John Merrill, Alport Castles and the Horbury Cut

In the days when every town had a bookshop, with several in larger towns and cities, you would find shelves full of walking guides written and published by a chap called John Merrill. He produced over 500 titles, initially about Derbyshire and Yorkshire, but later about other parts of the country too, such as The Lake District, The Isle of Wight, and Devon. He also became known as a long-distance walker, and walked the 6,824 miles around the coast of Britain, the 4,260 miles across America, and marathon walks in other parts of the U.K., Europe, and the world. He just wanted to go walking, and found a way to do it full-time. 

One of his first books, possibly the first, was about the Peak District around Kinder Scout and Bleaklow. My friend Neville bought it, and one interesting-looking route was around Alport Castles off the A57 Snake Pass road. Alport Castles is the biggest landslip in the United Kingdom, so called because from the valley below its gritstone mounds look like castles. The largest is known as The Tower. 

The Tower, Alport Castles, with Alport Castles Farm in the valley below
Geograph, (c) Neil Theasby 3 February 2012

Alport Castles route (click to enlarge)

I think Neville and I first went in 1974. Merrill suggested parking at the side of the Snake Road where a style in the hedge accesses the lane to Alport Castles Farm. After passing around the farm, the route ascends behind The Tower and up on to Alport Moor. It then crosses the moor via the Alport trig point to the head of the valley, and makes a large high-level anti-clockwise semi-circle across Bleaklow to return to the starting point. We found it pretty tough, and on later occasions returned directly down the valley from the point marked on the map as Grains In The Water. Sometimes we went up the valley first, and on two occasions I remember climbing up from Howden Reservoir. It became a favourite walk which I did with Neville or others, or alone, in all kinds of weather, from warm summer days when you could sit quietly on the peat moor and bask in the sunshine, to cold wet days when there was so much water up there it was almost impossible to find a way across. This, as you may know, is Yorkshire Pudding territory and he has written about it several times. 

Neville and Dudule descending the Alport Valley
with Alport Castles on the hillside above, August 1975

Neville plods up through snow towards The Tower, February 1977

and eventually reaches the moor top, February 1977

The top of the Alport Valley near Grains in the Water, August 1975

Not all of John Merrill’s routes were in such wild and bleak places. When I moved back to Yorkshire with Mrs. D., over 30 years ago now, we bought his “Short Circular” guides to walks in south west Yorkshire. Soon, we had done so many that Mrs. D. was able to send away for a John Merrill walking badge that until recently was stitched to her small rucksack. 

The River Calder near Horbury Bridge

I remember a September morning not so long ago when we did a quiet route east along the banks of the River Calder from Horbury Bridge to Calder Grove, fighting our way back through the rampant vegetation along the Horbury Cut of the Calder and Hebble Navigation. Barges were moored at the lock where the canal joins the river, and hallucinogenic fly agaric mushrooms grew under the trees. The route is also memorable for forbidding footpaths that tunnel under huge railway embankments, and one built into the railway bridge across the River Calder. Of course, Pudding has also been there too. Is it possible to go anywhere he hasn’t?

The footpath built into the railway bridge across the River Calder

The Horbury Cut on the Calder and Hebble Navigation

Hallucinogenic Fly Agaric Mushrooms grew under the trees

Back home, I wondered what had become of John Merrill and looked him up. There was a site for his books to which I sent a short email expressing how much we had enjoyed his guides through the years, and that although we had had the Horbury Bridge book for at least 20 years, we were still able to find our way. He had also found his way. In replying to thank us, he said he had been ordained as an independent multi-faith minister of religion in London. Clearly, all that walking brings you closer to God. Yorkshire Pudding had better watch out. 

Penistone

New Month Old Post: first posted 26th June, 2018.

All books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder,
For filth, I'm glad to say, is in
The mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd
                                  (Tom Lehrer)

I came across a previously undiscovered great-great-great aunt in the family history resources, and have been tracing her descendants. This sounds obsessive, but I find it intriguing because most of my ancestors were from the same area, and so many of us remained there that I keep finding people I know who are not-so-distant relatives. For example, one lad with whom I went all the way through secondary school in the same class turned out to be a third cousin, as was another who stayed with a family near to where I was on the school foreign exchange trips to Belgium, although we had absolutely no idea of the connections. 

One family name I have been investigating is Penistone. You might find this, with its rude connotations, implausible or amusing, but it is very common in parts of Yorkshire. 

I do see the funny side of it myself. My brother had a friend called Penistone, whose wife was appalled when, newly married, she received her new driving licence to discover that in those days the driver number always began with the first five letters of the surname. And a group of us from school had to suppress our sniggers when travelling between Sheffield and Manchester by train on the now-closed Woodhead line in the presence of a teacher, and the train stopped in the small Yorkshire town of Penistone (near where we now live). Two girls were adamant the station sign had a gap between the S and the T. Then there were the tales of people in the early days of the internet, who were unable to enter their names or addresses on internet forms because filters were cruder than the words they were supposed to filter out; those named Penistone from Penistone or Scunthorpe particularly affected. Yes, I’m glad it’s not my name. 

My research, however, has been made unnecessarily difficult by inaccuracies in the data on Ancestry.com – the genealogical resource I use. Time and time again, Penistone has been transcribed at Penestone or Panistone or numerous other variations, with the effect that searching the indexes produces incomplete results. For example, if you look for all the Penistones in the village of Snaith in the 1891 and 1901 censuses, you will find Panistones and Pennistones, even Kenistons, but hardly a Penistone in sight.

There are so many spurious entries in the indexes – literally hundreds and possibly thousands – that it cannot be due to error. A handful, perhaps, but not hundreds. Most of the original sources from which the indexes are drawn are clear as the top line of an optician’s chart, so it is as if some transcribers have deliberately chosen not to write down the name Penistone, but written something else instead. It would also be difficult to mistake Penistone for Penestone when transcribing an index because they appear in alphabetical order, so Penistone would be after Penfold and not before. 

