Morley East Circuit 30/05/20

7.1 miles, from Morley Hole, via Dawson Hill, Scatcherd Hill, Town End, Topcliffe Mill, 
 Capitol Park, Tingley Common, Tingley Viaduct, Sissons wood, West wood, Stank Hall, 
  Millshaw, Churwell and Lane Side.

After so many weekends out of the routine, it feels good to have been granted the space to get my walking career back on track, though we shall probably be keeping it local until July at the earliest due to public transport issues, but that's no matter as there's still plenty to mick out around Morley, especially when we are greeted by a bright and sunny morning that gets me feeling all sorts of enthusiastic, ready to push out to the east of town with another three hour course prepared in my mind. Thus it's down to Morley Hole once more, to get going at 9.05am, striking my way for the opening stretch to the south by departing Brunswick Street to rise up and over the shady passage of Dawson Hill, which as we rise over above Morley Bottoms has me wondering just how many of Morley's seven hills we have visited over the course of our recent touring and as Banks, Chapel and Daisy have all featured thus far, we check off this one as number four, and soon strike on to number five as we drop out onto the rising stretch of Queen Street and on up Scatcherd Hill. The town centre beyond has been completely unseen during the weeks of Lockdown, and the main drag of Queen Street past the Town Hall still looks light for general business, though not feeling like a ghost town as well-drilled queues organise themselves outside the green grocers and butchers to keep these local business going, which is an encouraging bit of social solidarity to see as we press on to the south end of town, down to the Fountain inn and the New Pavilion theatre, where the rise of South Queen Street grazes the edge of Hunger Hill, hill #6. So past St Paul's church and the mill conversion before we land on the Bridge Street - High Street roundabout, where we follow the footpath onto Magpie Lane which leads us into the Glen Road estate, shadowing the route of the GNR line to the east of Morley Top station, bounding the development to its south side, while we pass The Carriers Arms, another of the town's hidden pubs, and then follow the pavements and footways as they lead us among the residences of Glen Mount and Beacon Grove, noting that this estate was also built with a lot of green space around its closes, as we trace the embankment onwards along the edge of resumed edge of Glen Road before we land on Topcliffe Lane. Oaks and Topcliffe mills stand proud here, illuminated in the Spring sunshine, and our railway walk proper starts here, joining the Ardsley - Laisterdyke line as it presses east, joining the cycleway into Capitol Park as it follows the embankment between the yards full of cars and beer barrels, leading into the site of the triangular Tingley Junction, where the business park's growth looks like it arrested some years ago, to never be resumed, and the pair of cycling Community Support Police take an interest in my exploits as they pass.

Lockdown: Day 63 - 25/05/20

When Spring Bank Holiday Monday comes around, I've no desire to head out for another 3 hour trip in the locality as the day looks like it's going to be a proper hot one, and every one of this last week's excursions have left me feeling completely zonked, as if I've gotten out of practice with the walking routine after two months off it during some of the best weeks of the season, so perhaps it's just as well that I've no plans to bust the season open any time soon, as I've got a good few weeks of local trails to pace as lockdown eases. Thus, I'll take the relaxed option that won't leave me feeling gassed once the time to return to work comes around, picking out the Trainspotting variant of the Social Distancing Circuit, and timing so that I might be in a good location to capture all four of the Nova services as they pass on the Trans-Pennine route, now that we've had a timetable change and it looks like full services have been restored between Leeds and Manchester, and that provides an amiable stretch for 75 minutes, pacing among the greenery and blossom that has come, and gone, over the preceding nine weeks. I hope that will be my last time out on the local SDC, as the optimistic half of my brain hopes that and easing of lockdown might allow for some longer local trips and a bit of weekend public transport usage as we slip towards summer, though the pessimistic other half of me worries that this is where July and August could easily end up again if a second spike in Corona Virus infection occurs, as it well might. Anyway, a week off has been a grand time to focus on getting my numbers back in order, having worked through the paper record of my walking which I started in the 2017 off-season, and have abandoned and re-started twice over since then, re-doing all the calculations to ensure that the stats that I present are correct, and after much hard work, the revision session is complete, and the numbers presented here from now on will be as correct as they'll ever be. My Up Country total proved to have the fewest issues, having been short by 4 miles since its initial calculation in 2014, while my Overall total turned out to have been short by 4 miles since 2013 (meaning that my 1,000 mile gain points and the sum of 1402.2 miles for my first three years were both wrong), before somehow losing another 15.1 miles in 2018, while my Solo total became my cursed number, having no fewer than six addition errors along its course, ending up at 19.5 miles ahead of reality.

