The Thin Line That Leads Us

Rhapsody in Blue

2011-06-30T22:39:00.004+01:00

Kayaking off MacLeod's Maidens, Skye

Sea kayaking over the years has proved to be an exquisite blend of serenity, excitement, fear (sometimes, but not always overcome) and wonder bordering on worship for an intimate experience of the blue planet. Even so, there are moments where the blend is just so...well...overwhelming, that you know that the experience is even more amazing.

Some of the most memorable days so far have been on Skye. The first, when we barely knew what we were letting ourselves in for, between Dunvegan and the wonderful pub at Stein. Our second kayaking-of-a-lifetime trip also ended up in front of a well-tended pint at the Stein Inn as we beamed, bright red and crusty with salt, at the folk dressed in normal clothes. We were elated aliens from another blue world, one that was full of delightful surprises.

Taking off from Harlosh and out into Bracadale Bay, we eventually came to the cave-studded and towering clifflines leading out towards the stacks. The bay here opens to meet the Atlantic swell, and normally conditions here would be fairly dynamic. On this day of uber-calm, the swell just whispered gentle nothings to the coast, lifting the water's edge like a carpet. It was magical.

An immense cave full to popping with nesting birds. This one went back hundreds of metres, opening out into a cave cathedral.

A gentle splash of water disturbed the absolute stillness and a closer look revealed a stream plunging hundreds of feet off the basalt edges and into the sea.

A stream dropping into the sea.

Slowly the sea-symphony grew from small beginnings into a crescendo of situation and spirit of place. The immensity of the cliffs, the caves sputtering full of cormorants and kittiwakes with rarer puffins scudding along, just above the lilting sea’s surface. A sense of exposure that borders on high mountaineering and a truly awesome place to be.

With each turn of a corner in the dark, ruffled basaltic coast, the sense of exposure ramped up a little more until the theatre of spires opened out in front of us. A sensational amphitheatre of rising cliffs with the sea stacks breaking through the edge of the ocean.

The day was only half way through and our capacity for wonder was already full to bursting. With an ocean of time to play with, we crossed over the full span of the bay to the isle of Wiay. A stocky, basalt pile riveted with caves, we’d visited this isle before in bouncier seas. In the calm of the afternoon, this island was a rhapsody in blue. Cave upon magical cave and another wonderful place.

It had been a wonderful day.

Kayaking to Callanish

2011-06-16T18:00:00.001+01:00

Looking for some shelter from the winds on a recent trip to the isle of Harris, we decided to take a look at Great Berneray. A circumnavigation would have been nice, but wasn't going to happen that day. Instead, we headed into the lochs east of there, to Callanish.

From the water's edge, the standing stones could just be seen and curling around the shoreline, they were once more out of view. I was thinking they'd be disappointing, sometimes the way with iconic places like this. But no, they are truly magical and even more impressive than I could have imagined. It was wonderful to see them.

Mountains and Molehills

2011-06-13T21:13:00.015+01:00

The Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon 2011, Beinn Dearg, Northwest Highlands

The LAMM this year was tucked into the mountains south of Ullapool, on the Beinn Dearg massif. This is classic munro terrane: sculpted valleys with dreamlike rivers and waterfalls. Soaring cliffs set on a backdrop of one of the most sensational mountain panoramas to be found: Suilven, Canisp and the other instantly recognisable icons of the Wester Ross landscape. The LAMM has become a national treasure, and truly deserves its reputation as a conoisseurs mountain marathon.

Front runners in the B Class

Yet when all's said and done, this is one of the toughest of challenges, whatever class you choose to undertake. It takes a special kind of mindset to give the LAMM your all. And at the beginning, it's especially tough. It takes a while to chip off the layers of civilisation that say it's going to be cold, wet and midgified and the two hard days of the event hang over you like a shroud.

At the start of the Score Class

Slowly, but surely though, you eventually embrace what you have to embrace. The cold, the wet, the never-ending, punishing and relentless terrane.

Course-setter Angela Mudge's dog, digging at the start

And suddenly, you realise that there is less and less to worry about. The mountains open out to sensational panoramas and you realise you are experiencing something quite fantastic, somewhere where you may never set foot again.

Moving through awesome landscapes: the distant peaks of Stac Pollaidh and Suilven

On the LAMM, the low point comes at 5 am on Day 2, but this is deftly turned into the high point of the weekend with the cunning use of bagpipes. You awake from your half-sleep to the dulcet sounds of the Highlands' finest- an experience to treasure. It was, unfortunately, impossible to find a willing piper in the remote location of the overnight camp in Strath Mulzie, so we were left with the accidental droning feedback of Martin Stone’s loud hailer instead (which some, rather unkindly, thought was a good substitute for the pipes…). Some disappointed LAMMers in a nearby tent made up for the piper-less wake up call with a rousing rendition of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers”, so we weren’t short-changed…

Descending the rocky summit of Seanna Bhraigh

Somewhere along the way, this tremendous mountain journey has allowed you to restore your sense of balance, to see what's important again. And all of a sudden, you realise your mountains have become molehills.

Day 2 start with the lovely backdrop of Creag an Duine

B Class womens' team winners (I think)

Spirited Waters

2011-05-09T20:23:00.009+01:00

Alice before the rain

A while ago now, just as the freeze-thaw was releasing its grip on the north, we took off on another wonderful kayak trip with the sea touring group of the Scottish Canoe Association. These trips have come to be so much more to us than meeting a bunch of kayakers for a paddle. They have become food for the kayaking soul.

Meeting old and new faces at the Isle of Glencoe hotel, the air of expectation was jamming the lobby as the briefing for the weekend took place. Soon to be sealed in dry suits, Peter Venters asked Jim Weir if there was anything he needed to lead a group the next day. 'Big flask....lots of sandwiches', was his succinct reply.
The scene was set for another great sea kayaking weekend.

In opting for the trip to Lismore from Port Appin, we found ourselves standing in a group of rather good paddlers. A bit too good, and I was wondering how it would all go. Still, conditions were good, and the pace started off gently.

Towards the northern end of Lismore where a multitude of skerries streak through the tidal waters, I saw two large birds. Geese perhaps, but geese with funny, bent beaks. A couple of us had spotted them and turned to get a little closer. The birds took off, revealing their identity. The two sea eagles whirled above us, not concerned enough to fly off.

The day panned out into one of those unforgettable times spent on an infinite sea above a panorama of unending skyscapes. The trip was made all the more poignant by developments within the SCA which stand to threaten the running of trips like these. For those who've enjoyed these trips for years, it is a sad enough thought. But for us newcomers to this truly inspirational group of people, it feels like the wave has passed beneath us before having had the time to catch it. Let's hope it isn't over.

One Day in Morocco

2011-03-29T20:51:00.009+01:00

It's been a while since I was in Africa. Being near Tarifa in Southern Spain at Christmas meant that we couldn't have had a better opportunity to slip across the Straits and visit Tangiers.

The ferry crossing was rough- about force 5 I would say. The immense catamaran slapped heavily into the ravaged waves, driving many passengers into close encounters with the sick bag. We were shaken, but on this occasion, not stirred, and slightly uneasily, left the restaurant deck to the cleaners and wobbled out into the scorching sun.

To be in Morocco is to immerse yourself in what seems at first like an unreal place. Within moments, it seemed as if the natural reserve between strangers had disappeared. At the slightest flicker of a map from a pocket, someone was there, wanting to help.

Sitting in the shade of a street cafe, we were exhausted. We'd raced off to try and see everything in this amazing, arresting place. Drinking in the wild infusion of stabbingly-bright green mint tea, the rainbow displays of wizards striding by in swathes of decadent winter djellabas made it feel like a wonderful hallucination.

Something else slowly started to sink in, though, by the end of the day. Although it seemed as if this was as unreal and fairytale a place as you could find, it was quite the opposite. This was the real world, a kind of reality that we in Britain, and perhaps, Europe, have lost touch with. Intangible though it was, the full gamut of life was here as it had been for thousands of years and even in this immense city, everyone was connected to each other. With our unreal existence in the here and now in our technologically proficient but shallow world, it struck me that we may have by-passed something very special.

Maybe there was something in the mint tea, but maybe life in Tangiers is a window on a forgotten world. Reality check, indeed.

Mountain Kingdom

2011-03-08T20:51:00.000Z

Join me on a photo journey through the landscapes of Corsica...A wonderful place for granite climbing and mountain running.

The ancient capital fortress of Corte

Thin wisps of cloud along a rock shelf

The path to the crag is paved with prickly pears...

Afternoon nap

Iles Rocheuses

The dancing granite spires of Campomoro

A true mountain kingdom: Monte Rotunda. What a place to be running.

The clouds came in...

And parted again...

A Handful Of Earth

2011-01-11T19:46:00.000Z

The view from the summit of Ulva

Look out over the far west of Mull and you'll see a magical landscape of shimmering seas amongst gem-like islands of green baize. The pastel-pink and turquiose blues of Iona, towering ridges of basalt layers and the melancholic beauty of a hundred ruined villages. It is a landscape beyond description, beyond words and beyond time.

Every year, we visit this place. We are drawn back again and again on the pretext of one day circumnavigating the isle of Ulva, but the truth is, we don't try too hard to achieve it. The goal is really just to be there.

The Watermill, Ormaig

The south side of Ulva is a dream-like smatter of bright green and purple. The bracken is high, hiding a network of barrel-shaped tubes forced through by the stubby island goats. For humans, though, it's hard work. In amongst the bracken, the crofters' houses slowly sink back into the earth, leaving an ache of sadness as they go. Here on the south side is the village of Ormaig and the old corn mill. And below the high tide mark, near every house, pieces of broken china still wash back and forth with every tide. Striped, blue-pattern, earthenware, poignant reminders of how we are only separated by a thin selvedge of time.

This immense Atlantic Grey seal seemed to enjoy tailgating the kayaks. When we got to the shore, we watched as he spent a pleasant hour rolling around in the shallow water, playing.

We pulled the kayaks onto land at Starvation Point in a dank, dreichy drizzle. This austere row of houses clinging to each other against the ravages of their age, this was the place where the sick and the elderly were left to live out their days. Too frail to be thrown off the island, this place was the darkest on the isle.

Every year, there is something new, something special to see, and this year, it was a heart-breaking memorial to, I think, a paraglider.

The dizzying beauty of the seas

The ruined houses of Starvation Point

When the crofters were ordered to leave Ulva for the New World, there was not much that they could take with them. But many took with them something of Ulva: a handful of earth.

Kayaking out here on these isles is both a wonderful escape from real life and a true reminder of what real life actually is.

A Christmas Greeting

2010-12-16T18:11:00.003Z

And this year, from my Dad's Antarctic collection, some Adelie penguins.

Happy Christmas, wherever you are!

Snowbound

2010-12-01T22:21:00.010Z

Wandering out east on our annual pilgrimage to the solitude of Lindisfarne, we were surprised to find rather a lot of snow. It was easy to think the snow wouldn't hang around on the eastern-most feather of land, but as we hit pack-ice on the drive over the Causeway, we had to think again.

The peace and wildness of the landscape was complete, and for four days we could do nothing but mooch through the snow, marvelling at this place.

Bamburgh Castle in the distance

Ice streams coming off the boat sheds
There were no trips to the mainland, no visits to the Ship Inn at Seahouses, and certainly no road-biking. This was wonderful isolation.

Pack ice on the Causeway

The snow came right up to the high tide mark

We finally made it off the island a day later than planned in fairly heavy snow. Any later and we'd have been stuck for a week. Which wouldn't have been all bad...

The Isle of Two Halves

2010-11-10T22:03:00.000Z

Circumnavigating the Isle of Bute

The Isle of Bute nudges up against the deeply-rutted lochs of the Cowal Peninsula, and it is an isle of two halves. And in keeping with this double identity the Scottish Canoe Association trip in September saw us complete the circumnavigation in two very different days.

From the lozenge of land at the southern end, Kilchattan Bay, we launched into the trip. It had been a bit of a shock to find that (a) it was going to be a long, 60 km paddle around the Isle over two days, and (b) that Stu had decided to tactically withdraw from the trip to save his back for a climbing holiday we had planned. Stu had a pleasant wander round the Isle, meeting us at various landings, instead.

As we rounded the southern tip, our leader, Roddy MacDowall of Kayak Bute passed off the surprising, rucking waves as "just a wee but o' tide..." This half of Bute is rugged and rusty-brown, abutting the wonderful isle of Inchmarnock, where we stopped for lunch. From there, we were in sniffing distance of the fantastic cafe at Ettrick Bay, its over-sized lemon meringues a mirage to our salt-cracked eyes.

The glory days of the Clyde Steamers remembered in a weather vane

We camped next to Colintraive Hotel on the mainland just beyond the northern end of Bute and with a fantastic meal and great beer, it couldn't have been better.

Bute's other half is altogether a different story. The eastern side is dominated by Rothesay and Port Bannatyne, great Victorian holiday ports now slightly decaying and enduring the after-effects of Glaswegian resettlement policies of the seventies. A wonderful retirement destination mingled with surprising pockets of social deprivation and almost-urban levels of isolation, only moments from Scotland's great western frontier.

A weekend of contrasts, for sure, but having made it round, an experience to treasure.

A Small Scale Delight

2010-09-30T17:31:00.003+01:00

The Rab Mountain Marathon 2010, The Eastern Fells

The Mountain Marathon season has barely started for me this year, but if there was one event to do, the Rab was the one. Cool, but clear and dry conditions made for a stunning weekend of upland, off-piste running, and as always, there was the huge privilege of being in the mountains for a whole weekend. Liberated by the unbearable lightness of modern day kit, from super-lighweight tents to the humble zip-lock bag, we were in for a two-day journey through the mountains of the mind.

As Day 1 drew to a close, Penny and I were nothing short of confused. With our carefully calibrated piece of string, we had mapped out a route that should have stretched us in the six alloted hours of running. After five, though, we'd made too much progress, and were marooned between a distant checkpoint, high up on the steep slopes of Place Fell, and the lure of the finish. In the end, we opted to finish early. But as Kate of Tea and Cake has rather bluntly pointed out, if you stay out too long, you're crap, and if you get in too early, you're crap. I guess on that day, we fell in the latter category...

In any case, our string theory worked better on Day 2, and we squeezed into the finish with a few minutes to spare. Much more satisfying. And with a third place in 'the ladies of a certain age' team category, we were chuffed to bits.

The Longest Day

2010-09-07T22:14:00.005+01:00

Bill Williamson's Ramsay Round

Bill and Ian on the climb up Stob Coire Sgriodain

In life, we all have our mountains to climb. But for Bill Williamson, there have been more mountains than most. A year or two ago, Bill made an attempt on the greatest of all Mountain Trilogies: the Bob Graham, the Paddy Buckley and the Ramsay Round. All in one year. With the first two of these in the bag, it was the Ramsay Round that remained elusive. By far the toughest of the big rounds, this 56 or so mile loop of Scotland's most challenging mountain terrain was proving a tough nut to crack.

Ian Charters and I were Bill's pacers over the least challenging of the Ramsay Round legs- a 17 mile run taking in a few Munros including the mighty Beinn Na Lap. 'Least challenging' is perhaps a funny way of looking at it though. The terrain is as challenging as you could find in the UK, and the degree of remoteness is breathtaking. Staring around the room in the Rucksack Club hut the night before, it positively radiated with Legends of the Fell. Yiannis Tridimas, the Zen Master of Endurance ("Your trouble, my friend, is you have a low tolerance of pain..."). Alan Lucker, veteran of the UTMB and a host of other self-effacing but miraculous ultra-distance mountain runners like Bill and Ian. Even the support crew were semi-professional (the eponymous Wynn Cliff). I wasn't sure I could keep with Ian and Bill on the day, but in reality in this remote environment, there really would be no choice.

Charlie Ramsay and Yiannnis Tridimas

At the start of Bill's run, an engaging figure introduced himself as Charlie Ramsay. He'd taken the trouble to come and see Bill start, and, as with most central figures in the sport, turned out to be captivating and enthralling. It was a rare privilege to meet Charlie.

At six in the evening, Bill rounded the shores of Loch Treig where we met him for the next leg. Bill was in great shape and although the weather closed in shortly after getting up high, things were going well. The descents were tough, though. With head torches on, it was almost impossible to judge whether you would be landing on stone (hard), heather (disarmingly springy) or jet-black, still, leg-munching runnels full of icy water (which claimed a leg from each of us). It was best just to slither, and fast.

After the long, wet run through bog-lets and rivers, the wandering trace of a headtorch signalled that we about to deliver Bill to Yiannis, Will and Alan for the next leg over the Mamores. It was looking good- Bill had navigated impeccably and was very sharp despite deteriorating conditions. As the two Ians, Pauline and I took the low road for the 2 hour walk out, the wind started to pick up, and the rain slashed down.

After the crushing doubt of the previous day, I woke refreshed after a mere 3 hours sleep. But it had been heaving it down all night. For a while we pensively waited to hear news of Bill's arrival, but as the minutes ticked away, we knew. The weather had beaten him again.

Bill completed the Ramsay Round in conditions that would have flayed the lycra off most mortals. In those conditions, 26 hours was no defeat, but a shining example of mind over matter. And for me too, grappling with uncertainty and doubt in the foothills of the mind, it had been an unparalleled opportunity disguised as an impossible situation.

Round The 'Horn

2010-08-09T17:14:00.017+01:00

"The sea is boring, like grief is
But beautiful, like grief is not"

Norman MacCaig

Sometimes, there is nothing better than a boring sea. Boring and beautiful. It is on days like these that the apparent exposure and infinite-ness of the sea is as comforting as withdrawing to a fire-side hearth. On the rare occasions when the sea is calm, predictable, it forgets who it's meant to be and becomes a balm to tired eyes.

Today, we are nosing in and out between rocky islets off the Isle of Whithorn and up to Garlieston off the Dumfries coast. Both fishing hamlets, quiet aside from the folk walking dogs and children along the rocky beaches. These are hamlets that time has forgotten in its race for sameness. The bar is still full of locals, characters, grumpy staff. Old men with faces chiselled by salt and wind still go fishing off the pier. And they still play bowls.

We haul up in White Port, a tiny cove that has no access by land. The fringe of tiredness has receded like the tide drawing lazily away from the kayaks on its planetary journey.

Later, on a run into the thick forests of Dumfrieshire, spotlights flashed in and out of the burn on its way to the sea. It seemed as if the forests were breathing out. It was warm, and there was a sense that they were steaming.

Rising out of the forests and on to the glens, I saw it. The trees were indeed exhaling.

The Solway coast up here on the Scottish side is always a delightful surprise to the kayaker. Tucked away behind unassuming, green, rolling hills, the rocks on the coast are upturned, and the sea is busy making islands, teeth and gaping caves. It's on days like these that it's great to be there, on the journey.

On An Odyssey of Tides

2010-07-22T20:26:00.000+01:00

The Farne Islands

To boldy go...

There is an old adage in seafaring circles that says the sea will always give the test before it thinks to give the lesson... and so it was on a recent trip to the Farne Islands. Sat just off the shore of the north east coast, these iconic islands have long been in the distant gaze. Impossibly close, yet impossibly far.

One of a thousand seals

At this time of year, they are the preserve of a million sea birds, nesting where there are no natural predators. It has to be said, this was a spring tide: the largest of the year, and few self-respecting kayakers of mediocre skill levels would venture to the Farnes knowing that the moon was in full swing. Here, the tides leap with some severity over the slabs of dolerite beneath the water to sudden waves, haystacked together. We should have known better, of course, but somehow, in the race to make the most of the good weather, the full moon slipped us by.

The racing tides around Megstone

With a Force 4 forecast we opted for a day of coastal pottering on the trip between Boulmer and Beadnell. The guide to kayaking off the coast here said there were no tides to speak of, so that was good. The faint waft of kippers rose on zephyrs of wind at the lunch stop of Craster and we resisted the urge to have an ice cream.
Sue approaching the Inner Farnes

Pressing on northwards, the wind picked up and something tide-like was running under the boats in the opposite direction to the wind. Wind against tide always creates a confused sea, but it was about to get worse. Much worse.

I was beginning to wish I'd had that ice cream.

On the horizon, there were hills of sea. Haystacks in the water. I casually asked Stu what he made of them, white heaps jumping erratically up into the froth. It conspired that the tide was racing onto a spur of dolerite extending from Dunstanburgh Castle out to sea. The haystacks were huge, and quite unpredictable. Before I could say 'I don't like the look of that', Stu had got sucked through it, fending off the white foam heaps the size of tractors with an alarming set of white water manoevres.

After a long afternoon involving a variety of transport methods, we were all back together, safe and capable of laughing about it.

The Farnes themselves presented us with some of the most unpredictable, beguiling seas imaginable. From the Kettle, flat, turquoise and bath-like amid the families of Arctic Terns, to the house-sized, crackling waves that leapt in a straight line from flat calm to immense in a single beat as we traversed the North Sea. A quixotic, alarming think-on-your-feet sort of place.

But this of course is only half the story. Having retrospectively learnt that lesson the sea threw casually sideways, there is one thing I know. I'll be back for another go. But next time, perhaps not on a spring tide...

Lismore by Kayak

2010-07-06T23:35:00.000+01:00

A while back now, we spent a weekend with the Scottish Canoe Association circling the limestone isle of Lismore.

Nigel and his new boat

Sue on a graceful turn

The weekend was billed as a lazy trip around the isle, and with summer suddenly arriving all at once, it was hot, sultry and still.

Achanduin Castle

Lismore is tucked neatly at the mouth of Loch Linnhe where the back end of Mull starts to reverse into the mainland. For some on the trip, this was their back garden. And for us, it was another chance to experience the mingling of pasts with present, with landscape and forgetting that is to journey on the sea.

Camped near the southern tip of the island, the light was breathtaking

Gentle tidal smudging of the water at the southern tip of Lismore

Alison and the Kilcheran Isles

Shia, a ship's cat

Several of the people on the trip had moved from the city to live by these waters, to shape their lives around the daily tides. Undoubtedly, there are untold sacrifices in leaving behind the steady income of a city life, but it's a lesson to us all when people have the courage to follow their dreams. Mooring at one such home, one of the cats, Shia, joined us for the last leg of the journey. While we ferried boats from the water to the road, he checked the boats out, sniffed things and generally got to know everyone. I've undoubtedly spelt his name wrong, but roughly translated from the Gaelic, it means something like 'gentleman of the fairy grotto'.

The Selkie of the Summer Isles

2010-06-02T17:10:00.018+01:00

Fading light over the Summer Isles

In Old Norse and Celtic mythology, the selkie was a half-woman, half-seal who was able to shed her seal skin to ensnare sailors, then return to the sea when she felt like a bit of a change. It's a myth that finds itself repeated in many countries from Iceland to Australia. In his book In Another Light, Andrew Greig points out that they might all have stemmed from the haunting, melancholic cry that seals sometimes make on lonely skerries far out to sea.

Out on a trip to the Summer Isles, we are threading a line between widely-spaced skerries towards the wondrous Priest Island. The Minch is but a thin, glassy channel between us and the faded blue Outer Isles in the distance. Twisted skeins of glassy, undulating ocean roll in deepening blue towards Priest Island and the skerries in between. In the open expanse, there is a kind of sensory deprivation. No smells, no wind, just a gliding motion. Maybe a tint of salt, perhaps. But arriving at the shore of a skerry, the overwhelming saline-and-fish smell invades the senses after the blue desert of the ocean.

Storm shower over Bottle Island

Turning the boats towards the next sighting point, it is silent and the senses are stilled again. Little wind, and the quiet rush of paddles in the water. Just two kayaks in the vastness of blue-space. Several hundred yards away from the skerry behind, we are arrested by a wailing sound. We look back, but there is nothing. This mournful cry is, presumably, a seal. The selkie of the ancient myths.

The sea is a remarkable place.

Jutting out of the water like broken teeth, the skerry of Stac Mhic Aonghais is fringed with cormorants. They seem to like to add a touch of drama to already gnarled sea cliffs. The northern side of this islet slants out of the water at an angle, allowing the sea to slew dramatically up its ramp-like face and back down into the blue in a whirlpool of banked-up water. The moment of magic came when we paddled into this furling stream: meeting a raw edge of sea at the edge of the world. It wasn't, of course, but for a moment, it felt like it.

The sea like glassy, rolling skeins

Uncannily at the same distance from the next skerry and miles from the last, the mournful wailing began again. A look backwards revealed nothing. Maybe the seals were just playing with us.

Amidst a clutch of cormorant nests on a cliff, the sea etches patterns in the rock like abstract art

Textbook storm clouds above Tanera Beg

Here and there, the sea is pockmarked with resting seabirds. Some of them came over to swoop us, including a massive Bonxie, the pirate of the skies.

Inside an abandoned boat

It's a privilege to experience the sea's daily tides in places as beautiful as this, and to glimpse the timeless magic of the selkie seals.

At The Water's Edge

2010-05-11T21:20:00.016+01:00

Kayaking Round the Isle of Gigha

In the face of a another dramatic forecast of wind and rain over a typical Bank Holiday, we headed out to the Isle of Gigha. This rutted, linear scrap of land is shaped by the great tidal slew between the Mull of Kintyre, Islay and Jura. It had been languishing on our 'must go' list for quite some time, but had always been the casualty of raging winds or some other factor of a show-stopping nature.

Casting the serious and imposing forecast to the four winds, we went anyway. And good job too. In amongst the occasional Force fours, we picked our way round most of the coast, including the enchanting Isle of Cara.

A procession of wild goats on the Isle of Cara

Amongst these long, stunning paddling days, the coastal fringe changed with every passing bay: always interesting, diverting. Otters, herons, seals, and a pod of large porpoises. The porpoises came out of the blue as we were paddling over the last juttings from the sea of the Russian ship, Kartli.

Taking the adage of "women and children first" somewhat literally, Stu placed me and my kayak between himself and these large, mildly inquisitive superior beings. From their jet- fast transit across the bay, they effortlessly arced towards the kayaks, considered us for a moment, then carried on their amazing journey. They'd be at St. Kilda in time for tea, probably.

Most sources tell you that Cara is uninhabited. But there, next to a ruined chapel is an old Tacksman's house turned smugglers' den, which to some, would be a dream home.
Surrounded by no more than an impressively large herd of totally wild goats, all shaggy cream and brown, this island and its lonely house, all leather and white, parched maps, are wonderful.

Cormorants in the stillness

Sometimes it's sad to leave the unique quality that exists on these many Scottish islands, but it won't be forever. Standing at the water's edge, I was sure of one thing: that one day, we'd be back for more.

Leaving Gigha

The Wacky Races

2010-04-18T20:23:00.006+01:00

The 4th Ravenglass Seaquest

To some, this might be the stuff of nightmares: imagine you're running in wellie boots. Wellie boots full of water. You're also running through thick, estuarine mud the colour of chocolate. And as you run, the mud clings more and more, and the checkpoint seems to be getting farther away. Was this a bad dream? No. It was the Ravenglass Seaquest.

As races go, it couldn't be more wacky. Checkpoints dotted about in three different forked limbs of an estuary. Some of them might be floating, some on land. Some in mud, and some, it turns out, completely submerged under water...And the idea is to clip the most checkpoints in under three hours of kayaking as the tide shifts land to sea, and back again. In some ways, it couldn't be more intellectual. Which estuary first? Do you make use of the tidal jets as they force upstream, or do you plough right on?

Everything had gone beautifully to plan. We were ahead of a loose schedule and managed to clip most of the checkpoints with a few minutes to spare. We hadn't even had a flicker of a domestic, which can be an occupational hazard when racing in a team with your partner, and at the end, we'd had a great time.

Preferring the quiet patio of the pub round the back to the jostle of over a hundred kayakers on the sea front, we enjoyed a quiet pint in the sun after this fast- paced epic. On our way back to the car, we stopped for a moment at the prize giving on the front just as we were announced the winners of the mixed pairs event. We couldn't have been more surprised, and it did feel like a bit of a dream. But a good one.

Getting Away From It All

2010-04-06T18:57:00.013+01:00

Loch Nah Achlaise, one of the most photographed Lochs in Scotland

I've got to admit, life has been racing away with itself a bit of late. What with one thing and another, we've both feeling a little drained. In the run- up to Easter, we had been watching the marine forecasts with half- amusement as they veered wildly from Force 2 to Force 8. Without much of a clue about which one to believe, we took the safe bet and opted for a few days of kayak- camping in Loch Shiel.

I found it hard to believe that any three or four day trip could extinguish the rush and haste we'd escalated into, but this is what happened. Pushing off the shore at Glenfinnan, that was the last we were to see of it...For a while, at least.

With half an immense trout packed carefully in the boat (the unfinished portion of a particularly fine b & b breakfast), we paddled off to camp in a large valley half- way down the loch. For the next few days, that was our peaceful home. The trout was lightly fried in butter and shallots, and with a few beers chilling in the stream, this was a silent heaven.

The western end of Loch Shiel

In some ways, this place was almost too quiet. Compared with the endless shifting dynamism of the sea, the estate-managed loch was quiet, museum-like. But perhaps this was what was needed. A minimalist place of contemplation. No boats, no people, only the view.

Pink Ears In The Graveyard

It was all change at the end of the loch, though. A tiny jewel of an island at the far western end had caught our eye. St. Finan's Isle, with a ruined chapel and graveyard.

Little Viking boat on the altar

Reaching the shores, we could see a Canadian canoe had already landed on the island. Fellow paddlers (about ten, in all) were slowly converging from the end of the loch, and we stopped for a chat. They were wearing pink, furry, rabbit ears.

Boat-prints on the shore

That's the wonderful thing about kayaking in Scotland. In amongst the stillness, there's always something funny, magical, startling.

The kayakers moved off to join us camping in the big valley, but in an instant in this big country, they were dots on the immense horizon. The chapel and graveyard were quiet again. It was hard to imagine how the magic had worked on us in such a short space of time, but once again, it had.

The Birds of Rough Isle

2010-03-17T22:46:00.009Z

It was new years day a year ago when we took to the Rough Firth on the Solway coast on a bitingly cold day. The searing cold seemed to start at the bones and eat its way outwards. Photography wasn’t a priority on days like these, so the camera was in the car.

Along the beach front at Kippford, a few folk passed by, muffled in clothes. Neoprene and thick, three-ply Goretex had no defence against this kind of cold. On the water, a new icy freshness was in the air and the stillness was such a presence.

Just south of Kippford in the mouth of the estuary is the Rough Isle. It’s not remote, and if you want to, you can walk to it at low tide. Other than sharp and beautiful white and blue shell beaches, it’s an unassuming little place. But that New Year’s day, it came alive.

Nearing the northern shore, we could see hundreds of birds standing on the beach. In an instant they were airborne, in a big cloud around us, and piping their metallic alarm calls. To be in a kayak, on the water, swept up in oystercatchers was an amazing feeling, and in a sense I’d always been pleased not to have taken any photos. There is something in the act of photography that can take you away from the moment, even though you are immersed in it.

_________

Ever since then, I’d been carrying around the memories of those birds swirling in the still, icy air. Last weekend, though, I got a second chance.

Sinners

2010-01-21T09:31:00.015Z

Pooley Bridge pier

It's probably a bit late to talk about the incredible snow we've had here in the UK, but it really was an exceptional winter. And one that really took the rug out from underneath our feet in many ways. We can't forget the tragedies it brought, with about one death a week on the hills amongst many other lives lost and changed forever. But for the rest of us, I think it made us think differently, at least for a while.

Stu on Blencathra

Those days were like a dream now. The Eden Valley was exceptionally beautiful at -15 degrees C, draped in a new kind of cold as silent as the grave. Completely windless, too.

For some, maybe many, it was a hindrance. Me too, at first. For a day or two I sat around, wondering where to go running. On the third day, I saw this new landscape as an opportunity. Magically, it turned out the running was perfect on a bed of squeaky pack-snow. These runs turned out to be some of the most amazing runs of my life.

The magical Eden Valley

In some ways, I liked the way the snow mixed things up. Made people think about things in a different way, and slowed us down. Showed a different side to folk.

______________

It's conditions like these that make me think of a quietly brilliant film called Sinners, by Bill Heath. In amongst the noise and haste of a million adrenaline-fueled films about cutting edge skiing, Bill's film takes a different path. The film came about by talking to the folk he met whilst backcountry ski-ing in Western Canada, and chancing upon mountaineering physicist, A.J. Snow, still skiing at the age of 100.

Light and spindrift on Great Dodd

The film is beautiful and poignant. In amongst words of incredible wisdom and clarity from A.J., Bill cuts through the loud shouts of the fastest skiers and the ones with the most tricks. He shows you how beautiful it is. It's a work of art, and at the same time, whispers of a wisdom and truth that goes just a little bit beyond our normal thinking. And at its heart is a belief that being among mountains is more than what the powder junkie might see. Bill's film won the award for best mountain sports film at the Banff Mountain Film Festival in 2003.