Some of these records came from another resource called FreeBMD where they appear correctly. Thousands of volunteers contributed to its transcription – I was one – which is why it is a free resource on Ancestry. But they have been altered. Has someone carried out a global substitution? Could it be prudery – bowdlerisation on a massive scale? Could it have anything to do with Ancestry’s Mormon origins? Without insider knowledge, one can only speculate about the history of these mistranscriptions. 

The first rule for any genealogical transcriber is that you record what is there, even if obviously wrong. If someone’s name appears in an original source as Taster Dunman, you record it as Taster Dunman, even if you know it should be Tasker Dunham. There is no excuse for recording Penistone as Penestone or Peinistone or Panistone. If it says Penistone you record it as Penistone, and if it says Stiffcock, you write it down as Stiffcock, no matter how offensive you think it is.  

Teenage Part-Time Jobs

Did you have a part-time job while at school, such as a newspaper round or in a shop? 

My wife had both. She took over her brother’s paper round at 14, and was so reliable they promoted her to the slightly better-paid job of ‘marking up’. That meant being in at 6 a.m., 7 days a week, to unpack the newspapers and magazines from the suppliers, and sort them into bundles by house number and paper round. There were 8 rounds of about 30 houses each. It was complicated by the weekly and monthly magazines: The Radio Times, The TV Times, the local weekly newspaper, Weekend, Woman’s Own, The People’s Friend, The Lady, Jackie, Amateur Photographer, The Beano, and more. The Sunday papers with their multiple sections and colour supplements were particularly heavy and troublesome. At least it was warm in the newspaper shed. She did it for about three years. I doubt I could have stuck it at all. It was hard enough getting out of bed in time for school. 

Later, in the sixth form, she had a Saturday job in a book shop, sorting and tidying shelves, serving customers and dealing with orders, which included checking the microfiche for books in print and available. That’s what happens to the able and competent. They get more responsibility. 

I never had a regular job, but sometimes stood in for friends when they were away. Two I remember especially.  

A similar off-licence to where I worked

One was my friend Gilbert’s Saturday morning job at an off-licence. The owner was getting on a bit, and could no longer lift and move the heavy beer crates. The shop was at the end of a terrace on the corner of a side-street, with a step up to the front door, and a secure brick store for stock at the rear. 

You loaded the crates of empty bottles inside the shop on to a two-wheeled sack barrow (hand truck) and wheeled then down the step and along the sides street to the stock shed. There were usually around 10 crates of empties because in those days glass bottles carried refundable deposits of a few pence each. 

Then, the owner identified what he needed to re-stock the shop. 

“I’ll have two of these and these, and three of those, and two of those, and one of those,” he would say, pointing at crates of Hull Brewery bitter, Magnet pale ale, Carlsberg lager, Bass stout, and so on. You stacked them ready to wheel round to the shop, and took them load by load along the side street. 

That was tricky. The full bottles were heavy, and the pavement bumpy and uneven. If you picked the wrong path you would come to a dead stop, and it was difficult to get moving again. Gilbert did it for so long, he reckoned he could draw every slab and crack from memory. 

Once you reached the front, you wheeled the crates up the step into the shop, and re-loaded with more crates of empties to return to the store. 

“Never drink anything left in the bottles,” the owner repeatedly warned. “You don’t know what it is. People spit and pee in them.”

If you were trusted, you were asked to take the week’s takings to the bank on your bike. The bank notes, cash, cheques, and paying-in slips were all in a leather pouch, which you handed to the bank clerk to open and process, and then returned with the completed paying-in book. Very easy, but it did strike me I was riding through town with hundreds of pounds in my pocket: perhaps the equivalent of up to £10,000 today. 

“Don’t get nobbled, will you,” the owner always said when you set off. 

Front Page and Articles in The Sheffield Green’Un of 29th August 1970

The other memorable job was after I had learnt to drive. Dudule (his dad was French) did it on his motorbike, and I was one of the few who could help out by borrowing my parents’ car. It involved collecting newspapers from the railway station on a Saturday evening, and delivering them to shops in the villages of Old Goole, Swinefleet, Reedness, and Whitgift, which was 6 miles away. 

Each Saturday evening the presses of the Hull Daily Mail printed a sports newspaper known as “The Green 'Un”, listing the day’s football and racing results with local match reports. Much of it consisted of pre-prepared articles, but for the rest, considering that games did not finish until nearly 5 o'clock, it seemed incredible they could compile and print a newspaper, and have it on the train to arrive 25 miles away by 7. The wholesaler at the station divided the papers into labelled bundles, and you were on your way. I enjoyed that job the few times I stood in. 

However, our school did not approve of part-time work. You could just about get away with a Saturday job so long as you were not daft enough to get a detention, or be selected for one of the sports teams. Jobs during the week were another matter.

One lad, whose dad had a butcher’s shop, was out after school every day delivering meat on the butcher’s bike (basket on front, metal sign hanging from crossbar). He had some amusing stories, such as falling off and spilling meat across the road. He simply picked it up, wrapped it up again, and delivered it as if nothing was wrong.  

It had to end when he was spotted delivering meat in his school uniform, and the traditionalist, old-school headmaster, who had been there since 1936, asked to see his dad. It was inappropriate for a Grammar School boy to be engaged in such activities after school, he told him. It would affect his homework, and if he wanted to deliver meat he should leave so his place could go to someone who would make more of the opportunities. 

What head teacher would dare say such a thing now? And as for newspaper rounds, microfishe, deposits on bottles, cracked and uneven pavements, cash takings and paying-in slips, Green 'Uns, butchers’ bikes, meat deliveries, ... all disappeared, or just about. And it barely scratches the surface. There were also holiday jobs: I worked in a canning factory and my brother was a gardener at the cemetery in which he now lies. They did things differently then. England in the 1960s.

Developing, Printing and a Trip to London

New Month Old Post: first posted 20th July, 2016.

All the palaver of pre-digital photography: it seems as much of the past as typewriters and tape recorders: the business of loading the camera, rewinding, posting off the film, waiting for the prints or slides to come back hoping they will ‘come out’ all right, rationing your few remaining shots to avoid having to buy a new film, ordering extra copies for Grandma, and cluttering up drawers with boxes of colour slides, photograph albums and packets of negatives, and lofts with the slide projector, carousels and the glass-beaded screen.

And then there were those of us who took things a stage further: home processing. For that you needed another whole cupboard full of esoteric paraphernalia.

It was Duncan across the road who got me started. His dad developed his own photographs and had given him a packet of out-of-date contact papers. They darkened in light, so objects such as leaves or your fingers would leave a white silhouette. You could even print crude photographs from negatives in the same way. The problem was that the contact papers would continue to darken until they were completely black all over. Your silhouette or image lasted only five minutes at most.

Well, one thing led to another, and before long I was making proper prints from negatives. I turned the yellow shed into a dark room, got a device for exposing photographic paper to illuminated negatives for just a few seconds, and began to spend my pocket money at the local chemists on packets of contact papers and bottles of photographic chemicals: developer to bring out the images and fixer to make the prints light-proof.

With the idea of taking photographs of London, we went down on the train to stay for a few days with Duncan’s grandma in Hounslow, where turboprop aeroplanes rumbled low overhead smelling of paraffin, and we had to be up early so her night-shift lodger could use the same bed. We freely roamed the Underground on our Rail Rovers (would you let two fourteen-year-olds do this now, naïve as we then were?), went to the Science Museum, saw the Houses of Parliament and The Monument, howled with laughter at The Road to Hong Kong in which Bob Hope and Bing Crosby get fired into space in a capsule designed for monkeys, and got free tickets for the live Friday lunchtime broadcast of The Joe Loss Pop Show with guests The Barron Knights and regular singer Ross McManus – Elvis Costello’s dad. Actually, it was a bit disappointing to find the guests were only The Barron Knights whose act basically consisted of making fun of other groups. A few weeks earlier they’d had The Rolling Stones and The Searchers.

London Airport, 1964 (renamed Heathrow in 1966)

I took my new Kodak Brownie Starmite camera (12 images of 4x4 cm on rolls of 46mm 127 sized film), but none of the photographs I developed at home were much good. Only one commercially developed shots came out, taken at London Airport (not yet called Heathrow): the last frame on a colour film left over from an earlier family holiday.

I used the Brownie camera for the next ten years but with black and white film because colour was so expensive. I could occasionally afford the flash bulbs though: disposable one-use plastic coated bulbs filled with magnesium and oxygen, sparked off by a battery. They melted when fired, leaving ash-filled knobbly glass inside the protective plastic coating.

Black and white film was easy to develop at home if you had a light-proof developing tank, and one conveniently materialised at Christmas. The most difficult part was getting the film into the tank. You had to separate it from its light-proof backing paper and feed it into a plastic spiral which went inside the tank, but you had to do it completely in the dark. The yellow shed was just about dark enough for contact printing – you could do that in the dim orange glow from the contact printer – but film was ultra-sensitive and had to be handled in pitch-black. You had to wait for night time, and then found yourself with head and arms beneath thick bedclothes, trying not to breathe on the film, getting hotter and hotter and gasping for oxygen. You really had to get a move on.

Once the film was safely in the tank the lid stayed on and you could work in daylight. It was essentially the same process as developing contact prints. You filled the tank with Johnson Universal Developer for a fixed amount of time, emptied it and replaced the developer with Johnson Acid Hypo Fixer for around a further thirty minutes, rinsed everything thoroughly with lukewarm water, took the film out of the tank and just like in Blow Up hung it to dry weighted by a bulldog clip to prevent curling. After that the negative images on the developed film could be contact printed (I have archived a copy of the Paterson instruction booklet which shows and explains the process).

It was always exciting to take the shimmering wet film out of the tank to see the dark negatives for the first time and try to make sense of what they were. You could easily have forgotten because the earlier images on the film would often be several months old. When you then printed the photographs it was fascinating to watch the images emerge under the surface of the developing fluid, trying in the dim light to judge when they were ready. 

I was never more than an occasional snapshot photographer, but my uncle gave me his old enlarger for making prints bigger than the negatives and I avidly watched the BBC series Better Photography on Saturday mornings through the autumn of 1965. 

Later, the Brownie Starmite was superseded by a Zenith E, a fairly basic Russian-made 35mm single lens reflex camera for which I bought extra lenses, an electronic flash gun and extension tubes for close-ups. I later tried the more complex process of colour developing and printing but tended to have difficulty with the colour balance because of my colour deficiency. Eventually I moved on to colour slides, and home processing came to an end.

Now, of course, everything is digital and so another of those experiential manual skills has been lost to the electronic world: the exercise of judgement, the physical manipulation of the materials, the strange saliva-inducing smell of the chemicals, the darkroom perfectionism – all gone! Instead, we compile our digital albums, Photoshop our images, blog about what fun things used to be and can be vaingloriously creative without physical skills at all. It’s good in many ways, but not always as satisfying. 

- Maurice Fisher’s website Photographic Memorabilia is a real treasure trove of images and information about photographic film processing and equipment.

Compass

My first compass, from 1973. And I still have its 24-page instruction leaflet. 

The leaflet goes into great detail, enough to enter an orienteering competition, but I used the compass mainly to check I was heading roughly in the right direction. When you are walking the twenty-five miles through the mountains from Rannoch to Fort William in the Scottish Highlands, the last thing you want is to go wrong at the high watershed and somehow find yourself miles astray at Kinlochleven. I suppose most would use a SatNav now. 

Another brilliant walk was around the hidden, Blea Gill Waterfall near Grassington in Yorkshire. You follow the track along the Western side of Grimwith Reservoir (since considerably enlarged) to Blea Beck, and then climb to the top of the waterfall to Grassington Moor. A circular anti-clockwise route takes you back via Hebden Beck to the starting point on the B6265 road. 

Route around Blea Gill Waterfall (1967 1-inch map)

It was wild above the waterfall, very boggy, with few obvious tracks. There were centuries-old, disused lead mine workings, chimneys, shafts, and spoil heaps, a strangely beautiful landscape of industrial desolation, deserted by the legions of miners that once toiled there. You saw no one else all day, and without a compass it would have been easy to lose your bearings. Proper walking. I am told it has now been cleaned up with signposts, notice boards, and warnings not to fall down the concealed mine shafts. 

Blea Gill Waterfall, 1974

Grassington Moor now

I then looked for routes needing more precise compass work. I remember walking with friend Neville up to Alport Moor from Howden Reservoir in the Derbyshire Dark Peak. The ascent passes through dense evergreens before reaching open moorland, which levels out gradually, curving up so you cannot see the top until almost there. Neville looked dubious when I said the Alport Moor trig point was a little way straight ahead, and indeed there it was. He had complete faith in my map reading after that, often misplaced. 

We also liked to cross the Derbyshire moorland plateau of Kinder Scout, from Fair Brook to Kinder Downfall. I wrote about it here. It is not far across, but the maze of deep, watery, peat ridges and trenches known as hags and groughs, twisting and turning in all directions, make it impossible to keep to a straight line. All distant features are below the horizon, so there is nothing you might aim towards. Unless you check your compass every few yards you go hopelessly off-course. 

Navigating With The Compass

From the top of Fair Brook to Kinder Downfall you follow a bearing of about 255 degrees, but you do not really need to know about bearings. All you have to do is set the compass using the map, and then follow it. Well, that is how I do it. 

The needle of the compass points red to the North. It swivels inside a black dial, which can be manually rotated on a transparent base plate. The base plate has a large arrow pointing away from the needle. 

You place the compass on the map with the large arrow pointing roughly in the direction you want to go, and then slide it so that one of the long edges of the base plate passes through both your current position and your target destination, e.g. from the top of Fair Brook to Kinder Downfall as circled in yellow in the photograph. You then rotate the dial so that North on the dial matches the grid lines on the map. There are lines inside the dial to help with this. It does not matter which way the map or the magnetic needle are pointing at this stage. 

Setting the compass: Fair Brook to Kinder Downfall

You can then put the map away for a while. Stand up and hold the base plate level with the large arrow pointing ahead of you. Slowly turn round until the red needle lines up with North on the dial, and walk straight ahead. It helps to choose a distant feature to aim towards, if one can be seen. 

There is a lot more to it, but I usually find this sufficient. You could adjust for the difference between Magnetic North and Grid North, but over short distances it probably does not matter much, so I am not going into that. It makes only about 2 degrees difference at present, although in past decades it has been as much as 10. It slowly changes. It is also worth mentioning that map grids do not always point to True North, but, again, it does not really matter. I could explain these different kinds of North, but do you really want to know? 

The 24-page leaflet explains all this in greater detail. I have archived a PDF copy here, in case you are nerdy enough to be interested. 

As mentioned at the start, this was my first compass. I later bought a new, supposedly more accurate mirror compass, but never got the hang of it. I simply fold out the mirror and use it in the same way as the old one. I believe that for greater accuracy you can read the needle through the mirror, and look at objects through the hole and the notch. I am told that you can even measure heights, if so inclined. But I would rather enjoy the countryside than study for qualifications in surveying. At least the new compass fits neatly into your trouser pocket without any sharp corners to castrate you when you sit down. And the mirror allows you to check your face is still perfect after a long day out in the wind and rain. 

Road To The Isles

New Month Old Post: first posted 2nd June, 2016

Sure by Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Lochaber I will go

As step I wi’ my cromack to the Isles.

Rannoch Moor fires the imagination with mystery and romance: the myths and legends; the forgotten history; the departed people; the abandoned ruins; the strange Gaelic names.

Said to be one of the last remaining wildernesses in Europe, it is a bleak stretch of blanket bog, lochans and rocky outcrops to the West of Loch Rannoch in Scotland. The West Highland Railway crosses it on the way to Fort William and Mallaig, over peaty terrain so wet that the Victorian engineers had to float the track on a mattress of brushwood, earth and ashes to stop it sinking into the bog.

Other than by train, the only way to Rannoch Station is by thirty miles of narrow B road meandering along the northern shore of Loch Rannoch from Pitlochry or Aberfeldy. Neville, Kev, and I, had driven there the previous Easter to sit cheerfully swigging our pints outside the Moor of Rannoch Hotel in the warm April sunshine. We watched a goods train rumble slowly north across the Rannoch Viaduct.

But it was the enigmatic wording of the signpost that caught our attention:

PUBLIC FOOTPATH TO

FORT WILLIAM BY CORROUR

(THE ROAD TO THE ISLES)

What a walk that must be!

The following year, Easter was a full two weeks earlier and the seasons over two weeks later. A letter from Major J. D. Rennie of the Moor of Rannoch Hotel, Rannoch Station, Perthshire, replying to our enquiry, said that, yes, we could leave our car at the hotel for a few days provided we left the keys so they could move it if necessary. However, he still seemed surprised when we turned up in the snow. We camped that night beside the nearby lochan. By morning, the pan of water left outside had frozen solid. At least it was too cold and early in the year for the midges.

It would not be beyond endurance to walk the thirty miles from Rannoch to Fort William in a day, but it seemed ideal for a first attempt at backpacking. We loaded our aluminium framed rucksacks, left the car keys with the Major, and set off northwards beside the railway track. And apart from the railway track, there was little else to see for the first ten miles but vast, uninhabited empty moorland. Being Easter Sunday, there weren’t even any passing trains to disturb the isolation. Remote, beautiful, desolate! We saw no one else all day.

The land gradually rises to a summit beyond Corrour, the next station on the line. It was shrouded in mist. The station, since made popular by the film Trainspotting, is now busy with walkers and mountain bikers, and Corrour Station House is a popular restaurant and guest house, but in 1975 there was very little there. We passed without much pause heading for our first overnight camp at Loch Treig. It could not come soon enough. My feet were a mess. Idiotic to attempt such a walk in new boots.

 

The next morning, bright sunshine reflecting from the loch and mountains bathed everything in a brilliant blue light. We set off west, away from the railway, along the southern shore of Loch Treig. The loch is dammed at the northern end, and two lost communities, Kinlochtreig and Creaguaineach, lie submerged beneath the waters close to where we were. As if drawn to them, my blistered feet refused to go far that day and we camped again about a mile and a half beyond the loch, near the Staoineag ruin beside the Abhainn Rath river we were following. There was wood to light a fire and, again, no one around to complain.

 

We covered about eight miles on day three, struggling with our heavy rucksacks across difficult ground. Continuing west, the river becomes angrier and whiter, the wide banks giving way to a steep-sided valley sparsely lined with silver birch. It then becomes still again, with banks of stony mudflats, and the country opens up into wide, browny heath and moorland. But as you approach the once fine house of Luibeilt, now a lonely ruin, you have to ford the river.

We knew the technique. Trouser legs up, socks off, boots back on, wade across with caution, and most importantly, do not lose your footing. The river was not particularly high and should have been trouble free, but it wasn’t. At least I was not the one to slip and fall in, losing the capacity either to give or refuse consent to be photographed ignominiously paddling out.

While drying out, two countryside rangers waded across, the only others we saw on the whole walk. As you would expect, they made it look easy. We chatted with them for the next few miles. They asked whether we had been staying at Luibeilt. It was listed by something called The Mountain Bothies Association as a place of overnight refuge. It sounded good for the future and I joined fairly soon afterwards. 

The rangers sped ahead and disappeared into the distance as we approached the east-west watershed where the water flowing east towards Loch Treig along the Abhainn Rath becomes the water flowing west to Fort William down the Water of Nevis. Several valleys converge here and it was not immediately obvious which one to take, but a bit of map and compass work put us safely in the right direction. No G.P.S. in those days. The slight uncertainty makes for much more fun.

We camped again surrounded by the mountains of the Nevis valley: Aonach Beag, An Garbhanach, and Binnein Beag where deer came down the slopes in the night and made their way back up the next morning, avoiding the worst of the snow that sprinkled the tent.

We were soon up and on our way again, descending through the steep gorge of Glen Nevis to the end of the road at the base of Ben Nevis, where the misspelt signpost indicated whence we came.*

Public footpath

to Carrour 15

and Rannoch 25

But that was not the end. We still had to face another five gruelling miles along the narrow road to the Glen Nevis camp site.

We allowed ourselves the next day off, and early the day after that packed up and hiked into Fort William for the train back to the car. It was a little further to walk than now. The original Fort William station alongside Loch Linnhe, with its turreted entrance on the main street, was still in use. It closed and moved east to the present site two months later.

I did that walk twice again with different friends, once in 1978 and again in 1988, both times by taking the train to Corrour from the new station at Fort William, thus omitting the wearisome Rannoch to Corrour stretch. Sensibly, we also left one of our cars at the end of the Nevis road making it just a fifteen-mile walk – a good day out. On both occasions we were the only ones to leave the train at the deserted Corrour halt, to the incomprehension of the other passengers who looked down (both physically and metaphorically) from the carriage windows with bemusement at our cagoules, walking boots and daysacks. 

I doubt it would be such a solitary walk now that most days the train deposits scores of walkers and mountain bikers at Corrour to follow numerous routes around the moor. The station is used by over twelve thousand passengers per year, an average of over thirty a day, but probably many times more in summer and fewer in winter. “Like a Wallace Arnold bus trip,” my dad would have said. It is a privilege to be able to say I was there in quieter times, nearly fifty years ago, but it would be wonderful to go again.

Take it away, Andy:

https://youtu.be/KtsAfk6h8mI

Notes

* The same sign and post are still at Glen Nevis (or were until relatively recently). The sign is considerably weathered, but the spelling of Corrour has been corrected and further signs to Spean Bridge, Corrour Station and Kinlochleven affixed in both Scots Gaelic and English. 

On one of the later occasions there were signs of construction taking place at Luibeilt, but I see from more recent accounts that it is now a ruin without roof, woodwork or some walls.

I would not be so confident drinking water from mountain streams now. 

The Beatles Song Book

Another memory of the shared house.

Evenings wasted instead of working for exams. To the beer-off for a big bottle of Woodpecker or Strongbow cider each (were they 3 pints i.e. 1.5l?), then out with the songbooks and guitars? What a good thing the walls were solid. We never heard a squeak from the neighbours.

Brendon had the Simon and Garfunkel book, but that became too difficult as the cider went down. So, we would switch to songs made up ourselves, mainly about the chap who owned the house, known as “Pete may I trouble you gentlemen for some rent please.”

There was the song to the tune of The Ball of Kirriemuir: “Pete does all the cleaning, and that’s a job he hates, and so to appease him we have to wash the plates.” Or the one to the tune of The Tavern In The Town about what he liked to do with sheep. Delightfully juvenile.

Best of all was The Beatles Complete song book. My guitar playing improved no end through that. I still have it, its tattered and patched-up pages showing the use it had. We played it beginning to end, through all the old favourites from “Across The Universe” to “You’re Going To Lose That Girl” and “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”. We never seemed to get “Across the Universe” right, especially the “Jai guru deva, om” bit. One of Brendan’s friends could do all the harmonies to “Because”, which was pretty impressive. 

Later, I used the Beatles book for [tautology warning] improvisation practice, making double and treble backing tracks with my Akai 4000DS tape deck. Of course, you can do this kind of thing today with digital mixing desks, or even free software such as Audacity on a laptop. It was not so easy then. 

Here, from 1978, is “Yesterday” with an improvides middle eight. After 45 years, I now tend to hear the snatched notes, clumsy phrasing and track synchronisation problems, which might mean I’m a better musician now, but I still find it has something. The held note in bar 5 of the last verse, followed by slowing down at the end, releases tension.   

I have only just noticed that the song has 7 bars per verse rather than the usual 8.

https://youtu.be/8lgucFMNC1o 

Paul McCartney’s RAM

New Month Old Post: first posted 7th November 2018

We can be very dismissive when young, especially about music. 

When Paul McCartney’s long playing record Ram came out in 1971, a lot of people hated it. They were irritated by the embarrassing sight and sound of Linda McCartney and her wooden, astringent vocals. Why was she on the record anyway: as if it were a primary school class where everyone has to join in banging tambourines and triangles, even the talentless? Why was she accredited fully as co-creator, which no one really believed?

I simply dismissed it. It was not The Beatles. I was fed up with it emanating from Brendan’s room in the shared house. After all, didn’t I have more sophisticated tastes? Didn’t I think of myself as a knowledgeable connoisseur of serious music like progressive rock, particularly Jethro Tull who had just released Aqualung? How could the McCartneys’ frivolous, inconsequential warbling possibly compare?

The only legacy, for me, was that to this day, whenever we drive past a certain cut-price supermarket I sing the following mondegreen:

Lidl Lidl be a gypsy get around
Get your feet up off the ground
Lidl Lidl get around.

I recently looked up the lyrics to discover that the actual words are “Live a little” from the track Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey who “had to have a bath or he couldn’t get to sea” – another misheard lyric, it’s “berth”.

One thing led to another and I ended up getting the CD as a birthday present (I don’t do streaming). What a revelation! Judging it inferior to Jethro Tull was being Thick as a Brick.

I now think Ram is amongst Paul McCartney’s best and most innovative output: so rich in ideas – melodies, harmonies, arrangements, decorations, quirky bits – almost every part of every track is different. It‘s an amusing, joyful record, a bit late-Beatles, like the brightest parts of Abbey Road and The White Album.

It has been described as a “domestic-bliss album”. Despite personal and contractual pains in disentangling himself from the Beatles, Paul was now living a contented and enviable life, very happy with Linda and children in their rural retreat. You hear it throughout. And Linda’s voice is just about OK too, or at least you get used to it. 

Maybe I liked Ram all along but did not want to admit it.

https://youtu.be/XI6C7L66zq8

Follow The Moon

A few weeks ago, Jabblog wrote a post about Lyle’s Golden Syrup, which, by the ways and wanders of the mind in the night, took me to a party game. 

I was about six or seven, and it was my birthday. Mum invited a few friends round. I fancy there was Dennis and Johnny from the next street, maybe Jack the neat writer, and Geoffrey Bullard, not yet the monster he became. Girls? I don’t know. Maybe my second-cousin, Linda, and her funny friend, Margaret. I liked them. We were all in the same class at school. I can’t really remember. The more you try, the more you make up. 

I imagine we ran around in the garden for a while, and had tea. It would have been treacle on bread or treacle sandwiches (our name for Lyle’s Golden Syrup), or possibly honey. We often had that for our tea. Some people used to have condensed milk sandwiches, but I never liked the way it soaked into the bread and seeped out at the edges. For pudding, it would have been Rowntree’s Jelly and tinned fruit, with Carnation cream (which is what we called evaporated milk).  And fizzy Tizer or Vimto to drink. Such was the nineteen-fifties diet. The school dentist was always busy.  

Even now, I have honey on toast for tea when lazy, and Carnation “Cream” on tinned pears or apricots is luxury. Everyone here complains it is too sweet, so I have to have the whole tin myself. I don’t have treacle now, but the empty metal tins are great for all those bits and pieces you don’t know where to put: bath plugs, light pulls, door stops, picture hooks. Shame they risk disappearing in a squeezy plastic rebranding after 150 years unchanged. “... consumers need to see brands moving with the times and meeting their current needs. Our fresh, contemporary design brings Lyle’s into the modern day, appealing to the everyday British household while still feeling nostalgic and authentically Lyle’s,” said the brand director. “Drivel, bollocks, and bullshit,” said I. 

As regards the party, I have only one clear memory. Dad said we would play a game called “Follow The Moon”, but would say no more about it. The time came, and we waited outside the front room, with Mum and Dad inside, the door closed, and the curtains drawn. We were called in one by one.

The first went in, and after a short time cried “Aarrgh!” Then the next went in to join them, and made the same sound while the first person laughed. The third went in and reacted in the same way, causing the first two to laugh, and so it continued. 

I was last because it was my birthday. There was a sheet hanging vertically in the darkened room, with a circle of torchlight shining through. That was the moon. I had to keep my nose as close to the moon for as long as I could, while it moved around. It went up and down, and side to side, then faster in a circle, and, as both the moon and my nose reached the top of the sheet, a soggy warm wet sponge full of water came over from the other side and dunked me on the head. The others all roared with laughter.

Brendan and the Shared House

New Month Old Post: first posted 3rd February, 2019. (Not that old, but few current followers will have seen it).

I always assumed we would see each other again one day. We would go to the pub and get pissed and laugh about the people and the good times in the shared houses in Leeds. But it was not to be.

We would remember Ron, the guy who never stopped talking, notorious for ‘ronopolising’ the conversation with his mind-numbing ‘ronologues’ which always began “Did I tell you about the time I …”, and if you had ever been somewhere, done something or seen something, he had always been somewhere, done something or seen something better. He used to leave his towel draped over the hot water cylinder in the bathroom and it stank. He never washed it. You would think a hospital bacteriology technician would have been worried about bugs.

And Pete, who gassed the place out with the peculiar aromatic smell of Holland House pipe tobacco. He smoked even when it was his turn to cook, speckling the plates with ash. He once accidentally tipped the thing over my food and instead of being sorry just laughed and got on with his own unconcerned. Anyone would think he owned the place. Actually, he did. He was always asking “Can I trouble you gentlemen for some rent please?”

Then there was Nick, who could swear like only someone from the back streets of Manchester could, and Larry who made himself dainty little jellies and custards every Monday and lined them up uncovered on the kitchen table for several days (we had no fridge). And Roger, the Ph.D. student with his clever cryptic comebacks, and Paul with the outrageous ginger beard and silly Lancashire accent. And Gavin who was so well organised you had to make an appointment three weeks in advance just to ask him something. And Dave, the Geordie, who did an animated rendition of The Lampton Worm, and was on holiday when the electoral register form came, so we put his middle name down as Aloysius.

And who could forget ‘Pervy Pete’, the television rent collector, who came each month to empty the coin box, greeted us “hello mensies”, and lingered uninvited to take an unseemly interest in which bedrooms we slept? That television always ran out of money right in the middle of Monty Python or just before a punchline in Jokers Wild.

The others came and went, but Brendan and I stayed longest. We were from ordinary Yorkshire backgrounds, shared the same sense of humour and had under-achieved our ‘A’ Levels. Brendan was the liveliest among us, and the best looking. In his long Afghan coat, with his smooth young face and long centrally-parted hair, the kids in the street called him “that lad who looks like David Cassidy.” He made us laugh with his silly puns and deliberate misunderstandings. He could play guitar better than me and instantly put chords to almost any song at all. He could throw a lighted cigarette in the air and catch it the right way round in his mouth. He had an impossibly beautiful girl friend who was training to be a doctor.

We were both desperate to escape our mundane jobs, me from an accountants’ office and Brendan from a veterinary laboratory, and did so around the same time in 1977, me to university and Brendan on Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). He dreamed of some idyllic tropical paradise where nubile young girls danced to the drum-beat naked in the twilight, and was dismayed to be sent to sub-Saharan Africa, to an isolated rural village in Northern Ghana called Pong-Tamale, around 400 miles from the coast. It was not even much of a change of job: he went to run a laboratory in a veterinary college.

Pong-Tamale in 2010 (click to play)

In those days, people still wrote letters, and I looked forward to his aerograms dropping through the letterbox with their exotic stamps and tales of distant Africa. Things were not easy. It was oppressively hot. He suffered tropical ailments and diseases. They were short of supplies and equipment. He asked to be sent books as there was little to read and no television, not that they always had electricity to run one.

Yet, after an initial term of eighteen months, he decided to stay. He found a salaried post for three years with the Overseas Development Ministry in the city of Kumasi, about two hundred and fifty miles to the south. Then, after a year back in England, he found a post at Mtwara in Tanzania, and then another at Morogoro. It sounded like a television wildlife documentary: horses, Land Rovers, lions, zebras, and trekking in the Ngorongoro highlands.

I saw him a couple of times over these years during his brief visits home. He was now married with children, and I was busy with my life too. Letters became less frequent. He suggested I visit them in East Africa but it was never the right time.

Then we lost touch. We both moved within a short space of time and I no longer had his address. Due to a downturn in the property market, we rented out my wife’s house where we had been living, and it was ten years before we finally sold it. In emptying it we came across various papers stuffed at the back of a cupboard by tenants, including a ten year old unopened letter from Brendan.

Replying after ten years seemed pointless. Perhaps I should have tried to find him, but didn’t. Did I fear the collision of past and present? We had surely both moved on.

But, it was already too late, as I distressingly discovered yet another decade later. Out of pure curiosity, I typed his distinctive name into a genealogy web site and was shaken to find a record of his death in 2001. It took more time to find what had happened. They had returned permanently to England in the nineteen-nineties, and Brendan had died suddenly of a massive heart attack at the age of 49. He had been living less than ten miles away. All that time ago, and I had no idea.

We’ll never have that drink now.

The Ghost of Airmyn Crossings

A SEASONAL TALE
New Month Old Post: first posted 9th December, 2014. A fictional story set in a real time and place. I had recently been reading Thomas Hardy’s short stories. 

We grow up, we move away, we make our lives in distant places, yet, something draws us back. We tell nostalgic tales of times past, wonder at any mention of our town on television and look for the home team football result. Even after all formal and familial ties are gone, we make special detours to pass our old homes and schools.

But not Matt Wetherell. He keeps well away. When work takes him to Hull from his home across the Pennines, he turns off and enters the city over the Humber Bridge. Anything to avoid Goole.

Fifty years ago when still in the sixth form, Matt and his friends became regulars at the Percy Arms. In those days, sixth formers in a public house would have been in serious trouble, even when legally old enough to drink. It was an abuse of privilege, squandering their opportunities while those less fortunate were cleaning railway engines or keeping the peace in Cyprus. Matt and his friends kept discreetly out of sight in the taproom and the handful of teachers who frequented the same establishment carefully stayed in the lounge so as not to notice them.

The comforts of the taproom were basic: plain walls, wooden floorboards, bench seats and bare tables, but there was always a warm fire burning. It was perfectly adequate for the main activities there: drinking, smoking, playing cards and dominoes, and telling yarns. Matt and company tested each others’ memories of the Latin fish names on the faded chart on the wall. They became familiar with the other regulars: the farmer, the garage owner and the cinema manager who always arrived late with his wife after the last show, never removed his trilby and always had a rude story to tell.

To reach the Percy Arms, Matt and his friends walked the mile or so across the fields using the track known as Airmyn Crossings. It was lonely and remote in those days before the roaring motorway was built, and a housing estate sprawled across it. It was a pleasant stroll on a warm evening, more of a challenge in wind and rain, and undeniably menacing after dark, especially where the trees and bushes joined overhead. The darkness added adventure to the walk home which was always late. Pubs were not supposed to serve drinks after half-past ten, but the landlord bent this rule a little, especially if the cinema manager was delayed. The local police knew when to be diplomatic. Sometimes, it could be nearly midnight before Matt and his friends started home along the pitch black track with several pints of John Smith’s inside them, their apprehension kept at bay by vulgar songs and loud bravado. Sometimes a couple of the group would steal ahead to hide in the bushes ready to jump out and frighten the others with piercing cries. It was rowdy, but innocuous enough compared to what some teenagers get up to nowadays.

Matt never finished his sixth form studies. Before his friends went off to university he had left school for a job in a local office, his ambition diverted by a girl friend, the accomplished and beautiful daughter of an affluent local solicitor. They made plans and imagined their future together, but much to her father’s relief, she left for university too. Despite ardent promises to remain true, she gradually drifted away. When Matt last heard of her, she was organising famine relief in Africa.

Thus, one Christmas Eve, Matt found himself alone. He decided for old times’ sake to walk the path to Airmyn. Nothing had changed. The taproom was just as it had been. The floorboards still knocked to his footsteps, the seats remained hard, the tables, bare, the fading fish were still on the wall. There were few signs it was Christmas, but the coal fire had a more cheerful glow than usual and everyone was in a happy frame of mind. Matt played dominoes with the farmer. The garage owner enquired as to his well-being. The cinema manager arrived late with his hat, wife and rude story.

When Matt eventually started back along the deserted track, a little unsteadily due to the beer inside him, it was late and an ominous fog had descended. It was thick, the kind you get when moisture from the rivers and low-lying fields conceives a dense, cold vapour that penetrates your lungs and shrouds the sight and sound of your footsteps. Matt’s shadow hung eerily in the mist around him; shapes and silhouettes moved in and out of the bushes; dark forms ahead and behind gave the impression of something approaching and then dissolving away. The only thing Matt heard was the sound of his own breathing. It intensified his unease.

Suddenly, just where the path bends beneath overhanging trees, Matt sensed something tumbling from above, as if someone was falling on him. Inches from his own face was another face, a terrifying face with hollowed-out eyes and grimacing, uneven teeth. Matt raised his arm to push it away. His hand slipped into the mouth; it felt wet and cold; his fingers scraped across rough teeth. He shuddered and screamed, and staggered sideways into the adjacent field, the surface of which lay some two or three feet below the level of the path.

Looking up from the ground, Matt realised he was alone. No one else was on the path. Yet, he was certain it had been real. His fingers were wet where they had entered the mouth, and sore where they had rubbed across the teeth. Beside him, on the ground, was something round. It took a few moments to realise it was a human skull. It had the same uneven teeth as the face that had materialised in front of him. Matt cursed. Stone cold sober, he scrambled back up to the path and ran fast to the safety of the street lights on the main road.

Rationalising afterwards, Matt decided the skull had indeed been real. He had a graze on his hand to prove it. In his drunken state, he must have fallen from the path, dislodging the skull from the loose earth at the side of the field. The rest was illusion. It had only seemed to drop from above as the ground came up towards him. He had probably covered it up again as he scrambled back up to the track. He never related the incident to anyone, and there was never any report of human remains found on Airmyn Crossings.

The following week, Matt’s employer offered him a promotion in Lancashire. It was several years before he visited the Percy Arms again. When he did, reluctantly, but necessarily because of a family function, much had changed. Outwardly, it looked the same, but inside it had become a single large, refurbished lounge. There was no sign that the taproom had ever existed. He drove there by car, but passing along Airmyn Road, he just had time to register that the route of the old Airmyn Crossings had been diverted to accommodate the new motorway.

All of this was over fifty years ago. The farmer, the garage owner, the cinema manager and his wife must be long gone.

Recently, Matt heard a tale that seemed to have some bearing on the events of that Christmas Eve of long ago. A distant cousin, Louisa, whom he knew only vaguely, visited him in the course of tracing her family history. Matt was unable to add much to her findings, but she told him a tale that had been passed down to her grandmother from her grandmother’s grandmother.

The name, Matt, or Matthew, had run through the Wetherell family for generations. An earlier Matthew had been born in a village many miles away to the North. That Matthew had worked on the lands of the Northumberland estates belonging to the Percy family. One summer he had transgressed unwritten social expectations by becoming too familiar with the daughter of the incumbent of the local Parish. To prevent the friendship developing into anything more serious, it had been arranged that Matthew would be moved away to other lands owned by the same family in distant Airmyn. Matthew’s brother Mark had to move with him for no reason other than that he was Matthew’s brother. In due course, the news arrived that the vicar’s daughter of whom Matthew had been so fond, had married a tea trader and moved to the colonies. Matthew, distressed, took to wandering like a tramp in the woods and fields. He disappeared one Christmas and nothing was heard of him again.

More happily, Matthew’s brother, Mark, remained in Airmyn. He married and had a large family. He was the ancestor of both the present day Matt and his distant cousin, Louisa. If you care to look in the Airmyn Parish registers for the early years of the nineteenth century, you will find mention of a Mark Wetherell, servant in husbandry, son of John and Mary Wetherell of Melsonby, which is in North Yorkshire, near Richmond.

The exact location of Matt’s disturbing experience that dark Christmas Eve, must now be buried beneath the Eastbound carriageway of the M62 motorway. Strange things happen there. Engines misfire, sudden gusts of wind cause vehicles to swerve, drivers slow down for no apparent reason. You should concentrate and take extra care there, especially on Christmas Eve. Matt Wetherell avoids it like it was haunted.