Morley to Horsforth 13/05/23

11.4 miles, via Valley Mills, White Rose, Beeston Park Side, South Beeston, Beeston, 

 Elland Road, Lowfields, Wortley Rec, New Wortley, HMP Leeds, Botany Bay, Burley, 

  Burley Park (station), Headingley (station), Queenswood, Morris Wood, Spen Lane, 

   West Park, Ireland Wood, Clayton Wood, Cookridge Hospital, and Tinshill. 

It's not really related to what we're doing today, as we already lack trains going through Morley due to another engineering possession and there's another train strike happening this weekend too, but on 11th May it was announced that Trans Pennine Express were not getting their franchise renewed, which is a rare bit of good news for us travellers to hear after many months (and years?) of their failure to maintain services and self induced industrial strife, which means we might have a competent operator taking on the North Country's premier express services once the mainline upgrade is finally completed in the 2036-41 window. Anyway, the good start to May continues as we rise to another Saturday trail, hopeful that the early gloom will shift before too long as we target a new trail from home to my local Old Country and beyond, starting out from Morley station at 10.15 am and heading down the Valley Road path with only the most cursory of glances being given to the deliveries of aggregate as I'm actually growing bored of spotting local freight trains now, heading on down by the Gasworks and Valley Mills site to strike for the fields beyond, rising over the false ridge and equestrian fields that have Cotton Mill beck concealed beneath it, and down again on the Millshaw Beck side. Land by the gas plant and exposed stream ahead of the staff car park at the south end of the White Rose centre, where we pass across the access road, and the A6110 Ring Road carefully, to progress up the side of Dewbury Road as to comes down the hill, rising up towards the railway bridge and the path to Stank Hall farm, passing up by the side of the former GNR Hunslet Goods line and soon enough find ourselves in the exact same part of Beeston Park Side that we visited last weekend, by old St David's and coming up to the Tommy Wass corner, where we'll swap sides to progress north rather than east (or in reality, South). 

Morley to Woodlesford 07/05/23

9 miles, via Daisy Hill, Broad Oaks, White Rose, Beeston Park Side, Brown Hill, 

 Middleton Circus, Sharp Lane Plantation, New Forest Plantation, Robin Hood, 

  Haighside Wood, Rothwell Haigh, and John O'Gaunts.

The long Coronation bonus bank holiday weekend is a most welcome arrival, not that I'm at all engaged with the on-going shenanigans for KC3, aside from the Musicks, but more so that it gives me an extra day to rest up and get busy housework-wise, before we get back to the business of walking on Sunday, having had three whole weeks off the trail since last my last venture, and it's just as well that my scheming for the next phase of season 12 is to feature walking from home on previously unseen trajectories, as we've got two whole weekends of engineering possessions on the Leeds - Huddersfield line, which means there's no quick way to get out of (or back to) Morley, even if I wanted one. So we start from Morley station in a familiar fashion, departing at 10.15am and rising with the path above the cliff above the carpark to observe how the platforms have been built up on the new station site and to see that the support columns for the new footbridge have been installed, sure to arrive during the line closure in June, I'd figure, while there's more aggregate being delivered by rail which does get you wondering where it's all going, and this all needs to be observed from the green space on Seven Hills Way too, just to get the reverse angles from the rock cliff above the new station. We get going properly by rising up to Daisy Hill and setting off to the northwest, to find that a new rough track has been gouged out beside the path from the A643 down to Gasworks Crossing, though its not apparent of this is for railway work or future suburban development reaching down from Laneside, but the feeling is we'll have to enjoy the fields of Broad Oaks while they still endure, heading up through the farm to observe the growth at White Rose station on the other side of the hill, where the lift shaft tower on the south side has started to be assembled, to be seen from the footbridge path as a Kestrel buzzes the local wildlife.

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.