Tales of the Unexpected

2010-01-14T10:00:00.010Z

The magnificent Bernia Ridge

If there's one lesson this winter has written large on the blackboard of life, it is to expect the unexpected. Whilst quietly smirking at the good fortune of flying out of the UK before the first snows, we were hit with the news that our 'hot rock' winter getaway in Catalunya was already nestled under a foot of snow.

Some quick thinking was required. The rustic finca in the hills, our base for the fortnight, was snowed in and no longer an option. In a flash, a devilishly simple Plan B appeared: to keep driving south until the rock got hot.

In a thick fug of exhaustion after sharing an early morning flight with sixty excitable Liverpudlian school-girls, we had the unenviable 500 km drive south to contend with. Still, we were on holiday, we told ourselves.

Lemon leaf

The safest option was to head to the Costa Blanca. Here, at least some hot rock was a possibility. Yet it is an incongruous destination in some ways and a place of stark contrasts. Climbing on some of Europe's most prized cliffs means being up close and personal with the retired ex-pat holiday fleshpots of Benidorm, Calpe and Alicante. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but perhaps it's just not my scene. The problem is, the old Spain has been washed aside in a race for development. The stillness of climbing at the beautiful Sierra de Toix is often broken by the sound of pile drivers hammering footings into the limestone or jackhammers taking up pavements. To accept the luxury of climbing in the dead of winter, one has to take the flip side too.

The sixteenth century Moorish stronghold of Bernia

Even so, there are hidden gems like the Fort at Bernia, used by the Moors as a final hiding place before their eventual routing, and the inland towns of Xativa, Guadelest and Xavo.

A Monty Pythonesque cathedral frontage, Xativa

Long-awaited and uncertain though it appeared to be, we had some great days of climbing and walking despite some unusual twists and turns.

Airborne at Toix

New Year's Eve

2010-01-03T20:26:00.008Z

Montserrat, northern Spain

Whilst Stu's running days were sadly curtailed by a ski-ing accident some years ago, he still has a creative genius when it comes to suggestions for unique runs. There was a memorable run in a long Sardinian cave system when hailstones the size of eggs were falling outside. And now this- a run through the mythical spires of Montserrat in north east Spain on New Year's Eve.

From the south, the immense conglomerate spires of Montserrat are captivating. A long line of almost excessive serrations, deeply incised teeth set in a flat plain. Driving up to them from the north, the sensation is the same, a dizzying steepness, spire after turreted spire.

Running up past the largest of the many monasteries and into the river-worn clefts between spires was like a running dream. The chattering crowds emptying out of the Basilica were headed the other way, back to the coaches. A few people lingered on the paths, not really sure how far to go in the fading light. I ran on and up to the top of Sant Jeroni, the largest of these incredible peaks. I arrived as the sun was about to set.

Many places like this are imbued with a sense of religious significance for obvious reasons: they are quite magical. But grains of truth are easy to come by in so many different ways, and aside from my conspiratorial run through this landscape of dream-like beauty, there were backpackers slowly and silently making their way to the tops of the spires to await the dawn of the New Year.

Running down the paths, the spires turned red in the evening light, appearing in and out of the trees and stretching away in the mind's eye. The full moon rose from behind a cloud, bathing the monastery in an orange glow. So this was the last run of 2009, and it was surely one to remember.

A Christmas Greeting

2009-12-15T18:00:00.000Z

It's the time of year again when I sift through my Dad's old photographs from Antarctica. For some reason, this one always sticks in my mind whenever I pull out the stack of photos on thick, curled paper. Perhaps it's the sense of loneliness of the old ship's dog, left here by a Chilean vessel plying these icy waters. Perhaps it's the sense of icy stillness it conveys.

Have a happy Christmas, wherever you are.

Time and Tide

2009-12-10T16:07:00.014Z

With orbital regularity we circle our year around a single visit to Lindisfarne. Despite being a tiny scrap of land, it's far from boring to spend a few days there, sometimes cut off from the mainland by the incoming tide. With each year, we just get deeper into it.

And as we sink deeper into this place, the pace of our ramblings gets slower, more sloth-like. And with it,imperceptibly, a world of hidden depth and detail is there to see.

For such a small place, it has immense spaciousness to it. The beaches of The Snook seem to go on for miles, and a slow walk can take forever. A time lapse of a place.

Now, what shall we do with all these tank traps?

Occasionally we'll sneak past the tide to other beaches, equally spacious. And everywhere is a sparseness, places polished by wind and waves.

Sailors from Seahouses on the wall of The Olde Ship Inn, possibly one of the best pubs in Britain

As the wind picked up outside, we went to see if The Journey, Fenwick Lawson's staggering sculpture was back in residence. To our delight, it was.

With each turning year, we do less and less on Lindisfarne. Walk more slowly, get less far. Walk on a slowly turning tidal scale. And with each year, it seems to mean more and more.

Cumbria- The Aftermath

2009-11-27T09:08:00.008Z

The Ullswater Steamer Pier, broken and battered

It's been a fairly traumatic week for Cumbria. Rising floodwaters engulfed many low-lying areas of the county to devastating effect, destroying towns and countless homes along the way. Nearly everyone has a story to tell, some of them worse than others.

The hillsides are so swollen with water that there have been landslides in some valleys. As a geologist, this is pretty exciting stuff.

Waves in't road

The vast dog-legged lake of Ullswater had engulfed the roads on both flanks as well as a number of homes along its shores. Ploughing through waves to get to the end of the lake was fun, but nothing could prepare us for the scene of devastation at the end. Two landslides had steamed down the steep valley sides, taking out two barns along the way.

The toe of the landslide

Waves crashing over the end of the lake

A Flash of Inspiration

2009-11-08T08:57:00.000Z

The Great Orme Lighthouse

Stu wouldn’t let on where we were going. North Wales, perhaps? Or Scotland? To keep up the suspense, he mischieviously did a couple of laps of the M6 roundabout. We took the south exit, and so at least that was a clue.

To cut a long story short we ended up at the seaside. Skirting through the well to do areas of Llandudno, though, I still couldn’t guess where we were going. The road snaked out onto the limestone shell of the Great Orme, winding high above precipitous cliffs. And then a faded red and gold sign pointed to the Great Orme lighthouse, now a most unusual bed and breakfast.

An evocative mix of antique wood and diving helmets: the inside of the lighthouse

A perfect antidote to modern civilisation, the Lighthouse hasn’t really changed much since it was built in the late nineteenth century. Not a traditional stripey tower, it is instead a T shaped, turreted limestone castle with the lamp room perched high above a three hundred foot drop to the sea.

Inside the old telegraph room, we watched all 280 degrees of sky turn from bright blue to gold as the sun set. It couldn’t have been a better way to spend my 40th birthday.

Door near St. Tudno's Church

Once Around The Island

2009-10-22T11:00:00.003+01:00

Sea Kayaking Round Milos and Kimolos

Another bright blue day was dawning on the Greek island of Milos. Things were ticking along as they have always done. There were familiar faces drinking the same drinks at the same bar tables. Just a little bit more leathery than six months before. Archontoula's beaming smile at the delightful taverna in the Plaka was just as it always was, and Katharina was opening up the fishing tackle shop across the road, just like before.

Six months had passed since we’d left this wonderful place, and it was as if life on the island had been frozen in time, giving the illusion that nothing had changed, or ever will.

The old Sulphur Mine

This timeless magic rests everywhere on Milos. But this time, everything inside felt different. Stu and I were meant to be joining one of Rod Feldtmann's sea kayak expeditions to circumnavigate the 120 km coastline. But just hours before the flight, Stu had to finally admit that his back was too painful to last the journey there, let alone the kayak trip. It was a dark tunnel that lead me onto the plane on my own, but it was pointless for both of us to back out. And in any case, I needed the experience, to be happy in big waves. Then, Olympic Airways went bust a day or two before, abruptly severing the airborne lifeline to the island.

Udo, Hellen and Sandra

As the collection of Dutch, German and British kayakers thumped down their hefty packs outside Perros’ bar in Triovassalos, we compared stories of trains, planes and automobiles as Olympic Airlines sputtered to a financial halt. No matter, we were here now, and were about to enter a new world, a reality almost untouchable by the hasty demands of the modern world. A place of few things: just the five elements and only the instant of time occupied by the here and now.

The Taste of Salt

It was fascinating to be fully immersed in this salty existence. Washing everything from dishes to clothes to ourselves in the sea. We all slotted into a deliriously simple beach life camped on the shore. How easy it was to wash dishes with salt water and some sand. And occasionally, an octopus would come over and lend a tentacle...(or eight).

It struck me that although we were tired, we were all happy. It was physically demanding, but a kayak full of gear was all we needed. Maybe the good things in life are not things. And everywhere, in everything, the taste of salt.

Blazing Paddles

For the first half of the trip, winds were light and the sea state pretty calm. As we rounded the south west corner of the island, though, the influence of the highest mountain started to come into play. Great downdraughts came steaming down the mountainside and onto the sea at near-gale force. Kayaking from bay to bay and out onto these Force 6 and 7 winds screeching around the headlands was a lot of fun. Like being pelted with a water gun at point blank range. Rod carefully edged us onward, one bay at a time.

Rod having a play in a Force 6-7 offshore wind

Then the sea began to roll. A two metre swell reared up, and I was about to get the experience I needed. We all were.

Christian enjoying the big waves at Cape Vani

From our little rainbow coloured kayaks, these were immense salty blue hills, settling out to about Force 5. But a funny thing happened. We all just got on with it. Terry started singing sea shanties in his flawless bass-baritone. Some of us joined in. Rod shouted us clear and concise instructions. We carried them out as best we could. To our surprise, and delight, we all found we could 'do' big waves. And even enjoyed it.

Sheltering from the storm at Sikia

A few days of being very alive in big waves and we had completed the circumnavigation. It had been tough, but fantastically good. We'd lived at sea for a whole week, and having completed this thing so much bigger than ourselves, we were happy.

Taking off in the Olympic Air plane, the land and sea tilted at a low angle and the diamond bright church at the top of the Plaka was glinting through blue sea. The scattering of white hillside houses hid Archontoula and her perfect taverna and the open door of Perros’ bar. Low down to the sea in the brightly coloured toy box boat houses of Klima, the salty cats were plumping up nests of sea grass before settling down for a sleep. The sea was sucking in and out of the rocks, and in the immense, sheltered bays, the wind shaving corners off the ashy cliffs. The light was breaking through the clefts of rock and into the endlessly writhing sea below. All of this life, this nature, shrinking to a fleck of land in an ocean of time.

Christian, me, Udo, Hellen, Roger, Jude, Marjolein, Sandra and Terry (photo by Rod Feldtmann).
_________

Expeditions are always quite intense experiences, and it’s been hard to settle back into what we like to call ‘normal’ life afterwards. But sometimes it’s hard to know what is real and what is unreal. For a short time, that mythical unreality, that life in a salty blue bubble was as truthful an existence as we could experience. Those mornings of Force 5 and 6, the rolling of the Aegean swell, that was living nowhere but in the moment. That was surely about as real as it gets.

Photo by Rod Feldtmann

Three Triathlons and a Mountain Marathon

2009-09-29T18:17:00.022+01:00

Penny and I at the start of the Rab (photo courtesy of Jon Brooke, www.rightplacerighttime.co.uk)

It's been a crazy but fun month of doing big things. Thanks to a slip of the mouse on one or two online entry forms, I had been looking sidelong at September with a slight sense of trepidation. Most of that was down to one thing: the Helvellyn Triathlon. Not an event for the faint-hearted, it is a mile long swim in a cold lake, a 38 mile bike ride over Lakeland passes at their lung-busting best, then a 9 mile fell run to the Helvellyn ridge and back.

The other things were really just sharpeners, diversions from the main event. A sprint distance triathlon in Penrith and a club-organised tri in Appleby. And of course, there was the Rab Mountain Marathon.

Organised chaos in the transition area

But anyway. Back to The Helvellyn. The swim went like a breeze. The course was shortened a little as the water temperature was a bit low- any cooler and it would have had to be cancelled. And then from the drunken shadow-boxing out of the wetsuit, it was the long bike ride. If anything, this was the thing that drained the tanks, left the legs aching and crampy. But still, fascinating way to get that exhausted feeling without spending hours and hours on the hills...

By the time I'd got rid of the bike, everything from the waist down was in some kind of pain or cramp. It was an incredible feeling to know that 9 miles of mountain lay between me and a rest. As I hobbled those first few hundred metres while the legs adjusted to the run, Gill Douglas ran along side, as she had done for all the Arragons Cumbrian Triathlon Club folk. Before dropping back at the end of our one-sided conversation, she said '...just believe...'

These four events were a bag of chalk and cheese, as different from each other as they could get. The triathlon is a fun thing but it is, deep down, a contrivance, a fun thing to do with some fitness and a lot of equipment, but certainly a man-made game. The mountain marathon is different. It's about being absorbed into the mountains, going, as they say, where few men (or women) have gone before...

Penny on the Rab Mountain Marathon, the Howgills

The Rab was in the Howgills, those resting elephant-backs covered in a soft grass like the scruffy fur on a Border Terrier. They are, on any day of the week, some of my favourite hills to run in. It was a fantastic experience to spend two days running through them, slogging along sloping contours and into remote valleys where the situations were as grandiose as I'd seen on the LAMM in Scotland.

Perhaps the joy of mountain marathons is the sheer simplicity of knowing all you have to survive for two days is on your back. It's the kind of event where the mental and physical sides meet up, and if either one is not up to it, the game is over. To maintain the level of concentration needed while the tides of your mental state ebb and flow over two days is to slowly understand what you're capable of, what can or can't break you, and underneath it all, to perform a simple test of the spirit.

6.30 am, Cautley Spout

A glimpse of the English Schools Fell Racing Champs at Sedbergh

It's been a rewarding month of stepping onto the plate, and asking some big questions of myself. Give or take the odd moment of doubt in exhaustion, the answers have been positive. Chalk and cheese they all might be, but somewhere underneath it all, Gill was right. It just boils down to what you believe.

A Traditional Lakeland Show

2009-09-22T21:12:00.011+01:00

Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling with the fells as a backdrop

Ever since moving to the Lakes, I've managed to miss every one of these shows. Sometimes it's a straight toss up between running some race, kayaking somewhere or the gentler pursuits of taking in a show. And last year, many were cancelled because of the monsoon season.

Kicking back after the third triathlon in as many weeks, we finally got it together and went to the Shepherd's Meet and Sheep Dog Trials in Rosthwaite, Borrowdale.

Having spent a lot of time at Welsh shows, it was great to see the Lakeland version, with the unique and hopefully never fading sports of fell racing and wrestling.

Billy Procter and the lads from Helm Hill on the start line of the Dalehead Fell Race

The Mind Game

The biggest attraction was the wrestling. The crowd, three or four deep on all sides, first stood mesmerised by the junior matches. These were usually over pretty quickly and all a question of body mass. The older lads treated us to more tactical mind games which could have gone on forever...more stalking than wrestling. Great stuff.

All of these things, the sheep dog trials, the shearing, the droving skills, right down to the walking sticks are for me just one or two generations in the past, and the vestiges are still somewhere, languishing in the blood. Everything except the wrestling. And Stu rather pointedly said I might be quite good at that....

Trail hounds have an intensity about them that is often rare in other breeds

Duck driving

Heartland

2009-09-17T09:30:00.011+01:00

The Llyn peninsula is a singular place. Almost cut off from the rest of Wales, it has all the hallmarks of being an island. And it almost is. The landscape here is deeply rooted in the past, both primaeval and more recent: from ancient iron age hill forts to deeply gouged opencast mines.

Kayaking off here had an intangibly magical edge to it. Perhaps it was because of the bright blue sea, the warmth of the sun and the wonderfully rugged coastline. Or maybe it was the faint sizzle of belonging to this place. Not by birth, but by the far less obvious ties of ancestry.

In any case, a great place to paddle, often overlooked in the race to the tidal funspots of Anglesey.

A seagull feather on the water

_____________

From the vantage points of Snowdonia, a ragged line of perfectly peaked hills forms the backbone of the Llyn peninsula. Known collectively as Yr Eifl, these have been the mythical far off distant hills of my childhood, always there, yet never explored. Running through them was a dream made real in the bright blue sun of last weekend. Not vastly high, or remote, but learning now to expect the unexpected, they provided a surprise that took my breath away.

Around the summit of Tre'r Ceiri is an iron age stone rampart that encircles something like 150 ancient, perfectly built huts. High on this hill, with views stretching out over the sloping green baize and sea below, was an ancient community still preserved almost intact. All that was missing were the straw roofs and the palls of peat smoke. Was it amazing that this place still existed? Or was it that I had never heard about this place before?

