Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
The first half of an old joke goes ‘I don’t drink any more’. It’s supposed to finish with ‘nor do I drink any less’. For me, it’s not so much less as none. So I felt a bit weird joking on a card that I last completed the Otley Run in 2005. The card was by way of congratulations and good luck sent to a niece heading to third level glories in Leeds.
Yesterday, the mystery was the wind. Today, it may well be teaspoons.
That AA Milne poem came back to me as I photographed a landscape of the Mourne Mountains in the light of last night’s setting sun. I knew I wouldn’t get a sharp image of anything because the air was moving as thermals, returning the day-borrowed heat into the atmosphere. Locally becalmed in our isolation, yes, but the Mournes are 100 km distant. All of that radiating heat becomes a cooling and distorting visible haze over that distance of an evening.
[Read more…] about Mourne Sunset‘When a man gets power, even his chickens and dogs rise to heaven.’
This wasn’t originally an opening line. The idea for opening with it is from a 2011 fund-raising blog. I started every entry with the first line of a recently read novel. This was easy’ish’ because a novel a week was a great distraction from the inflections of geoscience projects and travel-induced jet lags. It was was a quiz-inspired fund-raising hook and I’d reveal the answer in a subsequent post. Interested readers might come back to learn, for example, that it was Hilary Mantel who opened Booker-winning Wolf Hall with ‘So now get up’. I had hoped, more importantly, that some might also contribute to a group fund-raising effort before a charity walk. They did contribute and most generously but not because of the quotations.
[Read more…] about OC and DisorderI woke this morning wondering about the super moon last evening. It was a clear evening and the moon did rise spectacularly and we saw it still pink a couple of hours later. Unfortunately, there’s a big hill between us and the eastern horizon and I deemed it inappropriate to walk the 300 m from home to the top from which I have photographed many other golden hour events. I thought there might be too many other people there so we stayed home. We have a view from our home towards the north, itself often spectacular but if we are ever moving again, I’d prioritise east and west views because of the rising and setting of celestial objects along the ecliptic. Indeed, the atmospheric high pressure persisted through to this morning and we could see into Ulster. First time in three months we could see both Slieve Donard in the Mourne Mountains (100 km away) and Slieve Gullion (about 95 km distant) standing proud in the ground hugging haze. Places we can’t go. Much like the moon itself. Things change given time, maybe we’ll yet visit both Ulster and the moon.
25 March 2020 at 10:31 GMT – 7°C Mostly Clear – Co. Dublin, Ireland
I stumbled over one of my photographs of the Mourne Mountains and that made me think of Slieve Gullion. Like Krakatoa and Vesuvius and Etna and Fuji, Slieve Gullion stands proud of its landscape though its a few million years older. And it’s often visible from South County Dublin some 90 km away and it less than 600 m high. Under high pressure conditions, not through today’s spring mists. It stands alone from our perspective, our eyes drawn to it in the same manner that drew megalithic people to build passage graves on the summit
I had the same view as my photograph when my age was in single digits. I remember seeing it once from where I grew up, through binoculars we were using to identify birds among the frames of hundreds of new houses being built at the end of our garden. My father joked “It’s a miracle” because the brown smog of Dublin city was between us and the mountains. The view disappeared shortly after that because my parents let the end of the garden grow wild to block our incoming neighbours from watching us in our kitchen and bedrooms.
[Read more…] about Borders