Morley South Circuit 23/05/20

7.6 miles, from Morley Hole, via Bruntcliffe, Howden Clough, Birkby Brow Wood, Cliff Wood, 
 Howley Park, Howley Hall, Soothill Tunnel, Woodkirk, Tingley Common, Capitol Park, 
  Topcliffe, Gillroyd, and Brunswick.

After the hot spike that landed on us from Tuesday through to Friday, conditions have taken something of a turn for the chilly as we look to make the most of the three day weekend at the far end of our 10 day stretch of being NIW, and the promise of early morning sunshine has mostly dissipated even before we've gotten to the day's starting line, and it looks like a stiff breeze is going to keep the day changeable as we look to our third tour around the town, looking to the south to retrace a number of routes from early season career that I haven't seen in a while. So to Morley Hole we head, for a 9.20am start, with the cloud cover already starting to accumulate as we set the day's trajectory southwesterly along the side of the A643 Bruntcliffe Lane, rising past Hillycroft fisheries and on uphill, along a familiar pavement, though the stretch between Corporation Street and the Wynyard Drive estate end, opposite the Highcliffe industrial estate seems to have avoided an officially measured visit until now. Rise up, past the cemetery, Bruntcliffe Academy and the Junction 27 industrial estate to land at the A650 crossroads, by the Travelodge and Toby Carvery, noting that the Morley in Bloom garden has been adorned with decorative archways featuring an aphorism by Dr Seuss, which bears recounting as it well suits my contemporary walking mood;

'You're off to Great Places, Today is Your Day, Your Mountain is Waiting, So Get on Your Way'

and thus we do, over the Bradford road and past the WMC and the Shoulder of Mutton inn, and over the crest of the road at Bruntcliffe, heading downhill along the pavement, over the M62 and snaring the views across to the high and distant southern boundary of Kirklees district before we slip past the last terrace in town. We head on into the greenery and leafiness that surrounds the descent into Howden Clough, where the signage indicates your departure from Morley, and Leeds District, long before the bottom of the valley where greater Batley and Kirklees start, and getting a grand look towards Howden Clough mills, which still remains in industrial employ despite is obvious value as an out-of-town and upscale residential development opportunity, before we take a turn to track southeasterly, entering the forestry of Birkby Brow woods, via the roadside entrance that wasn't used by the Leeds Country Way or the Kirklees Way on either of my prior traversals.

Morley Central Circuit 21/05/20

7.6 miles, from Morley Hole, via Daisy Hill, Broad Oaks, White Rose, Low Moor farm, 

 Bantam Grove, Burn Knolls, Morley Top, Dartmouth Park, Bruntcliffe, Gildersome Spur, 

  Dean Wood, Gildersome Tunnel, and the Ingles estate.

Wednesday brings the temperature spike that the week was due, but the heat doesn't attract me out, as housework and a general burst of aeration is necessary around my flat, and we wait until things have cooled a little before we strike out again on Thursday, not as early as I'd hoped to be out thanks to under-sleeping through the night and then oversleeping in the morning, which means that I depart feeling ever so slightly addled on my way to the start line at Morley Hole, getting on track at 9.45am and feeling hopeful that my paths won't be crowded as this weather improvement is sure to attract the populace to more engaging climes than this one. So east we strike again, on the literal middle one of the three loops that I've plotted arpund Morley, heading down Brunswick Street in the shadow of the Victoria Mills complex before we join Bank Street to rise up its other half, below the high walls above which Bank House, surely the oldest house in the town, stands, and above the back of the Cheapside parade at Morley Bottoms, pressing on as the road diminishes to a path by the low-rise flat blocks before it ejects us out onto Chapel Hill. Cross the lane to join New Bank Street by the off-license that has never been open in all my years here, heading on among the elevated terraces above the valley cleft through the heart of the town, passing the still vacant Baptist chapel site and declining with the lane to meet my Lockdown Circuit route and the empire of suburbia that has grown to the east of the town, before rising to the Daisy Hill prominence, where the old mill houses still stand along with its gateposts, from which a view back to town can be noted before we strike into the grassy cleft that lies beyond. It's still May Blossom season out here, giving us some floweriness among the foliage as we drop out into the fields once more, and rise up towards the track to Broad Oaks farm once again, as if every local trail feels the need to come this way, it's really to ensure that we get a decent photographic second look at the Social Distancing Circuit route while the greenery of Spring covers it, having been still a mess of bare earth when the lockdown walking session started, and despite the warmth of the day, the view from here to the city is clear and not burdened by haze, giving another good reason to come up here before we strike for the railway bridge.