It's so common to see hill forts dotted on the map but barely find a stone or two to mark their place in history. The complete picture of this place, by contrast, simply rises out of the ground. The huts are arranged organically like honey comb, drawn from the heavy scree into beautiful shapes. It is an amazing place.

The Long Way Round to a Sense of Quietness

2009-08-29T13:40:00.001+01:00

Sour Milk Ghyll gearing up for the rainy season

Sometimes, the best laid plans just aren't meant to happen, and as Rabbie Burns aptly pointed out, go 'agley' (whatever that means). Often, as Rabbie said, you're left with naught but grief and pain, but sometimes, maybe, a sense of peace and stillness can break out where you least expect it.

It went fairly 'agley' for me recently on a run round the back of Blencathra. I'd carefully planned an elegant but simple loop for the day, ending on the mighty track of the Cumbria Way. It didn't take long to realise it wasn't going to be straightforward, as the wind picked up and repeated storms flashed over and over. I was, in defiance of the weather, wearing too little. Breaking in some new fell shoes was another distraction from the real point of the run. And most irritating of all, the fells seemed to be coated ankle deep in moving sheets of achingly cold water.

To cut a long story short, I never made it even half the distance to my intended destination. Relief at reaching the river Caldew and the lovely Cumbria Way path just beyond it was dashed as I saw what the river had become. It was huge, and erupting rhythmically into big, brown standing waves like the backs of roaring bears. Dangling a leg in to see what it was like, I knew I had only one choice. Run round, or be mangled trying to cross it.

It turned out to be quite a long way round. The going was tough without real paths and with all that sheeting water. This was clearly the road less travelled as I eyed the alluringly- smooth track just a few metres away, beyond the Zambezi in full spate. But I did come across a beautiful badger's sett on this unpeopled side of the river, and felt little clouds of stillness rise up from the reeds.

After a few miles I was able to cross the torrent at a bridge, and ended up at the beautiful Lakeland hamlet of Mosedale. The day might have gone a bit 'agley', but having been forced to follow the Caldew all the way to its resting place on the flatlands, I had been tipped out of the fells at the Quaker Meeting House. Open for tea and cake, it said. Muddy, scratched and not a little bit damp, I sat on a pew and drank in the sense of immense, timeless peace.

Over a pot of tea and slice of cake, I listened as the lady at the urn recounted tales of entire trees being swept downstream, and once, her hen house. And in between conversations, the walls oozed stillness. Four hundred years of thoughtful meditation. I walked out of there a little different from when I went in.

Would I have felt this if my day's journey had been an easy run, predictable, planned, and executed to the letter? The answer is, I just wouldn't have got there at all.

Brass rubbings inside the Quaker Meeting House, Mosedale

The Missing Queen of Inchmarnock

2009-08-16T22:08:00.012+01:00

Inchmarnock is just one of those places. The sort of place that captivates and beguiles with a past so outlandishly interesting that you just have to go there. And we're certainly not the first sea kayakers to be lured by its charms. But, as is often the way, our visit to this tiny, teardrop shaped isle was anything but predictable. And this only added to its fascination.

Up till lately, Inchmarnock's claim to historical fame lay in the bones of a Bronze Age Queen found lying in a cist at the north end of the island in the late 1950's. The owner, Lord Smith of Kelvin, had placed a glass cover on her final resting place so that she could be viewed- sparking the curiosity of many a sea kayaker looking to unravel the fourth dimension. In the last few years though, the mystery deepened. The Queen somehow just disappeared. Douglas Wilcox wrote to Lord Kelvin to ask what had become of her, and his wife's reply, though courteous, gave no clues. She assured Douglas that everything would be explained, but stopped short, leaving us all hanging in space.

Having made it to the island, we found the open cist heaving with blackberry thickets and hoofmarks. We seemed to be no closer to answering the questions that surrounded this vivid reminder of our deep past. Settling back to an evening of watching the gannets plosh into the still waters, we saw a motorboat approach our end of the island. The two men on board stopped the boat at the beach and wandered up to the tent. I assumed this was not a welcoming party.

After fearing the worst, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the two men had just come to warn us about the Highland bulls- very excitable at this time of year. Whilst they didn't ask us to leave, we didn't need much persuading to relocate the tent to a safer spot. The boatmen turned to go, and I seized my chance in a split second. I enquired as to the whereabouts of the Queen.

In a great display of Scottish understatement, one of the men said "She's away just now". The older man was more forthcoming. He explained that she'd been taken away for DNA testing and face reconstruction. And apparently, she wasn't very easy on the eye, didn't eat fish, and was very local. We talked about the other archaeological research going on on the island, and his parting words were "you could work here for 25 years and still be finding things".

The Hostage Stone, depicting a Viking raid

And so it seemed. Farther south near the site of St. Marnock's chapel, an early Christian writing school was unearthed, with tablet after tablet of inscribed slates in Ogham and Latin script. The most extensive find of its kind in Scotland.

The cows found us a little after 11 pm, and started baying and pawing at the ground. They were curious, highly intelligent, and a little feisty. By morning, a thick clod of hairy beasts was peering dimly through Irn-Bru coloured manes at us as we attempted to make a dash for the kayaks. They were not the problem as such, but one of them was baying constantly for El Toro to help them out. In due course, the rippled black silhouette of a perfect bull in characteristic stance thundered up and screamed to a halt. After a few slightly tense moments, he collected up all his cows and calves and pelted off into the undergrowth.

The last inhabitants of Inchmarnock left in the 1980's, and it is now the home to the excitable hairy beasts. It would have been a complete paradise, as the last inhabitants still remember. Wandering through the ruined farm at Midpark, I found drifts of mint, angelica and medicinal herbs surrounding orchards of old fruit trees protected by tumbling walls. In the Queen's time, the island would have been lush, fertile and tree covered. It is extraordinary that she was preserved in her completely airtight cist for three and a half thousand years, just one out of many that escaped the attention of scavengers and grave robbers.

With the mystery of the missing Queen solved, we left the island to its hefty cows.

Running Mad on Arran

2009-08-15T10:15:00.012+01:00

The bunkhouse shoe collection

A few Eden Runners were up on Arran last week for a spot of bog trotting...and what a week it was. Amongst turbid and cloudy skies, the tumbling granite peaks arranged in wonderful horseshoes, the world was our oyster...almost. The weather played a blinding hand though, leading us on to thinking the worst on days that turned sunny, then luring us onto the tops in hideously wintry conditions.

Leaving Beinn Tarsuinn

Never mind this though. Arran is a place to come back to, to plan further runs, glen to glen. The sense of drama on the granite tops, weathered into cartoon mountain shapes, is fantastic. A mountain paradise.

The beautiful ridge of A Chir.

Running melded into scrambling amongst the boulders and ridges on the high peaks of Arran. Not for everyone, for sure, but for us, a gift.

Glen Sannox

Gill on the fast descent into Glen Rosa

Happy donkey, Glen Rosa

We need a holiday to get over the holiday- for us a full on, high octane mountain-fest of fun with friends. However varied our individual ambitions for the holiday were, I think we all had a scream of a time.

Kilmartin

2009-07-31T11:06:00.009+01:00

Spread out a map of southern Scotland, and you’ll notice something quite subtle, but amazing. You might not see it straight away, but gaze at it with your eyes half closed, you’ll begin to see a dizzying number of cairns, standing stones and cup and ring marked rocks. These sentinel reminders of life thousands of years ago weave into a vast landscape of time, ritual upon ritual, eclipse on eclipse. In some ways, we have such a better grasp of space than we do of the expanse of time. But maybe in places like this, they become intertwined.

No where is this clearer than in the prehistoric landscape around Kilmartin at the end of Loch Awe. The terrain here is fairly typical of southern Scotland-hellishly lumpy and scrubby, yet fertile. What sets this place apart is that here, burial sites, astronomically arranged standing stones and circles are spread over the valley floor. Laid out in a vast sacred space, the effect today is dramatic and evocative. This landscape is probably no more special than any other in the area, but having lain under a protective layer of peat for hundreds of years until the 1800’s, the preservation is exceptional.

From Kilmartin, the glen spreads out like a heavy carpet, rucked here and there by ancient hill forts like Dunadd, the ancient capital of the kingdom of Dalriada. A landscape where time is as important as space.

Over the years, we've drifted out of the kayaks into lochside church grounds, and almost by accident found an uncanny number of ancient, beautiful carved stone grave slabs. These at Kilmartin church are some of the oldest in Scotland. Walking into the simple stone building was to feel a strong sense of gravity.

Later, I went for a run past cup and ring-marked stone slabs, their edges fringed with lurid green moss. Beyond, I turned right onto a singletrack mountainbike trail, then side-stepped back onto forestry roads. More track junctions came and went, and by this time I was turning mostly at random. On the right was a steep hillside recently felled of trees. In this wasteland there was a steep, rutted path roughly cut out with a digger and I took it. By the time I got to the top of the hill, it was about time to turn back. But as I did so, something caught my eye. About 30 metres away, a pointed gable end of a grey rock bent out of the wasted stubble.

I had stumbled upon another ancient site. It was part of a stone circle, surrounding a solitary chambered cairn, floating in a sea of flayed ground.

There's probably no magic or mystery to this. But maybe, just under the surface, there is a thin line that leads us.

Three Days, One River

2009-07-19T22:20:00.011+01:00

Wednesday night: Eden Runners club run

Round the back of Mosedale, the River Caldew slices through the bog and bracken on its way to the flatlands to the north, draining Skiddaw in the process. In spate, it is fast-running and broad. During the dry spells, it is flat, glittery and littered with stones like the true Highland rivers of the north.

Anticipating a gentle shuffle up along the path to Skiddaw House, I got swept along on a rather more purposeful journey: to find The Broxap Boulder. Known to a select few (or perhaps everyone but me..), Andy Sharples offered to point out the whereabouts of a boulder that allowed you to cross the Caldew 'without getting your feet wet', a secret imparted to Andy by Jon Broxap.

This stepping stone on Leg 1 of the Bob Graham Round took a bit of finding. Launching into tussock, then whipping heather stalks, we aimed roughly at the river. After some slewing back and forth, and with, it has to be said, dripping feet, we found the boulders. We bounced back and forth across them to prove, rather forlornly, that we could cross the river without getting our feet wet, then trudged back out along the little swathe through the heather carved by the feet of the few.

Back at the cars, I threw myself into a roaring plunge pool in the River Caldew.

Thursday morning: a recce of Leg 1 of the Bob Graham Round

The first leg of the Bob Graham Round, for those who don't know, takes a U-shaped course over first Skiddaw, then Great Calva and up the great broad back of Blencathra. These three immense climbs make up the 5 or 6000 foot or so of ascent on this leg.

The July monsoon season had started again. Thick blankets of cloud held Skiddaw’s grey top as the first rains thundered in on the wind. I scooted down the back side of Skiddaw into the cloud and got out the compass. There is a wonderful mathematical simplicity about moving on a compass bearing. A complex life form being guided by a few spinning atoms of iron. Distance, speed and time in a white darkness of clouds.

Moving up Great Calva's vast flank, a poem by Rumi on the iPod made me jump:

"...Keep walking
Till there is no place to get to.
Don't try to see through the distances
That is not for human beings.

Move within,
But don't move the way fear makes you move.
Move within..."

With these longish runs, you can slowly prise back the tightly bound leaves of what the brain thinks the body can withstand. It's a good thing to do.

Friday night: light support of Cathy Gill's Bob Graham Round

At the age of 17, Cathy Gill was attempting to be the youngest woman to complete the Bob Graham Round. I'd offered to help by running into the notch between Skiddaw and Great Calva with some soup with her mum and sister, Dawn and Jane.

Only things weren't quite as they should have been. First and foremost, the weather was unbelievably bad. So bad that nobody really knew whether it was sensible to even start. And Dawn was so ill with the 'flu that she should really have been in bed, not standing in the middle of Keswick in the thundering rain.

Cathy Gill and Stuart Hurst on Leg 1

Dawn was wearing the accumulated anxiety of a mother about to watch her daughter set out on a 70 mile run across the mountains along with a bout of flu in the time of an epidemic. She handed me an enormous tub of soup, then a few bottles of water.

We set off, not quite sure whether we'd get there in time.

'I wonder if we'll make it in time' Dawn whispered, in concerned tones. A little later, she suggested that we start running while she walked behind...

Janey bounced off, unencumbered by the burdens of either age or soup. I thought about mentioning that I couldn't run with this much weight, but started shuffling anyway. It seemed to work, so I kept going. Soon, I was running with eyeballs out, stupidly trying to catch up with Jane. The path had become a river, and plodging through it, I remembered that I had gulped down too much tea in the anxious moments before Cathy's start, and now needed to go to the loo. Still, there was no time for that if the soup was to arrive.

We did indeed get to the crossing point just in time. Cathy, Adam and their pacers were as wet and slick as seals, while the rest of us sherpas just looked drowned. After a few gulps of soup, they were off into the mist, and we traced our steps back over the Caldew, one more time.

The pacers taking a breather

Running back to the car, the Glenderaterra River was spewing for its entire length at angry fire hydrant strength. The Caldew would be an immense, brown torrent by now, and even the Broxap Boulder would be engulfed.

_________________

In the conditions, Cathy and Adam did amazingly well. Cathy had to retire at Dunmail as the wind and rain on the Helvellyn range had worn them down. Adam continued on to Leg 3 but also had to give in to the weather eventually. Cathy has already started planning another attempt in August.

Quite a Day in the Lakes...

2009-07-13T22:44:00.004+01:00

The relief is palpable- coming in to land
Photos by Stu Mair

Sometimes it's quite good to do something that you're thoroughly unprepared for: and the one and a bit mile swim at the Day in the Lakes Triathlon fitted the bill there quite nicely. With the number of serious open water swims stretching onto two fingers of one hand, I really was wondering whether it would be sink or swim.

As the swim wore on, though, there was a massive sense of relief to realise that it was going to be ok. I'd survived a fairly decisive clip round the head and one quite impressive headlock from other swimmers, but other than that, it was plain sailing.

Borderlines

2009-07-12T21:22:00.009+01:00

There are those times when it's wet and windy outside, and there's nothing for it but to wheel out the mountainbike. It's a fill in for us. A way to walk out the door past the beckoning vacuum cleaner and make the most of a marginal day.

Here and there, we've visited all of the 7 Stanes of Scotland, and a smattering of other mountain bike trail centres besides. Each of the 7 Stanes though, have a unique identity. In amongst the miles of tracks, somewhere, there's a stone. Doesn't sound much, and to most of the mountainbikers there, it probably means very little.

At the Scottish border with England, the sculpted stone at Newcastleton is inscribed with Rabbie Burns' Auld Lang Syne to the north and Jerusalem to the south. Some of the other Stanes are perhaps more subtle, esoteric even. There's one shaped like a Pictish arrow head and carved with runes. Another inscribed in Klingon.

Perhaps the symbolism of this stone is fairly obvious. But for some reason, I really like it.

Slate, Sea and Sky

2009-07-05T22:33:00.013+01:00

Sea Kayaking off the Atlantic Isles

The desolation of Belnahua

Going in search of that magical blend of beauty, melancholy and wilder-than-fiction myth that jumps out at you on the Scottish Isles, we ended up on Seil and Luing recently.

Tip-toeing through first mist and then thunder and lightning, we made it to the deserted quarry township of Belnahua. A tiny dot of land, half corroded and eaten by years of slate quarrying, it is surrounded by a tidal mash of currents slewing through tight narrows of land and scattered islands.

It is a surprising place. This is all old slate quarry, but it is like walking on pillows. A deep machair has evolved over the 100 years of human absence, and as you walk over its unexpectedly uneven man-made surface, it is deeply plush as thick down. Things appear out of the grass. A winding mechanism. A mechanical pump. A series of channels for water to escape into the ocean.

Nature is slowly reclaiming the hard slate back into a soft island again.

Cormorants on misty skerries

Sometimes, it's easier to piece together the history of a place by visiting a graveyard than it is any museum. And Luing's ruined chapel at Kilchattan is no exception. There, in the stillness, we found the slate quarriers, founders of Presbyterian splinter groups and the Latvian sailors shipwrecked off Belnahua in 1936.

Only there for a day or two, we sank a little into this place. In the village shop, it took moments for us to find out that someone we knew lived in the village. Later, we asked for some water at a nearby house. 'Oh, you'll be the kayakers then. My husband's been watching you with the binoculars all day. He said you must know what you're doing because you hit the tide just right...'

If...

2009-06-26T09:29:00.009+01:00

Ian Charters' 55 peaks at 55

On 13th June, Ian made his third and final attempt to complete an extended round of 55 Lake District peaks in under 24 hours. Having completed 51 of them in September last year, it was a fair bet that if conditions were perfect, he could make it.

Ian was on bang on target coming into Wasdale as I stood in delighted disbelief at once again being in the company of Jos Naylor. He had arrived in David Powell-Thompson's Subaru, perhaps more mobile office than means of transport. It was stacked, layer upon layer with first paint spattered tools, then dog-eared and yellow books on the history of the Duddon Valley.

Jos, David, Ian, Alistair and my arm. Photo by Pauline Charters

As the time came for Ian, Colin, Alistair and myself to leave Wasdale for Dunmail Raise, Jos fixed Ian with his timeless, raven-like stare. 'Now don't give up, lad... however hard it is...' he said, gravely, and you knew Jos had been there, lived those long hours of pain. A salvation through suffering that Ian would relive again, one more time.

In the shattered landscape of the Scafell massif, the light flicked on and off through fast moving veils of low cloud. The rocks turned intermittently gold and grey as the sun went down, and the atmosphere was electric.

The sun eventually disappeared, and the wind dropped. This was a heady, charged silence to be running through in the dot-light of a head torch. Hour after hour of black silence and mountain, and then the single melodic warble of a skylark.

Ever so slowly, time had been trickling away as each black peak came and went. Ian had been feeling sick, and wasn't able to eat enough. And the gut wrenching moment came when he called it a day, after something like 18 hours on the run.

Looking in on the sidelines of these long distance attempts, it is hard to really understand what it is like, how much you really have to put in, and what it takes out of you. Being part of a support team, you invest a little bit of yourself, and add your hopes to the heap. So we all felt for Ian when he made this tough decision.

It would be easy to see only disappointment after this, but that would be just half the story. So few people dare to contemplate such extended rounds, let alone in their most unforgiving and committing original versions. So few are prepared to give what it takes to try.

It was not the outcome that defined the level of Ian's achievement, but what he chose to measure himself by in the first place. And for the experience of running through mountains with Ian and his friends? I think we are all the richer for it.

A Party in the Forest

2009-06-21T21:07:00.007+01:00

Beside a perfectly built Celtic Roundhouse, the band played another impeccably executed tune. Without a word, a fire thrower moved into a space between trees.

A day to remember in a beautiful space, and a wonderful way to celebrate Pen and Al's future life together.

Blencathra and the Summit Shelter of Doom

2009-06-10T21:38:00.006+01:00

Ricky Lightfoot sets a new course record - 58 mins 13

Racing up to the top of Blencathra to marshal on the summit, Andy, Ron and I felt the immense chill of a cold, clear night setting in. The wind belted around the summit like a jet stream, and clothes that seemed excessive at the car park were now painfully thin.

'Indiana' Sharples being eaten by a killer storm shelter

Andy quickly unfurled the summit shelter, an oversized burkha which had to be tethered with summit stones, feet rucksacs and hands. It didn't take long for the first runner to romp over the hummocky grass, and it was Ricky Lightfoot, closely followed by James Bulman and Jim Davies.

Steve Birkinshaw nearing the summit

Heading down the mountain after the last runners had gone through, I joined the other marshals who'd swept the course. It's always a crashingly fast descent, racing each other in our own quiet ways.

The hunt for the Terry's chocolate orange..

The Blencathra fell race is beginning to feel like a milestone in the year- everything is different, yet all is the same. Last year I hobbled up Blencathra, grappling with new orthotics, pain at every step to a summit steeped in rose petals and ashes. Someone had been carefully placed there, while a fell race went on around them.

This year the race was also lodged in the calm before the LAMM. Taking it easy, but afterwards crashing down the mountain regardless. From the ice cold summit to the warm fug of the car park, it was another good race to watch, another good time to have been part of.

On Running and the Weaving of Tiny Baskets

2009-05-29T21:48:00.007+01:00

photo by Duncan Richards

Sometimes its easy to take running in beautiful places for granted, but today, I had to pinch myself. In a wild mix of weather that spanned all four seasons at once, I was running over the Langdale Pikes and the Scafell Massif into Wasdale, then on to Honister Pass with Duncan and Karl.

Sometimes runs like this are relatively effortless, flashing by in a blur of measured ascents and crashing descents. At other times, every breath is an alveolar knife-fight where it’s up to the brain to keep it all together. Lately, runs have been tinged with the latter, and although they’re tougher to deal with, they can bring you to perhaps more interesting conclusions.

Why I was reminded of Ray Hudson’s gem of a book I’ll never know, but Moments Rightly Placed is more than just a memoir of life in the Aleutian Islands. Settling into the small community at Unalaska, Ray slowly becomes aware of the ancient Aleutian traditions of weaving very tiny baskets from swathes of grass.

These baskets are a blend of high art and devilish discipline, woven over thousands of years by Aleut women in a constant, ever changing evolution. From the highly exacting ways of harvesting and drying the grass to the intricate and extraordinarily laborious weaving, the process is almost unimaginable in its complexity. A finished basket of only three inches in diameter can contain over 15,000 stitches. There are now only four women in the world who know how to make an Aleut basket.

The tiniest of baskets made by Nina Kiiaikina

In the book, Ray’s mission to learn how to weave a basket becomes intertwined with the culture, people and an overwhelming sense of place into a remarkable impression of how these ancient arts can invisibly transform.

---

From Bowfell to Great End and beyond to Scafell is a dreamlike landscape of grey slabs of stone. Hopping from tinkling stone to clanking boulder is not running as many people know it, but the landscape lends an impossibly dramatic edge to it. A somber, spiritual place to run through swirling mists. Was it an impossible leap of synaptic misfiring to compare this kind of fell running to those little tiny baskets, slowly weft over months, and years? I don’t really think so. For all of us, out there, it is not just the run, right now, right there. It is an amalgamation of all of our runs, the snakes and ladders of our running highs and time spent facing injuries. It is the painstaking years of disciplined attention to our art. And when running over mountains is not effortless, maybe these things become easier to see.

I think it took Ray about a year to create a first basket which he describes as a worn-looking, uneven specimen with bulging stitches.

Anfesia, his formidable teacher, says nothing but “now start again”.

There are inevitably as many reasons for running as there are runners, but to me, on this day, it seemed to be as precious, as delicate, and as disciplined an art as learning to make a very small basket.

The Storm Gathering

2009-05-10T20:31:00.005+01:00

The 3rd Ravenglass Seaquest- kayak orienteering in a Force 5 gale

...What is he doing...? How can he possibly take so long to punch a checkpoint??

I am on the Ravenglass estuary, and what I thought was going to be a fun kayak event has turned into a battle for survival with Mr. Beaufort's friends. As I acquaint myself with no. 5, gusts of no. 7 muscle in, uninvited, it has to be said.

Unable to stay in one place in the raging wind, I mouth the international symbol for 'I can't stay here, I'll meet you beyond the bridge..' but somehow, I don't think Stu has got the message.

I subsequently learn that Stu was not punching a checkpoint, but emptying his boat after a poorly timed dismount.

Beyond the bridge, I have a chance to collect myself after the frenzied race start. The first gusts have ripped the course map off my deck. The camera, optimistically wedged under a bungee, is deluged in water and isn't going to be recording the event for posterity as I'd hoped.

As Stu wades through the windy glue towards me, I see the next checkpoint in the distance. One half of a double kayak pair has got out onto a grassy bank, but then disappears completely down a hole on the other side. It's a fascinating aspect of estuary orienteering that the checkpoints might be on land one minute, seaborne the next.

Trying to turn the kayak in these conditions requires skill and strength (both of which are lacking) and I stove the bow of my boat into a muddy bank. Stu and I are doing well, speedwise, after our trip to the Aeolian islands. But I'm breathing as hard as I would in a fell race.

The calm before the storm: paddlers large and small

As the estuary opens back out towards its mouth, the wind's fetch is allowed a free rein, and I just can't keep on course. The boat weathercocks wildly and no amount of heaving on my part will make a jot of difference. I resign myself to being shunted unceremoniously several hundred yards to the opposite bank. It's gusting Force 7 now, I subsequently learn.

The gale is picking up steadily, and a spirited pair in a banana yellow double sit-on-top kayak pass by, oblivious to the raging storm.

Back at the village over a well earned pint of Timothy Taylor's Landlord, the pub is crowded with bright red, salt-encrusted, beaming kayakers. We've come second in the mixed pairs, behind the couple in the banana yellow sit on top. An event to remember, to savour for all it's hardships and tribulations.

And you know what? As we sit there in the pub, the wind drops away to nothing. The sea is blue again, and not battleship-coloured. Isn't that just always the way...?

Must be the wreckage of a previous Seaquest...

The Big Blue

2009-05-05T21:50:00.012+01:00

Kayaking off Milos, Greece

Ramming speed: Stu and Henrik face- on to the wind

As the plane flew out of Athens there was a sensation of flying through an infinite blueness. Blue sea, blue sky. We were headed to Milos for some kayaking with Aussie geologist-turned kayaking supremo, Rod Feldtmann.

It's dark in there..photo: Rod

As we landed, we could see it was quite windy. White tops whipped across the bay as the taxi sped us to the hill-side village of Triovassalas. A few hours later, we met Rod and the sea kayakers already salty and wind blown from the days' paddling. They'd spent the day in a Force 5, and they looked very alive.

Milos boathouses

Not knowing what to expect, it was a pleasant surprise to find that we were enthusiastically hauled into this group of amazing people from the word go. About as different from each other as you could get, but united in this love of getting close up and personal with the sea in these funny little blobs of plastic. It just worked.

Each day, taking off with a trailer load of plastics, we clambered into the sea to paddle. Each day, a different coastline, and each day a different set of skills. By night, a rapture of food at tavernas hidden in white back streets and Metaxa-fueled discussions about Kayaks, the Universe, and Everything.

"I believe in the elements..." one of our number said, staring into his glass.

Indeed it does

Having had a wet winter, the whole island was knee deep in flowers

Cormorant-filled skerries

Dave admiring the seascapes to rival Fingal's Cave

Stu rockhopping

Looking back on this trip, it's hard to know where the horizon lines are. The boundaries of my paddling experience and skills have been well and truly pushed. I've spent time upside down in the big blue, and upright on the surface, and learnt to enjoy it whichever way up I am. We've looked at amazing rocks with a skilled geologist, and pieced together a volcano in our minds. And I've had my faith in human nature re-plumped, and had a good laugh all the way.

Heavy clapotis, anyone? Photo: Rod

As the plane flew out of Milos, we flew through that intense blue again. Blue sea, blue sky.

A Perfect Day

2009-05-01T14:52:00.008+01:00

Ian Charters' Joss Naylor Lakeland Challenge, 20th April

Joss Naylor at Sty Head: inseparable from the landscape

There's something thoroughly unique about long distance mountain running. I can't quite put my finger on what it is, but I think everyone who's a part of it, in some way, feels a profound sense of this without being able to express it.

At the last minute, I took up an offer to help support Ian on his Joss Naylor attempt (77 km, 5100 m of ascent, 30 lakeland summits in around 14 hours). Duncan, Karl and myself were the leg 3 pacers from Dunmail Raise to Sty Head, and the weather was just perfect.

All up, this was, as Ian put it, fell running at its best. From Dunmail Raise we slowly crept up the steep side of Steel Fell and on for another four or so hours till we ran into the huddle of new supporters at Sty Head. I scoured the group just in case Joss had come up from Wasdale as he often does on these attempts. I didn't spot him immediately: he was standing silently at the back, a remote yet intense figure.

Joss Naylor (for those not in the know) is a towering legend in the world of fell running. Dominating the record books for decades, no one could get near him in terms of speed, stamina or mental tenacity. Joss has, over the years, become almost a myth, with a childhood dominated by constant pain from a back condition that left him immobile, to running through injuries that would have literally felled mere mortals.

Joss has come to personify the spirit of fell running not just for these extraordinary facts spilling over into myths. There is an intensity and an alertness that is striking. Talking to him at Sty Head, first about the weather (well, what else..?), it was clear he was not so much observing the landscape as an integral part of it. He had grown into this place as much as the rocks and grass.

But there is also a poignant sense of nostalgia. Modern fell runners, in contrast to many other sports, are just able to grasp the fingertips of the glory days of Lakeland fell running's past. It is a hugely important tradition that we still (just) retain. And Joss is at the heart of this.

Ian made it round in 14 hours and 14 minutes, and you can read a full account of the day on Ian's blog.

I'm no closer to the elusive understanding of why we run up mountains, or what it is that makes it so magical, so rewarding. Even so, I think everyone in Ian's support team that day felt something of it, and this shone out at every turn. And for those of us who got to talk to the great man himself? Well, it was even more special.

Running around the base of Napes Needle to catch the others up, I watched Joss running down the fell into Wasdale. Now in his 70's, he still runs down a mountainside like water in a stream.

Spirit of Place

2009-04-16T08:57:00.014+01:00

Sea kayaking off Mull and Iona

There's a thread of a belief that runs through many eastern religions and indigenous cultures which I often wonder about. It's perhaps best expressed as the idea of the hidden valley (or beyul) of Tibetan Buddhism, and is used to describe a place which is often hidden (well, obviously) and hard to find, but imbued with unusual spiritual powers. A place where people can go at times of political upheaval to find refuge.

A maze of skerries, Erraid

In a way, Scotland is, by virtue of its turbulent history, littered with the faint traces of hidden valleys. But in this case, they are often islands where a church was built, or an abandoned crofting township of black houses, hidden completely from view of the sea and its marauding boatmen.

Iona is perhaps an obvious example of this, but so too are the lonely isles of Inch Kenneth, and Erraid (the home to the quietly inspiring Findhorn Foundation).

Perhaps the smudging out of time's inevitable course that often happens with kayaking helps to make you aware of these weird things. The tourist magnet of Iona was certainly the centre of the action for most, but paddling off to the remoter skerries and roiling seas was a journey to hidden valleys and into natural cathedrals of breathtaking beauty and melancholy.

Gravestone, Iona Abbey

Once again, the ruined black houses were places we sought out. Miles from anywhere (across acres of torrid bogs), tucked onto hidden slopes and out of prevailing winds, these tiny abandoned communities were captivating, yet very sad places to be.

Beautiful stonework, ruined black house, Breachadach, Ross of Mull

We were all too quickly sucked back to the 21st century: past Loch Lomond's golf course with its manicured, kidney-shaped sand pits. Trees budding shocking green shoots. Mazes of built-up housing.

Feeling a little culture shocked, we're back in the real world now, but the hidden valleys of Mull will occupy a very special place.

Friday Night on the Rocks

2009-04-05T18:27:00.006+01:00

It's hard to know where we are with Lakeland climbing these days. Endless routes on crisp, grey Mediterranean limestone have lead to a slight feeling of...well...anti-climax on the local cliffs. In between bolt-clipping holidays, we've slunk away from many a Lakeland beauty spot with little more than an abseil off a tree trunk to show for it.

Determined to break the spell, we'd decided, from the comfort of a sofa, that maybe a season of climbing nothing more than classic Lakeland V Diffs was a good plan. As well as being spoilt on bolts, I had had a run-in with a Hard Severe a while back which did nothing for my confidence. And then there was the business of Walthwaite, or Yosemite Crack. Climbing up the ever-increasing off-width, yawning crack, I mentioned to Stu that this yawning pillar was moments away from a major rockfall. He casually dismissed my concerns, although 100 tonnes of rock did crash to the ground a month or two later.

So as the blue hues of interleaved hills faded into the distance, I stood holding the ropes under a hanging garden of Babylon at Quayfoot Buttress on Friday, hopeful for a clean pass at a route. Balls of moss were rolling down under Stu's footfalls, and the Borrowdale-brown, blotchy rock looked a little soapy. The first pitch was moist, then increasingly damp, then frictionless, but undeterred, we carried on. It was a stroke of bad luck that the route we'd chosen then wove onto a side face of the crag, where the rock went from patchy dryness to torrential rivulet.

I started looking for a tree.

We set up the abseil in silence. The tree was quite a bouncy one, and my imagination had already lept to conclusions about its weight-bearing capacity.

"Well, you'd better b******r off then.." Stu intoned in his dry Geordie way.

I collapsed into a fit of laughter, which Stu took as a spirited attempt to diffuse the situation. It was really the ridiculous and over-melodramatic thought that these could be the last words we spoke to each other.

