Rumination: Returning to the Support Bubble

The Following is For Reference Only.

One year ago, on the very same weekend at the end of April, I made the second of my trips to Manchester with My Good Friends from Calderdale, for beers, food and the music of RVW, which marked the final collapsing of the public social interaction bubble which had been forcibly imposed in March 2020 and which I chose to maintain for more than three years, and at the remove of 12 months I find myself at an entirely different philosophical place than I did when the passing of the Covid Pandemic seemed to have happened, almost entirely due to the lingering after effects of my own infection, six months ago. This time around, I'm ripping it up to Mytholmroyd and Manchester again on Saturday afternoon to enjoy a long weekend in the company of my still enduring Support Bubble, even though the wider climates have completely moved on, as a sociable weekend with them is good reason to take time out from the walking year and get in some proper R'n'R after the third stalling of my walking year, not that there will be too much activity going on as it's been a tiring few months for all, and friendly ears will be leant as we chat about enduring the effects of a post-Covid syndrome and living with CFS (which I really hope isn't the path I'm on). Chatter over food and wine, and whatever sports are on the TV, is all very well, but we also need additional entertainments, and the Sunday os the focus for these, as my visit manages to coincide with the Cragg Vale festival which sees the Cragg Road being closed for the morning as many local runners and cyclists take the opportunity to run and ride the length (or at least part of) the longest continuous road ascent in England, and back again, and these energetic feats need to be observed as we stroll up the valley as far as Lower Clough Fold before we get to the real meat of the May Day weekend. This sends us in the direction of the Bridgewater Hall, where an afternoon concert brings us the Poulenc Organ Concerto and Saint-Saens Symphony #3 (avec Orgue) as performed by the Halle Orchestra for one of the loudest, and busiest shows, that we've seen in a long while, where the opportunity is also presented for beer and food at Society, where Vocation Brewery still having a thriving business with a surprisingly diverse clientele, where three pints of their finest ales and pilseners can be consumed, along with Chicken Katsu Curry that literally hits all of the spots that it needs to.

Rumination: The Tiers of Relative Proximity

Another weekend drops from the walking year as the bloom gathers and the pressure of balancing work and an active lifestyle keeps me in bed on Saturday morning, feeling drained and grabbing a couple of extra hours of sleep as a small bonus, stalling the season again though all is not lost as a result as there are still some minor creative endeavours to get involved in while we are resting up, which mostly involve directing my thoughts to where we might actually direct this twelfth walking year when I am feeling energetic enough to get myself going. This comes together thanks to having myself a new laptop to play with, replacing my previous one of almost nine years of service, one which is notionally a gaming PC, which I acquired thanks to it having a significantly more powerful processor which can actually handle running Google Maps, which my old machine absolutely loathed causing it to run obscenely slow to the point of absolute frustration, which led me to using Google Earth for my plotting purposes instead after drawing several routes that took almost as long to plot as they did to walk. Eleven seasons' worth of data was thus available to reassemble on two maps, the first being The Ongoing Walking Career, which needed to re-done as the ten layer limit on a MyMaps sheet rather scuppered my intent to have a layer for every walking season, though the extraordinarily high limit for plots and markers on a single layer means that I could still have a good couple of decades to add to that before it becomes so data-bust that only a computer with a god-tier processor and graphics card would be able to handle it. The second idea was one that came to me during the lockdown walks of 2020, when being confined to local circuits for three months had me expanding the scope of terrain that I'd seen when walking from home and got me thinking about how relatively close come locations were to my base in Morley, having blazed trails to many of the major settlements in West Yorkshire and encompassed areas of South Leeds and North Kirklees in my local travels, while other parts of the county still seemed rather remote, even as my Field of Walking Experience expanded into North and South Yorkshire and over the top of the Pennine into Lancashire.

Headingley to Menston 15/04/23

8.8 miles, via Kirkstall, Kirkstall Abbey, Kirkstall Forge, Hawksworth Wood, 

 Horsforth New Road Side, Low Fold, Park Mill, Low Green Rawdon, Nether Yeadon, 

  Henshaw, New Scarborough, Nunroyd park, Guiseley, White Cross, and High Royds. 