Morley North Circuit 19/05/20

5.2 miles, from Morley Hole via Valley Mills, Broad Oaks, Millshaw, Churwell New Village, 

 Rooms, Churwell Urban Woods, and the Ingles estate. 

At last we land on my next week off, and it's been a proper long haul to get here, and quite the roller-coaster of emotions to due to the health crisis and the national lockdown which we have been compelled to traverse, landing on 10 days of being NIW with so much relief, as a regular seven week spell of work can be hard to get through, a stretch like this has proved to be interminable, with time ceasing to have much meaning despite my working weeks having about as much shape as normal, and now I can look to a stretch of getting my head turned back towards normal after experiencing all the stresses that came my way over the preceding days. Interestingly, speaking to one of the departmental supervisors last week, she told me that she was cancelling all here leave for a long as the lockdown lasted as she couldn't face being stuck at home and completely out of circulation during her time off, and that's completely the opposite for me, glad to get away from it and have time completely to myself before having to face what comes with an eased lockdown and the working throngs starting to return to the city. As exercise rules have now been relaxed, going out for more than an hour at a time is now possible, and I could travel further afield if I had an independent transport option, but I don't and public transport use is still discouraged, not that I'd be taking just yet anyway as I'm convinced this lockdown easing has come at least a month too early, and thus I'll be looking towards some circular routes about my resident town, as Morley's lanes and fields haven't seen too much action over the last few years. So the plotting head goes on to find routes that offer a bit more than the sub-3 mile circuits that have been my route for most of the last couple of months and might keep me occupied locally until I feel emboldened, or am permitted, to ride away further from home and back towards where I wanted to be in my 2020 season and I've gotten a good local selection to keep me going, even if few of the passages will prove to be particularly novel. But before we get going with that, I'd just like to share a little more of the new lockdown hobby that I've fired over the last couple of weeks, namely going for a train-spot or three thanks to discovering the live train tracker at rail-record.co.uk, which has informed me of the movement of TPE Class 68s across the Pennines to the Siemens depot at York, which I can thus catch as they run light through Morley, taking their pictures and sharing them here as I have no shame at all about resuming a passion that I had as a child, an action that I'm sure would have delighted My Dad, no end.

Lockdown: Day 55 - 17/05/20

Well, this has been a strange week, through which we've pressed hard to get to the 10 (TEN) days of annual leave at the other end of, the week where Britain supposedly gets back to work, while lockdown because of the Corona Virus still continues, and for this week at least, there's little indication of there being any difference on the railways, as there's just as few people on the Morley - Leeds trains as there ever were, and no obvious differences on the Leeds - Cross Gates services either. Which is just as well because this is the week that I chose to start shooting video from the windows of my morning and evening commuter rides, as that's certainly something that you can't do on the trains under normal circumstance, unless you are a travel blogger with a semi-professional YouTube channel (and that's not a future I envisage for myself after discovering the brutal upload times which that site has) and it's amazing that you can find along the way of two line, once you factored in the orientation of the train and the direction of travel to give you as many a 16 variations. I can honestly say that I'm not looking forward to public transport getting busy again, as I can't envisage how you're supposed to effectively socially distance on a train when it's at more than 25% capacity, and thus it's relief to see no change through this week, as I doubt many businesses even had a plan to get people back on site in the city when the announcement was dropped last weekend, and the only indication that I can take of there being any real change in circumstances is the locally observed lower number of cars in the yard of my flat block, and the increase in apparent activity at the industrial units and workshops at the lower end of Station Road in Morley. My Friday evening swing around the town, to grab the weekly essential goods shopping at Bond Street Tesco, will thus be my probable last to see the deserted streets in the city centre before the retail sector starts to revive, and the only crowd to add to the regular few people traversing the street is the bunch who empty out of the Albion Street branch of Barclays Bank, ahead of my working week coming to end. The long weeks of being NIW to come should prove a good time to decompress after ploughing a relentless path of work through seven weeks of national lockdown, and the frustrations of the moment are combined by the thought that I ought to be on holiday to walk the Rossendale Way, and the fact that while restrictions of time allowed for exercise have been relaxed, the use of non-essential public transport use is still discouraged, which renders me relatively stranded in Morley for the time being, only fancying a regular short circuit out on Sunday morning, ahead of potentially putting down quite a few more local miles during my week off.