As our climbing degenerates into part-farce, part hilarious pastime with ever-decreasing goals, it is hard to know where we go from here.

But we do know with some certainty that the only way is up....

Decisive Moments...

2009-04-02T10:10:00.010+01:00

"...the decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition,
in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event
as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event
its proper expression..."

Henri Cartier-Bresson

It's probably very passe to talk rather pretentiously about the decisive moment. It's a much-abused photographic paradigm these days, it's true.

But it is a fascinating thing that the best photographers seem to know when the moment is right. Perhaps it stems from a primaeval hunting instinct. In my case, I prefer to think of photographic skill using the old principle that if you throw enough mud at a wall, some of it will stick.

Back on the north Yorkshire coast the other weekend, the tides appeared right to spend a pleasant afternoon combing the beach for some Jurassic fossil wood fragments. Hmm, not everyone's cup of tea, for sure, but perhaps it's what they represent rather than what they are now that is captivating. Well, to me, anyhow...

These wood chunks left the Jurassic coast 170 million years ago, floating out onto an azure sea. Various life forms latched onto these floating rafts and carried on the journey. Bivalve shells, crinoids. That sort of thing. Once the wood became waterlogged, these babies would sink like submarines onto the dense gloop of the sea floor, and there, covered over with more gloop, would be entombed. Walking over the shore and discovering these little life rafts seems like the unveiling of a 170 million year decisive moment, a dot in the ocean of time.

Today, all I was to find were some beautiful wood fragments, preserved in shiny pyrite. No tentacles. And that's why I ended up following a wetsuit clad surfer to a distant part of the beach, where I took some photos. It just happened that the surf was in at Staithes. The tides were right, the wind had picked up, and there were a number of black bodies in the water. Turns out that they were picking their decisive moments on one of the best surf beaches in the world.

Click on this one to make it bigger...

Complete chance or a moment of decisive knowing? Probably mostly chance. But for once, it felt like I was in the right place, at the right time.

Zen and the Art of Extreme White Water

2009-03-19T14:08:00.008Z

Personally, I'm not much of a white water kayaker. Bobbling down French rivers with a bottle of wine and a slightly damp baguette is about as far as it goes for me.

So as you might imagine, it was all a bit of a surprise to find myself at a lecture by white water kayaker Doug Ammons the other day. I assumed it would be an adrenaline junkie's wet dream, just something to while away a pleasant hour or so. How wrong could I be?

We piled into the lecture theatre, a group of folk neatly split into two halves: the young adrenaline junkies and the older ones with beards, wearing fleeces with a history. As Doug started to speak, it became immediately obvious that this was going to be a very rare gem of a talk, and about as far removed from my expectations as his kayaking experience was to mine.

It's difficult to know where to start describing what Doug's talk was about. Sure, we watched as Doug and his friends kayaked the steepest, most committing Grade VI rivers in the world. Sure, he had pushed the boundaries of his sport in a way very few are privileged to know or understand. But this was only a part of it. What came across was a sense of knowing what it was about on a much deeper level. How the ultimate achievement couldn't be counted with grades, or with first descents. What mattered was being at one with the greater forces of nature, and that this outward journey made possible an inner journey with an unparalleled opportunity for change. Down this deep, there were similarities between these ideas and many other forms of spirituality, eastern philosophies, martial arts.

After the talk finished, I felt like a hand grenade had gone off in my head. In a good way.

But it all left me with a raft of questions. Had anyone else sensed such incredible clarity and depth of of thought, inspiration? I've since asked everyone I know who also saw Doug speak, and very few seemed to be willing to talk about it. I looked on the kayakers' discussion group on the net. There were a few comments about the lecture theatre's sound system, the quality of the photographs, the general facilities, the seats. But nothing about the ideas.

In a copy of his book, Whitewater Philosophy, Doug wrote:

Rhiannon
I hope you find these ideas as interesting as me and keep developing your own.
Doug

Footprints

2009-03-06T15:17:00.008Z

Old Barn, Hartsop

It feels like the days since the Haweswater race have been dark. Somehow, the outside world has been playing along with a sympathetic fallacy, and my running has been a stark reminder of this mood. Bleak snowy runs in brooding Lakeland valleys. Runs along the steepening, dark Edwardian streets of Penrith, muffed up against the biting wind.

Alone, even when in company.

Maybe it is, as a friend summarised it, 'coming down off the ceiling' after Haweswater. Whatever that means. It seems apt enough though.

I followed the little dragging hoofprints of Herdwick sheep into the immense scoop of Threshthwaite Combe and out over the back onto High Street. There were no human prints up here. For the first time in a long while, I stopped and thought about the perversity of where I was, what I was doing. Was I running from something, to feel the need to run up here, of all places? Or what? The crashing sound of ice falling off overhanging rock faces in the combe didn't help in this arid place of the snows.

A squall smudged out the hills farther south in pencil grey, but I climbed on, popping through the snowy crust now and again. In a few moments, the grey smudge was all around me.

In this monochrome world, the surroundings seemed to capture and reflect how I was inside. Maybe this, on a weird level, is what mountain running is all about. A validation of what you feel. A connection between you and this place. A coincidence between worlds, one flesh, one stone.

Running away from something, or running towards it? Who knows. But to be part of this mad chase feels right. Whatever the mood.

The Haweswater Half Marathon...

2009-03-06T12:16:00.009Z

The agony of Michael Pluckrose in second place

"In the splendid surroundings of the Lake District, any race could be a success without too much effort." 2008 race report for the Haweswater Half Marathon, Runners World

This might have a grain of truth to it, but certainly over the last 4 months or so, there seems to have been a lot of organising to be done. Admittedly, on a good day, with a following wind, the race does just happen. But this year, a series of perfect storms have conspired to make it feel like organising through treacle.

With a slight combination of naivety and arrogance, I blundered into the role of race organiser. After all, how hard could it be? It's true, the race is organised by a team of Eden Runners. But as race organiser, you get to carry the can. Take the flack. Do the worrying.

The first whiff of trouble came when we sleep-walked past a brewing race-number crisis. Of course we needed the race numbers quite early to start sending them off. But we couldn't have predicted how hard it would be to get a print run of numbers done, when we relied on the goodwill of sponsors to provide them.

Then the vagaries of Cumbrian road running in remote locations took over. A matter of weeks before the race, the route had become 13.1 miles of sheet ice and landslides. And not any old landslide, but a really, really big one. Four foot deep. Massive. A 'ready for anything' bunch of Eden Runners had set to with spades (and in one notable case, a hastily grabbed coal shovel), to remove it last year. But this year, it was way too big for that. In the end, the Red Adare of Eden Runners, Andy Walker, managed to pursuade United Utilities to return our race route to its former glory. And thankfully, they did.

There were other laughable hurdles, but the race did, somehow, just happen. Over the years, it's grown from strength to strength, happily existing for most of its life with 300 or so runners. This year, with its pivotal position in the race calendar, 600 runners entered, and more were turned away. In a tiny hamlet like Bampton, this is quite a logistical feat.

It's been a tiring few months, but seeing the runners having had a good race in stunning scenery has got to be worth it.

The Act of Observation

2009-02-22T21:56:00.007Z

Geordie lads, Saltburn Pier

It's an often overlooked pastime, just observing. But over the last few years, it's one that I've grown quite fond of. As most of Tyneside's population enjoyed living out life on Saltburn beach, we spent a pleasant hour just watching. While shafts of sunlight came and went across the beach, it was a wonderful way to spend time.

Wait for me...

Along the cliff top walk of the Cleveland Way, the tiny beachside steel village of Skinningrove had paired houses and allotments. Fascinating ghettos of battered wood and corrugated iron for retreating to when it was best to be out of the house.

Shed, Skinningrove

There are always surprises on these trips to noodle about on old allotments, to sidle between fishing boats on lonely beaches. A strangely enriching form of beach-combing, in a way.

The Book of the North

2009-02-13T10:44:00.003Z

Alright then, I'll say it. I've entered a bit of a blank patch with blogging. It feels like I've sailed into the Bermuda Triangle without quite knowing how I got there, or what I do to get out again.

It's not like there's nothing going on though. Quietly bringing up the rear at the Kendal Winter League races. Quietly rueing the ease with which I entered the Helvellyn triathlon without as much as a thought to the practicalities of the training required, or the monumental effort it'll take for someone like me to finish before teatime. Quietly learning to swim properly in what feels like the dead of a Thursday night.

It's all about the quiet gestation of plans, a sea change in thinking, some sort of re-evaluation.

Some of the most enduring memories of last year came from wild camping on shorelines with the distant memories of crofters' lives drifting about us like sea mist. These places shouldn't have felt like home, but they did. And this year, we'd like to do more.

A book that leads us on these journeys is none other than Hamish Haswell-Smith's The Scottish Islands. It's a guide book like no other. It's more a mythology that winds Scotland's past with it's present. An examination and an explanation of why landing on a bare, uninhabited island feels more than it should. Extraordinary stories, Norse invasions, amazing communities and cultures, improbable island owners. It's all there.

With this compass to the past permanently out, pages spreadeagled, perhaps a bit of quiet planning a good thing..

The Rim of the Volcano

2009-02-02T13:19:00.003Z

A few years ago now, I was working on one of the remote islands that make up the Aleutian island chain. In case your geography is a little sketchy that close to the international dateline, I'm talking about a tiny chain of islands that set a bold curve between Alaska and the eastern tip of Russia.

Umnak Island is dominated by the huge crater volcano of Okmok, and this photo shows the top of the crater wall. We'd been blessed with a blue sky day (there aren't many of those there), but all of a sudden, a load of high, mackerel clouds pulled in. In a few moments, a low cloud which had been skimming the flanks of the volcano, spilled over the crater wall and sank into the void below. It was noiseless and bizarre.

I'm messing about with a slide scanner, which is why it's both grainy and covered in the accumulated dust of a slide with a tortured past. But I thought it was an interesting abstract photo nonetheless...

Frozen In Time

2009-01-23T13:44:00.003Z

A swirl of once-molten magma, Hawai'i

Now and again, I shuffle through the photos lodged unhelpfully in far too many folders on my hard drive. Photos of a past life, when work trips to places like this were the norm.

They are as disconnected from me as abstract paintings now. Bhutan, Nepal, Alaska, Chile, Asia, Australia. With frequent-flyer points no longer amassing in their thousands, I've been demoted from silver status to..well, brown class... But no amount of exotic travel can make up for feeling settled somewhere, for knowing what home is, other than as an abstract concept.

In this part of the country, they have a special word for this. And it's 'hefting'.
Derived in some way from 'heaviness or weight', it decribes the way that sheep flocks in the Lake District know exactly where their territory is. The natural instinct for knowing their home patch is passed on from mother sheep to their lambs with no real need for fencing on the fells.

I wonder if humans can be hefted as well as sheep. It feels a bit like it.

A Rainy Day Project

2009-01-16T16:36:00.001Z

Getting Your Bearings

2009-01-06T22:17:00.007Z

Unknown climber, Gandia, Costa Blanca, Spain

There's a funny thing about climbing that goes something like this: sometimes, getting to the crag can be the hardest thing, and even finding it at all is never a given. I'd even go so far as saying crag-finding could almost be classed as a sport in itself. For some guide book writers, the actual geographic position of a crag is a mere add-on to the main business of route description. It's clear from our ramblings in Spain that guide book writers must have been taken to some crags wearing blindfolds. On the back of a scrambling bike.

Take our recent trip to Font D'Axia. The crag is described as a small but pleasant crag in an idyllic setting, and so couldn't have sounded better. After driving several bumpy kilometres down a gravel track, we came to a clearing where the path surely weaved off to meet the crag. We parked up and started heading into the bush in approximately the right direction. The guide book assured us that we needed to climb up a couple of terraces and onto a plateau. So we climbed a few terraces, scratchily swashing past thorny undergrowth. I could tell from Stu's demeanour that he'd already given up hope of finding this one cleanly. I soldiered on, battling flicking spines and broken terrace walls until it dawned on me that we'd commando-crawled in a full circle, and were now right back at the car....

We decided to regroup over a lump of Manchego in the shade of a tree. A group of walkers were already sat having their lunch, and it occurred to me that they may have local knowledge, or even, maybe, just maybe, A Map. We approached them, quickly establishing that they were English.

Stu: "Do you know the paths around here?"
Walker "Ohhh, YESSS.....like the back of our hands! We've been walking here for over twenty years..."
Stu: "You don't happen to know where this path is do you? (pointing to map of crag and path)"
Walker: "Err...no..."

One of the others offered to phone a friend, while another told us that he had a son in Cambodia who might be able to help.

We decided to go it alone at this point. I eventually found it a few kilometres back, on a lovely path, absolutely nothing like the book's description.

Hot, tired, and a little scratched, we felt like we'd done the hard bit by the time we'd got to the climbs.

A Christmas Greeting

2008-12-13T12:26:00.007Z

Another couple of my Dad's photographs from Antarctica. The pup on the right was called Dot. Being a long-haired husky, she was destined to be shot because the ice would accumulate on her fur and eventually rip the skin. She couldn't become a sled dog, but was kept as a pet instead.

Spindrift blows across camp

Have a Happy Christmas, wherever you are.

Eastern Light

2008-12-13T10:56:00.010Z

A Return to Lindisfarne

With a metronome regularity we clock the years together with visits to Lindisfarne, the Holy Isle. At this time of year, it's always cold, bleak and silent. There are few people walking the tiny hamlet of streets, and the vicar's winter-weight cassock blows wildly as he walks his sermon across the road from home to church. How he gets by in sandals at this time of year I just don't know.

Despite the austere weather conditions, there is a singular beauty to the place which is lost to the thousands of summer visitors. And it's all about light. The light here is soft and radiant. And after all, it's probably what brought the Saints here in the first place.

Casting a glazed eye over the stacks of religious books in the tiny village shop only confirms this impression: "Chasing the Light", "Into the Light", "Lindisfarne Light". Through layer upon layer of religious tradition and transformation, the one thing that pokes through is still the primaeval beauty of this natural wonder.

The wonderful upturned boat sheds of Lindisfarne

And while all around us is change, the pace of it is slowed here. We caught sight of the 10 foot long tree trunk that we found washing up on the shore last year. It has been dismembered by the storms and lies in battered pieces at the high tide mark. This is change on a natural scale, perhaps put into perspective by the sudden disappearance of Fenwick Lawson's sculpture in the church. The extraordinary gravity of this sculpture has been replaced with little more than a scuff of wood against the slate floor. He has gone to be exhibited elsewhere.

It's great to have a place we call, in a very quiet way, our own. A kind of natural migration in the sometimes chaotic schedule of life. And why? Well, it's probably something to do with the light.

Sunset on the Causeway

Alright this, in't it?

2008-12-03T20:54:00.002Z

The battering of snow stayed long enough for me to snatch a snowy run along the Helvellyn ridge last weekend. It's often a place I end up going for a bit of a run on my own, which often ends up in deep and meaningful thoughts about running in the mountains. You'll be pleased to hear that I've forgotten all of them, but running up there is a gift.

A solitary fell runner scooted by on soft white sherbet snow.

"Alright this, in't it?"

"Aye, it's not bad..." I replied.

Baltic

2008-11-28T10:09:00.003Z

Waterfall, Scandale Beck

The wind chill factor on the fells last weekend took the temperature down to about minus 15 degrees here. Give or take. So far, the snow has been cheekily avoiding our days off, preferring to build up while we're at work, lure us into thoughts of crisp, snowy fell runs or walks, and then melt.

Anyway, a horseshoe walk over High Pike and Red Screes was just plain bitterly cold, rendering my bony hands into ice lollies. Turns out that they became perfect for tripod-less photography though- frozen hands completely removed camera shake from moving water shots in almost light-less conditions.

The Wensleydale Wedge

2008-11-17T22:19:00.006Z

Gill and Julia somewhere near mile 19

Lured partly by peer pressure and partly by a whimsical fancy to see what it felt like to run a long way, a few of us went east for the Wensleydale Wedge yesterday. It's a 23 mile Long Distance Walkers' Association challenge, primarily aimed at walkers, but runners seem to be tolerated quite well too.

A bird of prey about to pick off the stragglers at the back

The thing that amazes me is how civilised it all was. None of this frenetic racing business. There are cake stops in village halls along the way. Checkpoints manned by happy marshalls profering boxes full of Wensleydale cheese. Take a mug, and you're never far from a steaming urn of reviving tea. It makes fell racing look like the height of austerity.