Having had three rest days over the Easter weekend, and only worked four days of the following week, we feel good enough to go again as the next weekend rolls around, giving us a seemingly rare occasion for a bit of Saturday walking, not that we seem to have schemed out 2023 yet, aside from having an idea of targeting a number of railway station that haven't been used as destinations over the last 11 years, and maybe threading all my trails for the season into a single continuous line that reaches all over Leeds district, an idea that's as fanciful as it is ridiculous, one that would be sure to tie me in mental knots. Regardless, we ride out to Headingley on this gloomy morning, alighting at 10.05am and feeling none of the warmth in the air that we might be anticipating this year as we target a long stretch of road that we haven't approached in full along the days of our walking trails, to be found down the drop of Kirkstall Lane and beyond the Morris Lane crossing, where new development emerge on our left on the way down to Kirkstall Lights, where we take a right turn by the leisure centre to immediately join our trajectory for the day, north-westerly on the A65 where Abbey Road has had it Beatles connection noted as it leads us on between the Abbey Mills and West End Inn, and below the drop of the terrace ends. Just around the corner lies Kirkstall Abbey, the most enduring historical pile in the city which we haven't seen from the main road side on the course of my travels on foot, so a different aspect is presented as we go by its north face, passing the crowds that have already gathered in it parkland and progressing on pat the Abbey House museum and the fields of Burley RUFC on the way on past the Vesper Gate inn and on along the roadside to the Kirkstall Forge milestone marker and the observation that hardly any further development has occurred on the forge site itself since we first passed this way in 2017, judging by what we can see over the high perimeter wall that we pass around.

Burley Park to Headingley via the Meanwood Valley 07/04/23

10.9 miles, via Headingley, Woodhouse Ridge, Buslingthorpe, Sugarwell Hill Park, Miles Hill,

 Meanwood (village), Meanwood Park, Meanwood (wood), Scotland Wood, Five Arches, 

  Adel Woods, Adel, Weetwood, Far Headingley, Beckett Park, and Queenswood

My N-th pair of Boots
is ready to hit the trail!

A seemingly early Easter weekend, arriving at that point in the year where you would start to expect the sir temperature to start to rise and the Sprig warmth comes on gives us the second opportunity to attempt to restart the walking year for 2023, heading out to where we last dropped feet in Season 12, and also donning my new Skechers boots for the first time, with an unusual sort of route in mind, which might give them an opportunity to demonstrate their all-terrain versatility as we go in search of the hidden green valley that hides in the middle of Leeds, while also dramatically splitting the city in half. So for Good Friday's stroll, we return to Burley Park, deep in terraced Leeds, with a proper mileage in mind for the start of the third walking month of the year, alighting the train at 10.35 and immediately setting course north-ish for the long uphill sweep of Beechwood Crescent, around the edge of my old stomping grounds in the first decade of full time residence in West Yorkshire, tracking up through the allotment gardens beyond and over the railway via the high bridge on St Michael's Lane, and hanging a left to join the footpath that skirts both Headingley RLFC stadium and the Cricket ground on the way up to Kirkstall Lane. Passing below the shadow of what's no longer called the Carnegie pavilion, we pass the Cornerstone Baptist church and the run of stores and that surround the sadly lost Lounge Cinema, before the B6157 meets the A660 Otley Road by the Arndale centre and our no easterly trajectory takes us onto the least of the crossroads' routes as Wood lane leads into Headingley's district of Victorian villas and student flats as we crest over toward the edge of the Meanwood Valley, betting the grand old reveal of Leeds's hidden valley from below Ridge Terrace before we join the path high wooded path that runs along the top of Woodhouse Ridge.

Rumination: The End (?) of Winter...

The Following is For Reference Only.

As we find ourselves five days into British Summer Time and a whole ten days into the flourishing of Spring, there seems to be no indication in the air that would suggest a change of seasons, and once again we find ourselves stymied in our walking ambitions at the end of our late March week of being NIW, and chilly climate and a pressing need to rest up prevent any action on Saturday, and after that the plan is to be Down Country at My Mum's place, where only one day presents itself as being even vaguely pleasant, which was Monday, but also presented itself as intensely cold meaning the most activity we had out of the house was touring around Sainsbury's. It's pretty clear from my point of view that all is still not well, and though I'm still not wholly willing to tag myself as having Long Covid, the physical indications all seem to be pointing that way, as my internal motivation seems to have no power to overcome my almost constant lethargy and to face down the lingering chill of winter that has now persisted unbroken for all of the first three months of the year, feeling significantly colder than the regularly snowy start of 2018, and offering little of the warm sunshine that overcame the late season icy blast that landed in 2013. My fatigue and stamina issues have also not aided me in having time for most of my creative endeavours, as paid work and regular chores have used up most of the energy that I have before we get them, and even in this week, where we find ourselves entering the fourth year of clearing the accumulated debris of personal history in Mum's house in the wake of My Dad's passing, getting busy proves to be beyond me as a burst of yard work, one trip around the loft and a final book raid from the shelves has me tuckered out by mid-afternoon and not much use for anything else. At the start of the month, My Sister sagely observed that I was probably struggling just as much mentally as I was physically, and at a few weeks remove I am now in complete agreement with her assessment as I've clearly settled into a depressed funk that is doing nothing to get me motivated when faced by a body that needs more mental stimuli than it ever did before, especially as it's not used to being unwell for a long period, something which I've never faced in my entire lifetime, which is particularly unfortunate to be attached to a grey and cold atmosphere which is doing my seasonally affected issues no favours at all.

Cottingley to Burley Park 19/03/23

6.2 miles, via Cottingley Hall, Elland Road, Farnley viaduct, Holbeck urban village,

 Monk Bridge viaduct, the Leeds & Liverpool canal path, Kirkstall viaduct, and Burley Park. 

No walking occurs on the weekend of 11-12th as there's a ice risk to deal with after the only significant snowfall of this persistently chilly winter coming at the end of the preceding week, and I value my ankles to much to be testing out some challenging going, and thus I can't be inspired to get going again until some actual sunshine arrives, to not be seen until the following Sunday, which means we are yet to get into a routine of Saturdays when starting from home, as we finally travel away from Morley to start from Cottingley station instead, as we need to make use for it now that notice for its formal closure has been posted. Get away ahead of 10.20pm, and pass over the footbridge to pass away from our local paths by taking the route across the Cottingley Hall estate, via the Dulverton Grove paths to pass north of the towers and over the Cottingley Drive orbital route to descend through Cottingley Cemetery as a path exists to take us past the crematorium and chapels before we dropped out at the point where the A6110 Ring Road Beeston and A643 entangle themselves, where we cross by the builders yard and cement plant to follow the latter as it leads up to, and under, the railway line to reveal the Planet Ice rink, which has finally opened after an extremely prolonged construction. We'll move toward the city, and our planned targets as we join Bobby Collins Way as it leads though the lots of the Elland Road Park & Ride, where the Covid vaccination centre loitered for most of 2021-2, taking us round the side of Leeds United's ground that regular traffic doesn't normally see, before we split under the M621 to the Lowfields industrial estate, and move with the footpath down to Junction 2 where all sorts of heavy engineering work is going on the remodel the traffic island, which looks certain to be ongoing for a while, before we shadow the A643 once more as it heads off to form the Leeds inner loop road. 

Rivington Park to Egerton 04/03/23

7 miles, via the Pineteum, the Ravine, the Terraced Garden, the Dovecote, Noon Hill Slack,

 Hordern Stoops, Hoar Stones Brow, Belmont, Belmont Reservoir, Great Robert Hill, 

  Stones Bank Bridge, and Dimple.

To me the most disruptive thing about the Pandemic years has been the social ties that have been loosened and severed by the months of enforced isolation, and none more telling of these has been the distance that was put between myself and My Sister's family, where I haven't visited for a walking occasion since the summer of 2019, and not on a solo excursion since the preceding April, meaning that paths in the West Pennines have gone unseen, while my Nieces have transitioned into almost growed-up girls without us seeing it happen up close, and if there's a time to do something about that absence, that time is now. Company also allows me to push myself a bit harder on the trail as we make a second attempt to launch my twelfth walking year, and My Sister approaches my need to exercise with some very well-considered planning, which means not rising early and heading out immediately, instead easing through the morning an heading out for lunchtime, allowing us to fuel up before we get to the business of walking, and by aiming back towards their house means that no mental stress will be had from heading away from home and getting anxious about the duration of a return trip. So we head out to Rivington Park to take lunch at Rivington Barn for the umpteenth time, and afterwards, My Sister and I can then aim ourselves to head back around Winter Hill as she acts as my person trainer, as we attempt to get into some sort of walking condition again, and as we depart eastwards at 1.10pm, we can immediately acknowledge that the first challenge of the day will be heading uphill, off the Rivington Lane and onto the dirt track that lead up though the park's array of bare trees, onto the main path that leads up through the Pinetum, and on to shadow the Ravine, one of the features of Lord Leverhulme's parkland that has recently be revealed by some extensive tree-felling. The hard work comes as we rise on through the Terraced Garden, zig-zagging uphill still as my wheeze starts to get distractingly loud, though not actually worse than any of my regular early-season apparent breathing difficulties despite My Sister's concerns, before we hit the more direct rise up past the ornamental pond and bowling green that both manage to open up large flat spaces on the steeply pitched rise of the former Lever Park as we rise to the high track of the moorland-skirting Belmont Road, where the local crowds head on towards Rivington Pike and its tower and we press more northerly, towards the Dovecote Tower, above the informal garden around the site of the Bungalow, the now lost pile at the park's northernmost corner.