Lockdown: Day 48 - 10/05/20

Blessed is the four day week that leads into a three day weekend, and I may have expressed my frustration at getting my May Day break bumped back by four days, but when the alternative is feeling like you are baling from a working week a day early, I'm not going to fuss, and it's not been all that long since our last ones at Easter, which goes that bit of distance to making our work through lockdown that shred more tolerable, and we've landed on a couple of really nice days to use for a stretch and a relax too, so all's feeling pretty decent as the best weather month of the year settles in. Not that I'll be using my VE Day bank holiday for draping my house in flags and banners, or doing anything neo-patriotic as I find all that business rather distasteful, if you wish to commemorate those who served and died in conflict, we have Armistice Day for that, and if you're the sort who still feels the need to mark the anniversary of a conflict that 'we won' 75 years ago, which increasingly few have an active memory of, then I'm going to suggest there's something seriously off in your mindset. I'll be indulging the part of myself that's definitely the one that's My Father's Son, having recently discover the Live Rail Record website so that I might accurately synchronize my walking route with the passing trains on the run into and out of Leeds, and also adapting my route to give myself more photographing opportunities, by not walking the figure eight path and instead keeping to the railside path all the way from Valley Mill to beyond the White Rose Centre and the Elliot Hudson college to land by the cattle creep, or footpath passage, below the lines to join lost fields below the Millshaw business park. It's actually a shorter route than the regular circuit, but feels longer, allowing the full cycle of trains to be spotted over an hour plus in the vicinity of Morley, and the barren stretch can be burned off as I travel at the hurry-up over the rises at Broad Oaks and Daisy Hill, so that all the opportunities to snare the TPE Nova 1 & 3 units (Novae units?) with my camera can be made as they run a proper inter-city express service between Yorkshire and Lancashire for the first time in decades, and we'll turn that 2.5 mile trip around twice on the sunny mornings of Friday and Saturday. Otherwise, it's been frustrating to not see much of the bluebell season over the last few weekends, as our walk route wants for dank woodlands with shady ground, and most of the blooms hide in the railway cutting to be only really visible from the passing trains, but as if to compensate, the path is now gripped by a riot of May Blossom as the Hawthorn bushes do their bit to brighten up the passage of Spring, our third distinct wave of flowering since Lockdown began.

Lockdown: Day 41 - 03/05/20

Frustratingly, it's not May Day weekend yet, as those who would govern us have decided to move the International Day for Solidarity among Workers to the end of the coming week, so that it might coincide with the 75th anniversary of VE Day, for which the neo-patriotic public events have had to be rather unfortunately cancelled, due to current world events, meaning that our short week of work arrives before the long weekend that we always look forward to at the start of my favourite month. Not that I'm going to fuss too much, as this has been a pretty chilled out week thanks to being granted a complete change of scenery for my working week, as I'm sent off to do some support work at Seacroft Hospital, which might be ridiculously remote from Morley and a much longer commute at the starts and ends of my days, but riding the rails to Cross Gates station is probably better for social distancing than riding the infrequent buses along the York Road, and the 20 minutes of walking through the estates gives me some good time to exercise and mentally decompress, while the only local people out and about are the dog walkers, meaning that I'm inconveniencing nobody. Travelling the extra miles by train is also good for giving a bit of an expansion to my rather confined lockdown world, allowing us fresh sights to see as we go, and taking a great interest to see what rolling stock is laid up at Neville Hill depot and yard, concluding that the answer id not all that much as even the EMR HSTs that are stabled there appear to be turning over with some regularity, confirming that it's only been the Pacer stock that has been removed thanks to the reduced timetable, as none of that has been spotted since the reduced timetable came into force. I honestly could get used to riding trains on my own, and always sitting with 2 metres of space around me at all times, and with no other passenger in my sightlines, and it's not like Cross Gates station crawls with activity at either end of the day, with no more than 8 other passengers counted daily as I admire its big red wall, and use the brick facade for photography, not even feeling any frustration as the end of April refuses to be warm and even dumps a bunch of rain on us. When a bus does have to be ridden, on Friday evening because we need to do another turn around at Tesco and jam £30 worth of goods into a single bag, it allows us to take a look at Leeds city centre in full lockdown effect, taking a path via, Eastgate, Vicar Lane, Kirkgate and Commercial Street, showing it up as just as devoid as life in a way not seen since Bank Holidays used to shut everything down, which I recall last happening in the mid 1990s, and looking at the many stores along the way you'll see that most of them are empty, with their stock having all been dispensed into storage, illustrating just what a task it has been, and will be, to suspend and then later restart the retail industry.