The long plod to tea and biscuits at the top of Wensleydale

Wasdale

2008-11-12T10:09:00.006Z

The Scafell massif from Pillar

Tucked away in the remote south-west of Cumbria, Wasdale is, at least for some, the beating heart of the Lake District. It's tempting to call it 'unspoilt' in a chocolate box kind of way, but it's better than that. It's been spared the soft and cuddly Beatrix Pottery-Wordsworthy treatment by its remoteness.

It's a hard landscape, a real mountain fastness. Melded in some way between the catastrophic, varicose torrents that tumble off the perilously steep slopes, and the pockets of gentle flatlands dotted with Herdwick sheep. Moulded by generations of wiry Joss Naylors, slowly heaving the fallen stones into naturally contoured shapes. Oh, and it's got its own brewery. Could this be heaven?

A Perfect Storm

2008-10-31T12:03:00.006Z

The first snows have arrived here, turning the mountains of the Lake District a brilliant, Himalayan white. The leviathan swathe of the Pennines has also turned pale, giving me another chance to play with a photographic muse that's foxed me ever since I arrived here.

It sounds simple at first glance: it's a big, flat mountain. You can't miss it, it's on your doorstep, and it doesn't go anywhere. Despite this, photographing Cross Fell and its sister peaks has been a fun game of hide and seek, a race from jaw-dropping ambience to camera that ends up in disappointment. The problem, I think, is it's just too big. My catch-all camera, excellent though it is, doesn't have a wide enough angle or a close enough telephoto to capture the awesome brilliance that I drive past every day.

This morning, I looked out over the far southern end of the Pennines to where the massif breaks up into a jumble of tiny peaks. A perfect storm was illuminating them in a dusty light, and I knew the chasing game was about to start again. By the time I'd got my camera, the storm was passing over the flat fields beyond, and I'd missed the moment again.

Having a challenge like this is not such a bad thing, though. Was it Henry Moore who said the best thing you can do in life is to set yourself a goal that you cannot possibly achieve...?

You never know. Maybe next time.

Not Drowning, But Waving...

2008-10-29T13:52:00.005Z

The OMM and its aftermath

The Edale Skyline fell race, 2007: the essence of mountain running at its very best

Before I get going, I wasn't running the Original Mountain Marathon at the weekend. I'm just an innocent bystander in the storms, both real and man-made, that have beset the event since its cancellation in atrocious conditions at the weekend.

The media pounced on the story, grabbed it and ran away with such a staggeringly erroneous view that it's left us in a state of shell-shock. Of course there were 1700 runners unaccounted for. That's what happens during a mountain marathon....And the runners forced to seek shelter in a variety of barns and hostels? Luxury. Considering the scale of the event and the horrendous conditions out there that day, the injuries were minor, and not much worse than any other.

The smaller ripples of this media feeding frenzy reach farther than Borrowdale and the tabloids. My mother started to panic at about 9.30 am on Sunday, breaking siblings out of their respective hangovers and onto the phone, combing through start lists on the OMM website and a general fearing of the worst. Thousands of mountain runners' parents across the country would have gone through the same.

But none of this really matters. The papers will 'drag and drop' this story like any other. Some quarters will whinge about the cost to the taxpayer. But it's the long view that's important.

Most of us have at one time or another experienced conditions like the OMM. Being blown off your feet, eyes stung by rain and saturated. The strange thing is, these are some of the best times you can ever have. It's a perversity that most won't understand. In all the photos, the videos and radio broadcasts of the event, I haven't yet seen anyone who doesn't look like they've had the time of their lives. For the vast majority, they were waving, but not drowning.

"Perhaps it is escape from the pressure of life, but really it is more than this: it is proof that, sophisticated man though you may be, you can still go out with all your worldly needs on your back and survive in the wild places of Britain. That knowledge is great freedom."
Chris Brasher

The Pope, the Missing Universe and the Price of Fish

2008-10-15T08:38:00.008+01:00

Staithes, North Yorkshire

To most people, rocks are just...well...stones. To others, they are rather more than that. Being a geologist, I might be forgiven for the occasional bout of enthusiasm for them. But here, on the North Yorkshire coast, geology has played such a blinding hand that it's impossible to put a lid on it.

Walking along the shore, you could miss them. Just a load of greyish, layered rocks. Look closer though, and there are signs of life. A lot of life. Ammonites, hermetically sealed in nodules that fall out of the cliffs during storms. Worm burrows, shells, dinosaurs and unrecognisable creatures living and dying before our time. Even wood fragments playing host to life on a vanished, yet once bobbing tropical blue sea.

Papal Alchemy

A fossil hunter’s paradise, maybe, but there’s a more recent human past that could only have happened here. Back in the 1500’s, the Pope had a monopoly on the crystals of alum (aluminium sulphate, amongst other compounds) which were used to fix coloured dyes to wool. This was big business. Eventually, the secret to making the little white crystals was smuggled from Rome to Northern England, where the right rocks to make it could be found.

What amazes me is how the extraordinary complex chemical extraction processes involved were ever figured out in the first place. I mean. Who would think to burn a load of Jurassic rocks in a big pile for an entire year, then add urine or seaweed to them before liquefying the extracts in tanks and carrying out more bizarre chemical reactions involving (can you believe it) eggs? It is staggering to think that they did all this without really knowing how or why it worked.

The processes are one thing, but the quantities involved were gargantuan. There are great gouges cut out of the hillsides where the Alum Shales were quarried. Then there’s the seaweed, which again was required in such quantities that the entire coastline of the north of England and Scotland was being scraped by men, women and children. And the urine? Shipped in by the boat-load from London and Newcastle. I can’t imagine.

The Hunt for the Missing Universe

The rocks around here are amazing for another reason too. As luck would have it, not only are the rocks well below ground economically important, but the resulting underground mines are so deep that they are perfectly shielded from atmospheric radiation. The rocks also happen to have such low background radiation that it is the perfect place to detect what could be described as the ‘Physics of the Elephant in the room’- the search for dark matter in our universe.

There are 3 million pounds-worth of detectors down there, all waiting for the weakly interacting massive particles to give off a hint of their presence.

Rolling an ammonite fossil around in my hand, I can’t help but think this place has come a long way through time.

So what’s that got to do with the price of fish?

Good question….

Not The Ian Hodgson Mountain Relay...

2008-10-08T18:02:00.003+01:00

Late on Saturday night, there was a panicked phone call from Penny.

'Have you heard?'
'What?' I burbled, slurping on a glass of Shiraz.
'The Ian Hodgson's been cancelled.'

There was a slight note of hysteria in her voice. I could tell this was one too many of such cancellations and disappointments that she'd experienced lately. This was a blow, particularly after losing the village's best window-box display.

A race to the fell runners' forum revealed that the rumour was true. Brotherswater was like a paddy field. There was nowhere to park.

It was a shame, this. Our eight-person team had been out every weekend for weeks, finding the shortest line between points. Worrying about things....looking forward to Patterdale's finest cake display.

In short, the race didn't go ahead, leaving hordes of honed fell runners to have a series of relaxing runs in a more informal sense.

It's a right shame, but we're all looking forward to next year.

In Strange Places

2008-10-03T14:02:00.008+01:00

Cairn Holy, Dumfriesshire
We've been to some curious places of late. Well, perhaps I should say, more curious places than usual. We're used somehow, to wandering around forgotten corners of Scotland or Northern England, not sure why we're there other than to see the way a human past melts into nature over time...But Stu's got a new toy has led us to seek these places out in greater numbers.

After a slightly alarming lull in his photographic ambitions, partly due, it has to be said, to a tricky Ebay transaction with a bloke in Hong Kong and a muck-up by DHL, Stu has leapt into the world of photography with a gadget that is quite spellbinding. It's a digital SLR with a sensor that's been converted to see only Infra-Red light.

The results are captivating. White, ghostly trees, stunningly radiant against black trunks...abandoned boats, rusting brown in daylight, but soft baby-blue and white in Infra-Red. One day, I hope he'll let me put one of his photos up on here. But for now, you're left with mine, as I noodle about old ruins while Stu takes shots of the real stuff.

The Rab Mountain Marathon

2008-10-01T17:56:00.004+01:00

A Grand Tour of the Back o' Skiddaw

It was in these beautiful, solitary hills that the Rab Mountain Marathon was set last weekend. It was surprisingly comfy terrain to be handling with a 1:30,000 map and a lot of plastic bags in a flimsy sack. Not too hard on the feet, plenty of running territory and surprisingly easy to navigate.

The flavour of each mountain marathon is different. Some are like a big game of chess, where you have to think your way round the course. Some are like a game of chicken, where a moment's hesitation can make the difference between winning and losing. This one was, by comparison, an engagingly charming grand tour of the mountains, designed for pleasure, almost. It didn't matter a jot that we came 6th in our category behind a few crack teams from Keswick and Borrowdale. It was the enjoyment that mattered.

An Ocean Away

2008-10-01T17:30:00.004+01:00

After what seemed like an age, Stu's finger came out of its plastic cocoon. We took it, and the rest of him for a paddle on flat-calm waters off Oban.

A lick of paint, perhaps?

By accident, we rolled up to the shore at Craignish to look at some sculptured stones. Inside an abandoned, roofless church were more of the beautiful tombstones carved by the Iona sculptors several hundred years ago. Sometimes by chance, sometimes by design, we've seen quite a few of these beautiful carved stones now.

Fell-o-philia

2008-09-15T22:46:00.004+01:00

A random rant about Askham Fell

It's been months since I've been up here. It's funny, because it's not like I haven't been fell-running for a long time or anything. But I just haven't made it to Askham Fell. And in a very strange way, the absence made me realise what an irrational attachment I had to the place.

There have been runs in the dark. Runs basked in February heat, and retreats from battering August hail. Runs with friends, and solitary runs. Many of those. Where I practised navigating, pacing out bearings through bracken to piles of stones carefully arranged by those living thousands of years ago. Where the first baby steps of fell runs began through heaving lung gasps. Even though it is flat.

Last week, I shoo-ed off the gangly wild ponies sucking experimentally at the car and sniffed the wind, heavy with the smell of peat.

It was good to be back.

The Ring of Kerrera

2008-09-15T22:11:00.007+01:00

The Isle of Kerrera might not seem like the obvious choice for a mountainbiking island getaway. For one thing, it's a mere 10 minute hop away from the bustling kilt shops of Oban. But there was something that I'd always wanted to see there.

It was a massive pair of concrete fingers. Stu had found them 15 years ago on the east side of the island, in the garden of an old fisherman's cottage. There, pointed at the mainland, was an enormous, 6-foot high hand fixed in a V-sign, telling all the world generally where it could go.

Whilst the sentiment might seem a little vitriolic, it has become, over the years, something to aspire to in a funny sort of way. A small Scottish hovel with a V-sign in the garden.

Gylen Castle

Sadly, the concrete sculpture is long gone, but the folk of Kerrera are still, in a rather gentler way, holding their hands up to the mainland. We mountainbiked around the island, following the trail of a pack of wild goats with shiny, trailing manes.

The insides of Gylen Castle

Five days in the Tatras Mountains

2008-09-05T08:38:00.013+01:00

A few snapshots of the trip to the Tatras Mountains, Slovakia

Boulder-hopping: the terrain was often harder than we imagined...

A breathtakingly clear view of Lomnicky Stit (8000 feet, give or take)

A cloud passes overhead

Gill and Christine on the via ferrata ascent of Lomnicky Stit
The chain is here somewhere...getting misty on the top...
Back on the chain gang...

The mist envelopes us...

The only way is up for the Slovakian mountaineering nuns

Wobbling Cameras in the Tatras

2008-08-19T18:01:00.003+01:00

Like most grand ideas, reality never quite matches your imagination. Despite this, you have to start somewhere, and so here it is, my first YouTube thingo.

It's a run in the Tatras Mountains of Slovakia where a few of us from Eden Runners have spent the last week. It's been a fantastic running overdose amongst towering spines of granite. Fab.

Ooh, and no one is claiming responsibility for the scene involving some partial nudity.

Every Pub Should Have One...

2008-08-08T11:38:00.004+01:00

Imagine my surprise to find this solid chap living in the beer garden at the King's Arms in Bowness-on-Solway.
An incredible character, he'd been brought up with the pub's dogs. He's a Kunekune from New Zealand, apparently. A Maori pig.
Where do I get one?

The Cruel Finger of Fate

2008-08-04T22:16:00.002+01:00

Storms over Derwentwater

It was a hot, summer's Monday evening, and it seemed like the right time to start swimming in the mountain becks. The water was still a bit cold for it, but by exercising beforehand to get warm, a swim would be a chattery, but fun experience.

Clattering on mountainbikes along the stoney singletrack to Skiddaw House in the clefts between egg-box mountains, anything could have happened. Our skills are still a bit ropey, and it was a tight track.

On to the River Caldew in full spate, with luck on our side. Into wetsuits and into the raging flume spewing from the mouth of the falls. It was as plump a river as I'd ever swam in, and it seemed like a good transferable skill to practise darting in and out of the boiling white mass in case we got flipped out of our kayaks in a raging sea at some point in the future.

This, too, we survived. Later on, whilst taking off a sock, Stu managed to snap a tendon in his finger. Not falling off a bike at the back of Skiddaw. Not smashing into rocks lining the river. Just yanking off a sock. He's got 'Mallet Finger' and can't climb, kayak or mountainbike for 6 weeks.

Still, the splint looks like just the job for planting seedlings in the garden...

Down Time

2008-07-30T10:10:00.007+01:00

It's always sunny in Douglas Wilcox's blog. Never a grey sky or a drop of rain (ok, there's some fog in one of the latest photos, but just look at the number of azure-blue-puffy-cloud photos there are).

But you know, I think Douglas is missing a trick. Whilst I envy the way he can charm the sky into being blue for a photo, the care-free look of a happy paddler in the foreground, I feel there's something missing.

Whilst I know it's the opposite (for him and everyone else), Douglas paints an idyllic landscape. He is the Constable of the kayaking world. Feted by the new, glossy magazine of the moment, his photos are scattered throughout Ocean Paddler. Full page spreads. Big, blue skies sell copy... There's no storm on the horizon...

'It's easy paddling from here' it is whispering to the subconscious mind.

There is a delightful contradiction at the heart of this.

We were recently holed up in our tents on the beach while a storm whipped down the loch. For a day we watched the sea make crazy, salt-flavoured Pollocks over and again on the shore. It was a fantastic piece of down time.

I guess how you see things through a lens is a good reflection of your inner world. I find the subtle moods of the darkest Scottish sky intriguing.

I can't wait to be holed up by a storm again.

East of Eden

2008-07-23T17:08:00.003+01:00

You're probably more likely to see another person on the Moon than you are up here, on Cross Fell. It's a great place to run.

The Silence of the LAMM

2008-07-16T10:02:00.001+01:00

All photos: Felicity Martin

0530 hrs, 7th June

I am conscious of a strange noise dragging my brain from 2 hours of fitful sleep. I can’t place it. It’s an unusual noise to hear at 5.30 am. And it’s very close to my head.

Oh, yes, it’s a bagpipe.

Somewhere in the back of the brain, there’s a synapse of recognition. You get woken up with bagpipes on the Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon.

THE LAMM? How did this happen? The panic slowly subsides as the memory comes back. It’s not a horrible dream. Penny and I did enter the LAMM.

Outside, the midges are amassing in numbers. . Everyone’s got black midge nets on. It looks a bit like an outing of 900 suicide bombers. I put mine on. It’s marginally better than not having one. For a brief moment I snigger at people trying to conduct normal morning operations through nets. Brushing teeth. Drinking tea. Eating midge-flecked porridge. Then I try it for myself. I scrape the raspberry smoothie stalactites off my midge net and make a mental note to bring a straw next time.

0830 hrs

Well, this is it- the start. The sun seems to have moved closer to the earth, it’s baking, and there are still midges making the most of this unusually large feast. They probably haven’t had so much fun since the Battle of Culloden.

1030 hrs

We’re nearing the second check point. We’ve been contouring a deeply incised hillside for 2 hours. We crash down to a stream and drink like wildebeest.

1530 hrs

We’re looking for a checkpoint. It's not here. It’s the worst possible place to lose a checkpoint- a series of enormous hummocks. It could be any one of these monsters. Backwards, forwards we trudge. I can feel the will to live leaving. I have started to stop caring. Then a strange thing happens. I start to worry about food. I haven’t got enough. My brain is going, I think. Has my body had enough, or my brain?

“Charles!! CHARRRRRRLESSS!!” An elderly man behind is shouting at the top of his lungs. He’s miming the international symbol for a checkpoint to his partner, although it seemed a little superfluous. He’d attracted the attention of everyone. Including us.

