In 2007, I went walking with 2 good friends in the Yorkshire Dales around Ingleborough.
The air was heavy with rain that never quite broke, shot through with sunshine that never really came out to play, and just the right temperature to keep you walking at a mile-devouring trot.
We walked up hill and down valley, up to the top of Ingleborough, glorying in the view down to Ribblehead Viaduct far, far below (look – we were up there) and marvelling how completely unsuited to the environment we were with our puny arms and puny legs, clumsy and uncoordinated. I’m saying this chiefly because I remember falling over just after the following photo was taken – one of those undignified sprawls that has even the goats rolling around, eyes streaming.
Somewhere up Ingleborough, I lost my notebook.
(Maybe you can see how).
Then, three months later, my hard-drive crashed just before a much-delayed data backup, and I lost all but four of the the 100+ photos I took. These are two of them: the others are here and here. Four photos and a few scraps of memory, like wisps of sheep wool on barbed wire.
It’s shocking how much of life is like that.
