Winter in Keswick

In February 2010 I booked the train up to Penrith...

only to break the bicycle I'd planned to take on the day before departure....

so changed plans and walked everywhere in the snow around Keswick and Derwent Water, where the boat bus company fought to break the ice...

up over Walla Cragg and Latrigg in the blizzard, and through the fresh snow around the stones at Castlerigg...

and got the double decker bus down to Windermere for the train home...

The squirrel was a lucky catch in the woods below Ashness Bridge.

Hill climb

A82

The A82 between Tyndrum and North Ballachulish in the West Highlands is a remarkable road.

Astonishing not just for the breathtaking moorland and mountain landscape that it floats across and weaves through.

And the extraordinarily difficult remote and hostile conditions in which it was constructed, across deep peat bogs, around peaks and lochans and over fast flowing and frequently frozen mountain rivers.

But because it was built in 1931 to a very distinctive engineering style which is rarely seen in our mediaeval lanes or our modern roads made up of computer generated continuous gentle curves.

It is more like a Roman Road or the military roads built to suppress the Jacobite risings, in following perfect straight lines for many miles at a time across the flatter parts of the moor, joined in short curves.

But maintaining a relatively flat and practical course, across the rocky mountain streams on reinforced concrete bridges and viaducts, built in situ to graceful but experimental designs that haven't been seen since the discovery of the boring but cheap square beams on straight stilts method of road bridge construction.

It’s one of those few places that actually bears some resemblance to the great open road of car adverts and Top Gear features — the thing, the freedom, the lifestyle that people are told that they are buying when they get conned into a daily grind of traffic jams on cluttered streets and webs of dull computer-designed roundabout-linked suburban distributor roads, and all the ill-health and unhappiness that comes with it.

Except that this is still a real road, with real traffic and real drivers. So the moor is littered with broken plastic and glass; bumpers and hub caps and metal slowly sinking into the peat. Better the quick death by car here than the slow one on the ring road, perhaps?

More pictures in the Highlands gallery.

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On Snowdon

Some shots from Britain's busiest mountain, and the highest in Wales, mostly from an ascent in June 2009.

It's not just that Snowdon is busy with tourists hiking on the several ascent paths. Far more visibly than many of Britain's highlands, it's a very developed and exploited landscape — and not just in terms of the mountain having a railway all the way to the top, where you can take in the view from inside a coffee shop.

The mountainsides around here are strewn with the ruins and remains of industrial workings: quarries and mines, and the railways that took the region's rocks away.

If indeed the mountainsides even still exist: across the Llanberis Pass, the view of Snowdon's neighbour Elidir Fawr is dominated by the 700 acre Dinorwic quarry, closed since 1969 but still an open wound.

Not necessarily a bad thing. From this distance in time, much of the industry and development adds interest to the landscape. And I don't suppose Welsh would have wanted to preserve their Highlands if the only method on offer was that by which the Scottish Highlands escaped development.

View Larger — Ordanance Survey Map

Skiddaw from the shores of Derwent Water

This is another one of those views I seem to keep returning to.

With attempts from the summers of 2007 and '08, the spring of '09 and winter '10.

The distinctive blunted heaps of England's fourth highest mountain, Skiddaw...

...reflected in Derwent Water.

The same view that appealed to and was exaggerated by the Romantic landscape artists.

One day I might even get around to climbing to the top and taking one looking the other way...

Cwmorthin

Cwmorthin is one of the many huge disused slate quarries and mines around Blaenau Ffestiniog in Snowdonia, a mile walk up into the Moelwyn Mountains from the town and station.

Most of the workings are underground, in the many miles of mine tunnels that climb and descend inside the mountain, some of them still open to cavers, others now damaged by the attempts to use explosives to aid the extraction of slate in the quarry's final working years in the 1990s.

But there's still lots to see above ground, around the portals beside the lake, Llyn Cwmorthin.

In addition to the huge spoil heaps, which send tentacles reaching out into the lake, the quarrymaster's house is intact, but boarded up and getting scruffy. But the quarrymen's barracks, whose residents had a life expectancy of 44 years, have been in ruins for several decades.

These photos were all taken early one May morning. There's a lot more industrial archaeology in the Cwmorthin valley that I didn't get to see that time — I must go back.

View Larger Map — Ordnance Survey Map

Haystacks

Not a big hill by Lake District standards, but a popular one.

Because of its pleasant ascents past the tarns and rock formations.

And the view over Buttermere and the valley.

More on Wikipedia.

Los Lagos

This time last year, I was cycling around the lake district, Los Lagos, in Chilean Patagonia. I was there with Computer Aid International, who refurbish old office computers and send them to schools, hospitals, and development projects around the world, including the small city of Osorno in Los Lagos. Below are a selection of out-of-context and out-of-order extracts and photographs from my record of the week. All profits from sales of Chile prints go to Computer Aid.

There is a crazy old lady in the aisle seat beside my window seat. She speaks no English; I speak no Spanish. In attempting to establish that, yes, I do wish to access my seat, and, oh, right, you're just going to sit there and invite me to push past then, we each continue to happily speak our own languages at each-other. Once settled in, we compromise on German, since, between us, we don't quite have enough to hold a conversation. She spreads her elbows and proceeds to snore through the take-off, waking once we're airborne in-order to poke excitedly at the airline magazine. By some coincidence, this month's magazine includes a feature on our ultimate destination, the Chilean lake district, which explains in English roughly what she had been attempting to tell me in German — that the region has a fascinating and noble history of German immigration and the harbouring of Nazi war criminals. We're given a dish of pink meat product and damp potato slices, which I poke at. The crazy lady points at each item on my tray in turn, looks at me hopefully, before taking them, starting with the desert. She disappears, not to return until breakfast, and I fall asleep.

After lunch we are given the choice to continue up the one in ten climb to the Raihuen crater. Half of us continue, two turns up, one slide back, on the soft black volcanic sand of the zig-zag hill, under and back-under the creaking ski-lift. Christine, who has been telling us that the secret to good speed and stamina is "cadance" and the "correct use of the gears", walks to the summit. This is, of course, not actually the summit of the volcano, but it is the summit of the road, which ends in a pile of black grit, a snow plow, some sparse brown alpine vegetation and a mud splattered portaloo. Rodrigo (our guide) decides that the location is so delightful that there really isn't any need to continue along the frozen path to the crater, and that there will be no better spot for a photo opportunity. There is indeed a spectacular view south along the cordillera, taking in the volcanoes Puntiagudo and Osorno, and west down the valley and over Lago Rupanco. But a glance at Google Earth tells us that the real reason we're not continuing is that Rodrigo has taken a wrong turning, and is quite lost. The road to the crater was three miles back.

From the river, the dirt road climbs a short hill and turns a corner before running in a perfectly straight line through conifer plantation for five miles or more. With heads down into the strengthening wind, we all begin to string out again. I accidentally find myself some way out to the front, with miles of empty road ahead, and the only source of any sound behind, downwind. So one of the now filled fish trucks stealthily creeps up on me at a speed that I estimate to be "too fast for this track". The driver doesn't seem to know how to deal with cyclists on the road, and, I learn later, has been swerving in and out to overtake everybody one-by-one — despite there being no oncoming traffic to keep out of the way of. As he swerves left to pass, the truck tips a little, and all of the water flows to the left, spilling out on the far side. As it is passing, the wave bounces back to the right, spilling out on the near side. Somehow, all the fish get lucky: avoiding finding themselves under our wheels.

More photos can be found in the Chile gallery.