I confess my food concerns to Penny and tell her to leave me to die right here. I can’t go on.

She makes me sit down, feeds me a breakfast flapjack. Takes some weight out of my sack. She knows what’s happened, and deals with it. The experience of an Alpine mountaineer.

2030 hrs

It’s been the hardest 11 hours out on the hill in a long time. A tough decision had to be made to climb up and over a set of Munros, not down the valley to disqualification. Walking like an empty shell, nothing left inside. A never ending, drawn out pain. The silence of the LAMM.

2230 hrs

Every last atom of energy has left my body. Penny has got outside of her rations, while I cannot eat a thing. It’s a bad sign. The midges cluster around the squashed remains of the raspberry smoothie.

There’s a strange sense of having learnt a great and valuable lesson. To know where our limits lie is a powerful thing. Do we learn more from our successes, or our failures?

The course planner, Andrew Spenceley tells us that our course had twice as much ascent on the first day as it would have normally. It makes me feel a little better about having scraped the barrel of my endurance and my being. Now, a month later, the pain has gone. And what are the memories? A perfect herd of deer thudding close by, the light splintering through pines, the dance of a thousand folds in the rock, pressed by unimaginable heat and time as we ran past in a moment.

0530 hrs 8th June

The piper digs out another tune from the wheezing bag.

It’s ‘For A’ That’ by the great Rabbie.

"Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
A man's a man for a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
Their tinsel show, an' a' that,
The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,
Is king o' men for a' that."

Fishing for Poems on the River Eden

2008-07-04T17:26:00.009+01:00

"This leaf which is being persecuted by the wind,
Let her beware of her fate.
She is old though only born this year."

A while back, squeezing between tree roots along the banks of the Eden, we came across a beautiful quote carved into the rock. It is reputed to be the work of William Mounsey, an eccentric botanist. It turns out he carved a few things along Eden's banks, and recently, we set out to find one of his more eloquent ones. Of course, being Welsh, it was the vague rumour of an ancient Bardic poem by Llywarch Hen that was the lure.
An old Welsh poem did seem a very strange thing to carve in deepest Cumbria, but then again, maybe not. When Llywarch was penning his words of wisdom (early in the 9th century), Wales and Northern England were linguistically one.
Mounsey carved his eulogy to Llywarch on St. Constantine's caves, a series of monastic, multifunctional cells variously attributed to meditation, storage, and retreat from the dreaded moss-troupers...hmm..

The caves themselves were a curious mix of surprise and disappointment. Others had followed, rather less creatively, in Mounsey's footsteps and covered the walls with names, italics, childlike scrawls and finally, spray paint. It was madder than the walls of a mental institution.

The final act of vandalism was sprayed right in front of William's wonderfully sonorous poem, and laid claim to the fact that members of a certain eastern European immigrant community had been there.

It's interesting to chart the way that, over the course of human civilisation, drawing things on rock has gone from the ultimate expression of a timeless sprirituality to...well...something rather less profound.

Running Through Mountains of the Mind

2008-06-15T23:00:00.002+01:00

Andy Ramsay and some of the Leg 3 pacers

It's been said that life is really just a series of wonderful opportunities disguised as impossible situations. And as with life, so it is with running. If there was one endevour that epitomised this above all others, it would be the Bob Graham Round.

A 72 mile circuit over the tops of Cumbria's highest fells, it conveniently has the same amount of ascent as that of Everest. The catch is to complete this in under 24 hours. It is impossible, and more so, inconceivable to most. To many, it becomes an obsession. And to a few, it becomes the wonderful opportunity in disguise.

To say that this insanely long run takes it out of you might be an understatement. On a run this long, such a sustained onslaught on your system, your physical ability becomes a mere background to the current of your own thought. The mind (and dare I say it, spirit) are put squarely on the line. Anyone who's read Richard Asquith's Feet in the Clouds will know how it goes.

Seventy six years to the day that Bob Graham first set out in his pyjamas, shouldering a big bag of hard boiled eggs, Eden Runner Andy Ramsay (pictured at right, above) set off to complete the round. Armed with sandwiches (not too posh..no sundried tomatoes round here) and a lot of energy drink, he was guided round the route by a host of Eden Runners with all their hopes pinned in one place. As each leg was completed, the pacers breathed a sigh of relief and handed over their cargo to the next. There was a sense of trepidation as the Leg 3 pacers saw Andy, Robin Gillespie and Dave Owens charging off the foothills of Helvellyn. So much so that some of us decided to start the leg early in case we held him up. It all went wonderfully well, though. Even clagged in summits could not halt the Ramsay machine as Penny's supercharged navigational skills kicked in ("now...at the thirteenth cairn, we need to bear 190 degrees")...

So next time you're in Keswick late at night, and you see someone staggering on their feet, throwing up with a bottle of champagne in their hand, it might not be all that it seems... they might just have seized a wonderful opportunity out of what looks like an impossible situation. They might have just completed a BG.

Fantastically well done, Andy.

Arran's Better Half

2008-06-04T10:05:00.010+01:00

In hot and sultry conditions we spent a couple of days kayaking down the eastern half of Arran. Well known as Scotland in microcosm, Arran's landscape has a little bit of everything. Well, almost.

Perhaps the highlight of the trip was a visit to Holy Isle. Docked alongside Arran, this mountainous little drop in the ocean is home to the Samye Ling Tibetan Buddhist retreat. It has recently been put in the (admittedly small) spotlight by sea kayakers, as some have been asked not to land by the monks. Happily, the 'no landing: retreat' signs have been removed from the lighthouse at the southern end of the island. While we were quietly enjoying the pervasive sense of peace at a discrete distance from the Buddhist centre, it seemed that the most disturbance was being caused by powerboaters driving up and down (as they do). A particularly loud powerboater dragging a sea biscuit could be heard shouting way out in the bay.
It was, though, a place of wonderful peace and tranquility, and I can't help thinking that sea kayaking is a most 'Buddhist' way of going about things. Quiet...no engines. Nothing but you and a bit of fibreglass...the mesmerising sea...a respect for everything around you...and the nothingness.

We squashed down a particularly un-Buddhist box of Viennese Whirls and went on our way. Leaving nothing but crumbs and taking nothing but peace.

It was a surprise to see a small Viking longship in a dock at Corrie. Turns out that it belongs to the Arran Viking Longship Society. It's called the Black Eagle, and it's smashing.

One thing that was sadly missing from Arran's little microcosm was the Arran Brewery. It started up on the crest of a wave which has since become a massive growth in Scottish brewing. Arran's pubs and ferries were plumply endowed with finely crafted beers- an oasis in a desert of ales, as it was a few years ago.

To cut a long story short, it turns out that Arran's bottled ales were doing quite nicely on the supermarket shelves until the price of hops went through the roof. Forced into selling to the 'big three' at a loss, they slowly but surely went under. The supermarkets don't care- they have many more where they came from. But to the Isle of Arran, it is a tragedy. It is desperate to see a line of Tennents and Guiness taps where the Arran brews should be. It's not even this that is the greatest worry. It's also what it means for the rest of the Scottish revivalists of the ancient art.

Leaving Inch Kenneth

2008-05-21T09:19:00.012+01:00

As the road winds around the thick basalt flows of Loch Na Keal on Mull's western side, there's an isle out in the throat of the loch that is small, yet captivating.

It's bright green, and tilted slightly, but commanding in a way that is not related to size. This is Inch Kenneth. It is steeped in uncharacteristically peaceful history. Saint Cannoch made this patch of green his home, and it became a monastery. Clan Chieftains were said to be buried here when the crossing to Iona was too hazardous. We made the crossing in stunningly beautiful conditions- bright sunshine over azure blue water. We wandered through the 13th Century ruins, taking in the peace of the place.

These 500 year old engravings were once the gravestones of the mighty clan chiefs. Once again, landing in kayaks seemed to dislodge any sense of 21st Century time.

As it happens, one of Inch Kenneth's most infamous residents died almost exactly sixty years ago. The childlike, limping figure of Unity Mitford was a common sight along the shores of Inch Kenneth, and it is quite a blinding story. Always struggling to outdo her five sisters, she topped the lot of them by becoming a Nazi and entering Hitler's inner circle. At the outbreak of war, she took her pearl inlaid pistol and shot herself in the head. Having lost her faculties, she lived out ten years on Inch Kenneth before the bullet finally claimed her.

Set in Stone

2008-05-18T22:40:00.007+01:00

If you take one of the myriad paths leading to the river Eden at Armathwaite, then squeeze between a few trees splaying their roots in the tiny gap between water and rock, you might find these unexpectedly whimsical carvings.

William Mounsey travelled the length of the Eden from its source in Mallerstang to its end, carving beautiful memories into stone as he went. One of them, I'm told, is a sonorous poem in Bardic Welsh. This one is an extract from the Compleat Angler by Isaac Walton.

The moon-like faces with impassioned stares probably pre-date William's time, and along with a large salmon carved at rest on a sandstone slab, are perhaps the work of an angler. An intriguing place to climb.

Ocean of Time

2008-05-09T11:56:00.012+01:00

There are some places on this frenetic isle that have been frozen in time. Changeless landscapes where time’s endless chasm opens out into a breathtaking vista. Curiously, it is often easier to see this dimension when travelling by kayak. Don’t ask me why.

I’m also not sure why I was reminded of Jon Swain’s book, ‘River of Time’, when kayaking through Scottish islands. A hauntingly beautiful book centred on the lodestone of the River Mekong, it poignantly captures the thin line between Cambodia’s haunting beauty and its collapse into war-torn destruction. It seemed about as far from a trip to Mull as you could get.

On the north side of Ulva we sank into the landscape. Just two people in an ocean of time. The flat spot we just happened to camp on was the site of an old, abandoned croft. Very few people would have known about this place unless travelling by sea. Slowly, the croft grew out of the ruins. Here, the stone walls of the compact, black house…there, the shed next to the tumbling burn, everywhere the meticulous rig and furrow lazy beds once full of potatoes. Even beautiful paths carved on the steep slopes to the track above.

While a Force 5 wind blew itself out on the water, we explored inland. Time seemed endless as house after crumbling house rose defiantly out of the windswept bracken. On headlands, in bays, abandoned communities everywhere. The crofters had been here for a thousand years or more, and there was a strong sense of presence in this absence.

I later learned that the notorious F.W. Clark bought the island in the 1850s, and set about systematically ridding Ulva of its tenant crofters. Six hundred of them on this one island. Sixty people had lived and worked on the land that our feet were treading. I could touch a stone that they once grasped as they built these houses into the landscape. It was a world away, yet their presence was immediate.

The hearth inside a croft

Jon Swain’s story was immortalised in the film ‘The Killing Fields’, and in many ways, Ulva’s past played out much the same story. In fact, the parallel was eerily perfect. The same terror, destruction of a way of life, the same futility and the same timeless beauty.

Past lives, frozen into the landscape, and frozen in time.

"As I walk along these shores
I am the history within."
Runrig, Proterra

Above the Cloudbase

2008-04-28T09:15:00.007+01:00

It's another world up here, where the cloudbase is down. In these conditions, with high winds and no visibility, we are taught the most. We have to become super-aware of our surroundings or we are lost. It's a lot to do with self-reliance, being comfortable in the hills, being part of them.

This is what it's all about. More than any of the small challenges we set ourselves, any race, any win, any loss. It's about a deep sense of belonging up here.

The Anniversary Waltz Fell Race

2008-04-23T08:36:00.005+01:00

'Who's idea was this, then?' Runners piling up Catbells with Robinson and Hindsgarth distant memories behind. Photo courtesy of Bill aka Baggins.

With ten minutes to go before the start of the epic Anniversary Waltz, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It belonged to Wendy Dodds, one of the greatest fell-runners of her generation. She just whispered "Now, this is a real race...." before disappearing into the crowd.

She wasn't wrong. Compared to the piddling winter fell races, this was on an altogether bigger scale. No fewer than 5 summits, 3600 feet of ascent over 12 miles, this was different. Keeping what I amusingly call race pace up over this distance and terrain would take me into very different territory.

A fierce wind shot us up and onto the first, most gruelling peak, and I was two minutes ahead of last year's time. As the route circled back on itself to Hindsgarth, the wind was against us though, and this kept up most of the rest of the way, making it a tough battle of the mental over physical.

Over a welcome blob of mince and tatties after the race (food of champions), it struck me again what a nice bunch of people fell runners generally are. There's also a touching tendency to completely inarticulate understatement amongst those, generally, who are superhuman in what they do..."aye..grand..." might be the long version of what is said at the end of a tough day out on the hills...

But, I have to agree. That was a real race.

Of Men, Stones and the Feeding of Rats

2008-04-14T21:34:00.008+01:00

When Al Alvarez eloquently summed the need to climb as 'Feeding the Rat', he probably didn't quite envisage the way it would set the paradigm for describing the compulsion to climb to the outside world. Whilst the insatiable gnawing from the inside that he describes is undoubtedly a good analogy, there's always the personal question as individuals as to why we climb. A Russian doll of enigmas that is never quite resolved.

Sometimes the rat is more bloated than hungry, and it all seems like a bit of an effort. At other times, there it is.. a circular feeding frenzy of risk and reward.

Our latest pilgrimage of the hungry rodents took us to another great swathe of European limestone: Provence. The seductive combination of hot, dry rock, wonderful food and wine was quite enough to feed any number of rats.

Of Stones and Men

Of course, the weather turned wet, and in contrast to the highly planned nature of climbing days, we followed our noses into old, medieval walled cities and let fate decide what we should see. It has not let us down so far. In the back-streets of one city, we found the remnants of a wonderful exhibition, 'De L'homme et des Pierres'. The natural masters of the trompe d'oeil, this purely French exhibition was stunning in its subtle interplay of black and white and warm limestone. Quite something.

The Shipping Forecast

2008-03-31T21:42:00.014+01:00

As a lone seagull pipes a single, repeated note in the distance, the rain putters heavily onto a rucked and velvet sea. The cracked bones of trees on Eilean Munde shelter the jet black graves of those massacred at Glencoe.

It's been a wild few days.

There are warnings of gales in Viking North Utsire South Utsire Forties Cromarty Forth Tyne Dogger Irish Sea Shannon Rockall Malin Hebrides Bailey Fair Isle Faeroes and Southeast Iceland.

From bright blue seas casting sun-ripples on the sea bed, to sheltering behind gun-metal grey islets from downdraughts. Four seasons in a matter of days.

Rockall Malin:
Southerly veering westerly 6 to gale 8, occasionally severe gale 9. rough becoming very rough or high. Rain or showers. Moderate or good, occasionally poor.

For the first time, we sighted otters. Not one, but two. The first traced a graceful arc around the seaweed shorelines of Loch Moidart, lying on his back in the water to pick at a small fish with his paws, then coming up to land a larger catch. The second was close enough to come up snorting from the water to peer at us.

As Scotland enjoys a renaissance of spacious seafood restaurant developments with panoramic, lochside views, Castle Tioram is at the centre of a very modern form of battle. Sold for a song by a Californian descendent of the clan Macdonald to an Ayrshire businessman (ironically named Lex, for all those fans of the film 'Local Hero'), the Scottish parliament are wrangling over its use as great chunks of it slide down into the loch.

The Snow Waltz

2008-03-24T17:31:00.005Z

It was the day after Causey Pike, and there'd been a huge dump of snow overnight. I got wind that a friend wanted to recce the Anniversary Waltz fell race today, but had decided that I was too tired from the previous day's race.

Trouble was, the sun was shining, and the hills were covered in snow...a snap decision saw me grabbing two chocolate bars out of an Easter egg, excavating the car from a snowball and driving off for an extraordinary run.

Gill and Mark on the snowy descent off Robinson

The Anniversary Waltz race has a kind of cult following. It's the first real medium-length fell race of the year at nearly 12 miles, and the route it takes is so logical, following a ridge line of breathtaking beauty. Robinson, Hindsgarth, Dalehead, Maiden Moor, Catbells, and cake. Lots of cake. It's not just a fell race either. Somehow, all 400 of the runners also take part in the wedding anniversary celebrations of the organisers, Wynn and Steve Cliff.

The descent from Maiden Moor

Taking more than four hours in heavy snow, the run was breathtaking. From the start, we had entered a monochrome world of the snows. Rarely do the Lakes look more stunning. Moving through this landscape over such a stunning array of peaks was a privilege.

Subtleties of route choice were largely lost on us, knee deep in snow. The route off Dalehead? Still a mystery. The line off Catbells? Uh uh...But the scenery more than made up for the obscuring of race routes.

An incredible day.