20 Jul 07 Fort William
We have arrived in Fort William after an overnight ride on the ScotRail sleeper train. That journey was one of the most surreal I’ve had… Strange squeaking, squealing and banging sounds broke up the night, making it difficult to get any sleep in the pitch black 4×6 foot cabin. I had visions we were riding in a tow trailer over fields of dead bodies. Creepy.
Surprisingly there is no mobile network in this town, the second largest we will visit along the walk, and I doubt there will be until Inverness. It’s unusual not to see people yapping on their phones or typing away their text messages. Fort William is tiny though - we’ve walked through it six times already and haven’t yet checked into the B&B! Weather is great though and we are after a shower we’ll go for a few hours walking in the Glen Nevis forested valley.
Tomorrow we walk to north Spean Bridge.
30 Mar 07 Going for a little walk
We received booking confirmation for a walk in Scotland in July:
“You have chosen to walk along the Great Glen Way, which is a scenic and exciting walk through the Highlands of Scotland. From Fort William to Inverness, this trek offers much variety and interest.”
The itinerary:
Fort William to Gairlochy 10.5 miles / 17 km
Gairlochy to South Laggan 12 miles / 19 km
South Laggan to Fort Augustus 10.5 miles / 17 km
Fort Augustus to Invermoriston 8 miles / 13 km
Invermoriston to Drumnadrochit 14 miles / 22 km
Foyers to Dores 12 miles / 19 km (cruise across Loch Ness from Drum.)
Dores to Inverness 10 miles / 16 km
Total distance: 77 miles / 123 km
Flickr has over 700 photos tagged “Great Glen Way” but I’m reluctant to look through them since I’m looking forward to experiencing it for myself!
30 Aug 06 Days go by
Summer is nearly a distant memory already! The heatwave has long passed and morning chills have set in.
I’ve just finished pulling together my submission for the annual London Independent Photography exhibition coming up in mid-October. I made five prints from images I took for the Street Photography workshop at Tate Modern awhile back, all black and white, 12×18 and mounted for framing. I drop them off tomorrow and should find out by September 10th if any are selected. So cross your fingers for me ;)
This past weekend was great fun with a bank holiday on Monday, which also happened to be Matt’s birthday! We ventured out into the woods for another country walk, this time to Saunderton. The weather was so variable that our trek alternated between clopping through mucky forest paths under a bit of rain to crunching across dry harvested hay fields. In the wetlands we saw hundreds of snails and a few slugs; in the dry it was (you guessed it) sheep, numerous pheasants (that run around in zig-zags), the odd rabbit, horse and a single fawn. There was a surreal minute in the forest too, when rounded the path and entered the Matrix! About 50 feet ahead of us we spotted two goths dressed in long, swinging black leather coats. They slowed down to take photos (and, of course, to give us the opportunity to get a closer look at their outfits). Both wore black leather caps, dark sunglasses, leather pants and boots - all this for a stroll in the country! Surreal.
We stopped through West Wycombe to tour the Hellfire Caves and Tearoom. Sounds a bit strange, doesn’t it? The chalk caves were excavated between 1748–1752 “to provide work for unemployed farm workers following a succession of harvest failures” and for the owner of the land, Sir Francis Dashwood, to hold underground meetings with his member-buddies of the Hellfire Club. The caves are impressively enormous and wind deep underground, though I can’t recall how deep - perhaps 100 meters. Disappointingly, the place is a certifiable tourist trap swarming with kids tearing around in the dark, narrow corridors, so it’s difficult to get a sense of how creepy the caves might have been in the mid-18th century.
In other adventures, I spent part of the weekend visiting with my friend from Chester whose samba band rolled into town to play the Notting Hill Carnival. The band, called Batala, numbered nearly 150 players gathered from the UK and France. Saturday night was kind of preview celebration with all sorts of carnival players performing in a sweaty community hall, and Sunday was a 6+ hour Batala rehearsal at a small university gym.
This section made up about a quarter of the band. It was difficult to photograph in the low-lit gym and because of space limitation I shot down from the observation balcony. Anyway, this day all these players worked incredibly hard preparing for their 4-5 hour carnival parade on Monday. Tuesday morning they were rewarded with a double-page photo spread of their performance in the Guardian! Hot stuff.
14 Aug 06 Some pics from last weekend
I forgot to post these to give you a look at the landscape from our walk last weekend near Lewes.
We crossed all these little hills :) That was the first couple of miles.
A beautiful stud with family, scratching on posts.
Taking the escalator up another little hill.
Most sheeps run away, very skittish creatures. This one was kind enough to pose.
7 Aug 06 Weekend of walking
This weekend we clocked at least 25 miles/40km on foot!
Saturday was lovely, not too hot, so we ventured from home near Aldgate East to Covent Garden and back. It was imperative we stop in at a hardware store to pick up some mouse poison. Yes, after all our humane efforts to stop the mouse madness in Ithaca we have been ‘forced’ to try alternative methods here. This is a new building, so it’s surprising how quickly these peskies infiltrate. The humane traps you buy here do NOT work and I’ve been trapping on my own with a combination approach: corral the mouse behind a rickety arrangement of cardboard boxes then cup it under a tupperware bowl. I’m a champion trapper! First sign, a couple of months ago, there was only one mouse traveling through the building and accessing the cupboard under the sink through holes around the piping. Then the other day I got quite worried when I spotted no less than three mice… in the bedroom. I was working at the computer and glanced down to see one sitting between my feet! My nerves were a bit shot that day :) I was convinced they had nested under the bed, but after a thorough cleanup found that wasn’t the case. They had created a spawning paradise at the back of our storage closet, behind the water heater, in a gaping hole cut to fit the pipes. So we set the humane traps, but they absolutely do not work. Since Friday night there’s been no indication of a return but we just laid out some poison anyway. Stay away rodents!
Sunday we interacted with different, cuter, and much larger animals: sheeps and cows! It was the first walk we chose to do out of Time Out’s Country Walks (near London) books, Volumes One and Two (not to be confused with 50 Walks to Country Pubs). We traveled an hour by train to Lewes, followed the guidebook out of town, up a hill and across a field, and soon discovered we picked one of the tougher walks in the book :) They may not be mountains high as Banff or BC, but there are some huge rolling hills and valleys through the south and we trekked up and down more than a few of them during that 15 miles! In the UK you can cross through farms on privately owned ‘access land‘ without fear of being shot on sight.
Under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (CROW), the public can now walk freely on mapped areas of mountain, moor, heath, down and registered land without the need to stick to paths.
We came across a farmer and son shearing sheep, walked past them onto their fenced property, and further along met with a large herd of friendly curious cattle. We moaned through layers of sweat as we hiked from the first valley up a 700m hill. Direct sun and humidity didn’t make this experience the most pleasant, but luckily later on the clouds overcast. Before we left home we knew Lewes had a lovely castle, but seeing it up close wasn’t meant to be. This walk was pure country, and after walking the final five miles along the river Ouse, where we counted 38 white swans and passed the spot where Virginia Woolf walked into the river to her death, we had no energy left to climb the (relatively small) hill up to the castle.
Some notes on sheep doo doo and cow pies: Some sheep poop out a bundle of blueberry-sized pellets while others don’t. The contrast between the two types is confusing. Cows plop perfectly round 12-inch pies. Attempts to avoid all these hazards were futile, and I’ll just say a crunch underfoot is so much better than a squish…
GET FED: