Middleton & Cross Flatts Parks Circuit 27/02/21

11.1 miles, from Morley Station, via Newlands, Owlers, West Wood, Middleton Park 

 (via The Urban Bike Park, Middleton Wood, Belle Isle railhead, Broom Pit, The Lake, 

  The Carriageway, The Rose Garden, Wood Pit, & Park Wood), Cross Flatts Park, Beeston,

   Millshaw (& the playing fields), Broad Oaks, and Daisy Hill. 

Throughout this pandemic, it had been a small point of pride to me that I had managed to not be unwell through it's first 11 months, but that long streak came to end this week as I somehow got afflicted with a head cold, despite all the personal precautions that have been taken, which blighted my working Thursday and knocked me out of Friday completely due fierce sneezing and a persistently running nose, leaving me feeling rather flat but not showing up any symptoms that could be a harbinger of something worse once the weekend rocked up. So I might be only feeling about 80% charged on Saturday morning, and the impetus to rise with the lark isn't there either, but we need to get some oxygen back in the blood for a few hours and thus we start out a bit late, hopeful that the afternoon will bring the sunshine that isn't apparent as we descend down to Morley station for the 10.40am jump-off on my next parks circuit, targeting the major pair in South Leeds, with our route starting us off out of the valley and up the steps flight to Albert Road. From there, we immediately we start our track eastwards, through the small industrial zone that has grown on the site of Morley Main colliery, and then on among the houses that have recently been developed over the sites of the old spoil tips and alongside the estate that arrives as we merge in with the end of Peel Street, turning with the lane corner to meet a local pavement that oddly hasn't landed below my feet before, down to Wide Lane between the nursery in the former Low Common End farm and the recently rebuilt Newlands Primary school. Meeting the B6123 by the Gardener's Arms, we're on to the red route out of town soon enough, between the Newlands and Owlers estates, and into the fields that development hasn't claimed just yet as we run on to meet the Mcdonalds by the roundabout on the A653 Dewsbury Road, which we have to cross to get onto the track of West Wood Road as it descends among the fields to pass over Mill Shaw beck before rising to meet the railway bridges, both contemporary and former. We split from the track here to take the rough path up through West Wood, which feels more familiar now after last year's visits, rising though the tree cover and getting a better look at the lost GNR line thanks to the lack of foliage before we emerge out into the pasture on the western fringe of the Middleton estate, where no horses seem to be grazing today, which at least opens it up for the locals for some free dog running, as trace our way around its perimeter, tracking north until one of the few formal paths into the estate appears to send us eastwards again.

Morley Roads: North-West Circuit 20/02/21

9.8 miles, from Morley Station, via Morley Hole, Lane Side, Churwell, Cottingley Hall, 

 Beeston Royds, Far Royds, New Blackpool, New Farnley, Upper Moor Side, Cockersdale,

  Drighlington, Adwalton, Gildersome Street, Bruntcliffe, and Morley Hole. 

The climate has returned to something approaching its February norm as our walking year gets back onto it's regular sequence of filling in the Saturdays that follow my walking weeks, with the glumness remaining, but the bitter cold being replaced by a more tolerable temperature, so we're free of snow and the bleaching effect of so much gritting as we alight on the second of my pair of obvious road circuits around the town, but starting out as late as possible to let the morning's inclemency pass, getting to my starting line at 11am. To match my last trip, we this time start out from Morley station, to pound the uphill pavement of Station Road and its pitch that gets more noticeable the older I get, noting that someone has recently been planting trees in the middle of the recreation ground's slope, as if someone wants to render this parkland even wilder than it was before, and then rising up to Morley Bottoms to see yet another empty property getting a makeover to join the local bar culture, drawing these three commercial blocks to as close to full occupancy as I've seen since first moving here, nearly 14 years ago. Then on, around Victoria Mills/Court along Brunswick Street to start the road loop proper at Morley Hole, joining the side of the A653 as it heads towards the city, rising from the primary school past the Ingles Estate and following Victoria Road as it heads past the Springfield Mills roads, St Peter's church and is its pubs on the junction corners, and on to the long downhill stretch, easing us past the villas of the Victorian town above Laneside farm, and the mills sites across the way with the own impressively scaled houses. Walking a north-easterly trajectory on hugely familiar road means there's not a whole mass to describe as new as we run into Churwell, still distinct beyond the open fields to one side of the road, heading down Elland Road on its absurdly steep stretch between the many former churches and chapels, and its enduring pair of pubs, passing the community hall and the memorial gardens before angling to pass down below the bulk of Churwell viaduct, still obscured from view by all the trees despite the seasonal lack of foliage, and over Farnley Wood Beck as it emerges from below the various railway lines that hide it away. 

Morley Roads: South-East Circuit 13/02/21

12.7 miles, from Morley Hole, via Valley Mills, White Rose, Topcliffe Hill, Tingley Common, 

 Birks, Bruntcliffe, Gildersome Street, Gelderd Road, Farnley Junction, Beeston Royds, 

  Cottingley Hall, Millshaw, White Rose, Broad Oaks, Daisy Hill and Morley Station.

Arriving at the concluding weekend of my week off, the need to start the proper push on the walking year comes along with it, but as we look to longer mileages, the sunshine that shone through the previous days has been lost, and is replaced with glumness, while the penetrating sub-zero temperatures remain, and coupled to the enforced local trails, there's little impetus to try to do anything toe exciting, and to instead to look to some raw mileage on the local main roads, as there is a pair of local circuits that advertise themselves obviously. The challenge they present is no more complicated than picking where to start out on their circular routes, and so we commence out from Morley Hole at 10am, to initially draw a line across my earlier parks circuit, down the groove that divides the town in half, traversing Brunswick Street to Morley Bottoms and on down Station Road along the hidden and culverted route of Cotton Mills Beck down to the railway station, where last year's Social Distancing Circuit can be met and traversed for old times sake. This leads us down Valley Road, to the town'd gasworks site, and the Valley Mills, which we move around on the footpath, where the cold weather has caused the natural spring that regularly moistens this path to turn into an ice sheet that turns the descent down to the footbridge into a slippery slope par excellence, ahead of us striking east on the muddy paths to the south of the railway which have frozen into hard and uneven going, as the absence of trains along the way is noted thanks to the reduced lockdown timetable. We are thus lead to the edge of the White Rose Centre's site, where the southern portion of its woodland walk  need to be approached for the first time, as it meanders its way downhill alongside the circuit road, matching the boundary of the sewage works site that it now occupies before we are dropped out by the overflow car parks, and our way is made out onto the Dewsbury Road, right by where Morley's concealed stream emerges, flowing under the A653 towards Millshaw Beck. Join the footway alongside the dual carriageway as the road circuit proper starts off southbound, rising steadily up this small valley, which West Wood on the Middleton fringe looms over as we pace on along one of those sections of roads that I have very little reason to encounter, on foot or otherwise, as we head up towards the Wide Lane roundabout, the familiar transit point out here, where my instinct from last year to the Harvester's seemingly imminent demise proves to have been correct, as it's been replaced by a Macdonalds, which doesn't really feel like a massive social upgrade in my eyes. 

Morley Parks Circuit 11/02/21

7 miles, from Morley Station, via Lewisham Park, Magpie Lane Rec, Glen Road Playing Fields,

 Hembrigg Park, Hopewell Farm estate, Dartmouth Park, Scatcherd Lane Playing Fields,

  Scatcherd Park, Scarth Gardens, Morley Hole, Springfield Mill Park, Clark Springs Wood, 

   Daffil Wood, Japa Wood, St Peter's churchyard, and Station Road Rec. 

My original walking season plans for 2021 hadn't intended us to get off to the rapid starts that have featured in previous years, but the renewed lockdown has me thinking that the Nine Day Weekend (which is what we can regard weeks of annual leave as if we are unable to travel away) might be put to getting down multiple days of local mileage, but no such luck as my start-off Saturday, the 6th, is lost due to constant rainfall, and the subsequent four days are blighted by repeated snowfalls and persistent sub-zero temperatures as the third storm that I can recall being named 'The Beast from the East' passes over. So it's not until Thursday that the risk of further snow has passed, and the climate has settled into one of generally cloudless skies and arse-freezing-ness, and 2021's walking year has to be kicked off before I start to succumb to the risk of going stir crazy, donning all my thermals and leaving my flat to see if all the local walking from last year has left enough of an impression in my mind to tour around all of Morley's notable parks and green spaces without the need of a map, hopeful that the constant coldness won't have blighted the town with sheet ice literally everywhere. So it's to Morley station we head to start our circuit, departing at 10.30am, and full of intent to get around without stopping, heading off southbound and clockwise as we depart Valley Road and head up the non-treacherous flight of steps up to Albert Road, arriving between the Miners Arms and Fisheries and pacing on along Ackroyd Street to the old Co-op and chapel, and then on to the terraces of Cross Peel Street and to Peel Street itself, carrying on up its pavement to the City Mill and former Board School, where we take a left onto South Parade. He we can detour into our first green space, Lewisham Park, which was laid out with the building of the Middleton Road estates, and now offers a dog-exercising and perambulation space behind the semis, as well as frozen playing fields and a pavilion complex that aren't seeing much business as of now, as we traverse our way along the northern perimeter path, which leads us east over its long axis to the exit onto Clough Street, where we renew our wandery trajectory southbound, directly into the low sunshine along the estate's snow-dusted pavements that are doing their absolute best to melt off in the radiant heat of the sun.

Out of the Dark Season... and Onwards?

Snowy January in Leeds.

With the passing of every festive season, I normally crack wise about hiding away for the remainder of January, and essentially going into hibernation for five weeks that lead us out of the Dark Season and on towards our renewed walking career, but 2021 has already given us enough reason to literally do that, as a renewed National Lockdown, our third since the start of the Covid Pandemic, which means my inclination for keeping out of circulation for the month has no been imposed on everyone else too, and as we look forwards to my Tenth year of walking, I'm feeling deeply uncertain about what's going to come next. Not with regards the pandemic situation, as I can honestly say I've finally gotten a proper handle on that, but with how I'm going to conduct myself as we look to get walking again, as restrictions look like they're going to be in place for a while, and although it seems like severe time limits for exercise are not going to be in place this time around, there seems every indication that local exercise is going to mean just that, and so all the plans that I'd been hatching for 2021 during the late passage of last year are effectively junked to comply with the instructions passed out. So for once, I find myself on the waning edge of the rotten three months of the year, looking forward without a great deal of certainty about where my walking year is going to go, as I'm not immediately feeling a lot of enthusiasm for making more trails around Morley, having exhausted the vast majority of the plausible paths during that long Spring of 2020, with my desire to engage with the walking year feeling like it's at its lowest ebb in along while. I don't think I'd really expected to be in such a place when my last walking year ended, with the country going back into lockdown in the teeth of a second Covid wave that my optimistic brain would have hoped would have never come to pass, indeed my thinking back in March would have had us on the tail end of this pandemic, as it retreated into the background after the effective and well considered actions of governments and health care systems worldwide would have taken a firm grip on it. 

The Conclusions of 2020

Wrapping the 2020 Walking
Season at Morley Hole.

In retrospect, it seems entirely plausible that I cursed this past twelve months before they even got started, as the previous year's summation boldly declared both '2019 has been a rough year that I do not care to see a repeat of', and 'I'm going to need my good mental health as much as ever in 2020' almost as if I had accidentally wished upon us all a year of pain, frustration and intemperance with my hopeful words for the future, a reality that gave the world a stiff old kicking and left us all in a much less certain situation than we started out in. But if we ignore the Covid-19 pandemic and all that came with it, which we really ought to in the context of this walking blog, 2020's active season turned out to be far from ruined, as in spite of all the obstacles thrown in its path, like losing two months of Spring to absolute lockdown and being unable to travel beyond Morley, we managed to make the best of the Summer and Autumn while keeping ourselves mostly removed from the risks of the disease which has blanketed all our experiences. I'm really happy that my resolve to keep walking managed to hold so firm after losing so much of the first half of the year when compelled to keep my exercising local, and despite all the stresses and strains through the back half of the year, I managed to get all the way through all of the trips that I had originally planned for the four lost months, keeping going until the last available day of the year and reaching a final mileage which made it not even close to my least impressive year, surpassing both 2012 and 2013's totals. Indeed, only one walking weekend between July and November was actively under-utilised, as I gratefully absorbed the hospitality of My Good Friends in Calderdale, and while I might have not managed all the route across the Pennines to the fringes of Greater manchester, I managed to keep a tight focus to gain the landscape knowledge of another part of the county that had been absent from my walking field for too many years, giving all the lands between the Colne and calder as much exposure as they could have ever wanted. So while we may have seen more of my home town that I'd ever have anticipated, and only done half of the long trails I may have wished to have paced, I don't feel like I've missed out on the expansion of my walking experiences at all, as all you really need are a high viewpoint or two to look beyond what you know, such as ascending the Pennine ridge and looking west across the Cheshire plain to the Clwydian Hills, or east to the North York Moors and the Wolds, giving you a new visual horizon in excess of 100 miles wide.

Rumination: Lockdown 2.0

Pandemic Thoughts - November 2020

The Following is for Reference Only, the 2020 Summary will follow in a Month from Now.

On December 2nd, the second National Lockdown to attempt to arrest the resurgent spread of Covid infections came to an end, and even after four weeks of renewed restrictions and attempts at containment, I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it, with most of my most substantial thoughts having been shared at its outset, as it hasn't seen me get out of work, predictably enough, and aside from having no opportunity to travel away to visit Mum, it had no other impact on my plans which mostly involved hibernating my weekends away at the onset of the Dark Season. I'm sure all those involved with the hospitality, leisure and non-essential retail sectors will have really felt the sting of it, especially after so many weeks of mixed messaging from those who would govern us ahead of the inevitable, but being in the business I'm in, and having so little social interaction beyond my familiar circle, I really can't make any more useful observations beyond the facts of trains into Leeds being noticeably quieter in the mornings, but inexplicably busier in the evenings. It's not been an experience anything like the first national lockdown though, where most businesses shut down and so many people were effectively confined to their homes for two months, as this time around schools have stayed open, and suffered all the fluctuations in attendance and operations that might have been expected when operating through a pandemic, while there have been a lot more retailers opened up and offices not doing nearly as much working from home as before. I'm sorry that I can't report anything personally in more detail, but my attitude towards self-protection during this crisis means that I've been witness to so very little, and can only really reflect on what I've learned through the usual methods of reportage, such as noting that the Covid infection rate dropped by 30% during the past month, which is a substantial drop and not a stat to be taken too lightly, but it feels less like a good reason to return to normality than a reason to get everything back to normal, than a cue to keep things shut down for another month to arrest the spread further. It's certainly discouraging to see the increasing infection rate in school age kids, and the dangers that it presents to families nationally, and for the first time in months we've started to look seriously at the death rate again, which HM Government had massaged down to 41,000 at the start of July, but has since risen to 60,000, presenting the horrifying reality of this second wave, with the ONS suggesting that the rate should be revised significantly upwards again to reflect all the indirectly caused deaths that have occurred due to medical access restrictions during the months of pandemic conditions.