Category: Pennines
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A Rainbow Over Ruin: The Legacy of Great Rundaleâs Baryte Mines
A rainbow graces the Pennine valley of Great Rundale, near Duftonâa charming touch to a landscape turned into an industrial graveyard. The old lead and barytes mines have left their mark: adits, crumbling shafts, stone hut ruins, and vast heaps of rocky waste. The track winding up the dale carries the faint memory of men…
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Robin Hoodâs Bed: Erosion, Myths, and Grouse Shootersâ Wine
Our return journey across the M62 was, unsurprisingly, rather more foggy than the outward. This, coupled with a smidgen of common sense, deterred any whim to revisit Blackstone Edge. Thus, I here is instead another photograph from yesterdayâs wander, of the rock formation bearing the pretentious title of âRobin Hoodâs Bedâ or, to vary the…
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The Aiggin Stone: a Resilient Guidepost of Blackstone Edge
On a damp, somewhat joyless morning, we embarked on a foray up Blackstone Edge, detouring briefly from the misery of the M62 to scale this Pennine hill. Past the summit trig. point and âRobin Hoodâs Bedââan erratic boulder unceremoniously perched there as though in mockeryâwe came upon the Aiggin Stone, a relic with pretensions of…
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Not another one!
I remembered today a painting my aunty had above her fireplace. It was of a blue lady and it was years later that I discovered that it was just a reproduction sold in its thousands in 1960s furniture shops. The painting was called the Chinese Girl, and apparently the original was sold for nearly ÂŁ1…
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Chew Reservoir
It’s been a long day. At the crack of dawn this morning I was on the high Pennine moors above Oldham. Maybe it was a dream. I came across Chew Reservoir quite suddenly out of the swirling morning mist. When full it holds 200 million gallons of water but the current level is substantially lower.…
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Blackstone Edge
With the young scion installed back at uni, a chance to explore the Pennines on the way back home. Blackstone Edge, a gritstone escarpment conveniently just off the M62 and overlooking the conurbation of Manchester. The map named Robin Hood’s Bed just south of the summit which sounded interesting but as I didn’t know what…
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High Cup Gill
Across the Pennines to High Cup Nick above Appleby to see the Great Whin Sill, an intrusion of volcanic dolerite between limestone layers. Well I would have seen it if it had been clear. I managed to get this snap of High Cup Gill before I climbed into the cloud.