In this case, Little S and I went and the talk was absolutely fascinating. S gave a short talk of his own at the start about his fund-raising for the jamboree he hopes to go to in Bangladesh in a couple of years. He did really well, and what’s more, the assembled members of the Horticultural Society were incredibly generous.

One last walk to report that day, but only up the hill to a neighbour’s house. He’d had surgery a little while before and was getting stir-crazy convalescing. I took a game with me…

…which my brother had bought us for Christmas. As ever, it was a great choice and I really enjoyed playing.

My photos from the following day, a Sunday, are all of the sunset, taken at The Cove. I assume that the weather had been poor and only cleared up late on.

Some tunes:

Maybe not what you were expecting? I remember this cover version was released as a single which was given away free with the NME. I think the other side was their cover of ‘Eight Miles High’ which is brilliant. I still have it. Somewhere. I saw Hüsker Dü at the International in Manchester. That gig has the dubious distinction of being the loudest I have ever been to.  (That is, way too loud). Even louder than The Clash at the De Montfort in Leicester, which made my friend M’s ears bleed.

And then, because this maybe is what I lead you to expect…

 

January Walks from Work

Another component of my drive to increase my mileage were regular Lancaster walks from work, both at lunchtime and often later on for half an hour or so, before returning to prepare for the following day. I became quite adept at just missing the sunset from up by the castle.

Lancaster Canal and the Cathedral.

The garden at the Storey Institute.

St Peter’s Cathedral.

We did, occasionally, see some blue sky this winter. Just not often.