The train is rolling to a stop. I take a deep breath.
I’m about to be horribly murdered. (more…)
uk
Trans Pennine Trail: The Long, Winding Goodbye
It’s midnight, and I’m looking up at a signpost.
The best way to see England is on foot. (The second best way? Ask Sustrans). It’s a country designed to fit your feet, whether via the National Trail network or by those enticing mystery dashed lines you see winding their way into the trees at the fringes of your Ordnance Survey Landranger. You’re not meant to go from A to B – you’re supposed to dabble with the rest of the alphabet. This is why English people of a certain age will argue until they’re blue in the face about the ‘quickest route’ for a stranger to get somewhere. What they really mean is their favourite route – and everyone has a different one, because England can accomodate that.
At midnight on the 23rd of August I’m in Hornsea, my childhood home on East Yorkshire’s coastline. I’ve wandered along the sea-front, tweeting fitfully and plucking at memories, until I’ve reached the Marine Hotel and a sheer concrete wall to the upper promenade I clearly remember being too nervous to climb, which I can now scale by jumping, grabbing the rail and pulling myself up. (It’s such a contrast that I feel I have someone else’s memory). The clouds are low enough to turn to mist, fogging the streetlights and giving the ruinous amusement arcades the look of a heavily anti-aliased Pripyat.
Then I’m at the end of the old railway line, the one that connected Hornsea with Hull until Doctor Beeching swung his axe. The disused train station is long gone, and replaced with an enormous paved compass, pointing westwards – specifically, at Southport, on the other side of the country.
I walk the first mile of it.
From here, the Trail winds over the Wolds and down towards Sheffield, splitting in either direction to provide secondary routes for the weekend-tripper (one of which is up to York, via the whole Solar System)….
…and finally, on the main route, reaching Southport on the west coast, 20 miles north of Liverpool.
When Barbara of Hole In The Donut Travels came to York a few months back, I was startled to learn she hadn’t arrived via London. Because all too often, that’s the England visitors see. I’m not knocking London (it’s a fascinating place) but it’s not a synonym for England. The England I love best, that gets me scanning maps with what I can only describe as geographic lust, is that of hill and dale and moor and backwater trail – and the best ways to find these are by taking the great trans-England walking routes so beloved by folk like Wainwright (who even devised his own coast to coast walk)…
Striding along these great Ways isn’t just an effective method for seeing (and feeling) England – it’s also a great way to say goodbye to it. Since my plans revolve around seeing the rest of the world, a couple of final, epic walks sometime soon are an attractive prospect.
And the symbolism of starting the last of them from my childhood home?
Irresistible.
Further reading:
- The official Trans Pennine Trail homepage
- Walking Britain: tons of ideas here, complete with detailed breakdowns of walks and some (sadly quite small) photos of what you can expect to see.
- The Ramblers Society is a good jumping-off point for the basics.
- It is absolutely impossible to read this book and not have twitchy feet. That’s you warned.
Images: rofanator, vikellis, karenwithak, steves71.
Dead Air Under London
London breathes on my back. Around me, shirts billow, dresses flare and hats are clutched, as the stuffy, tasteless air roars past us in search of somewhere to dump its heat. Behind me, the mournful screee of an Underground Tube train – and around me, a subterranean London that is far from solid.
Imagine laying a cross-section across the city, dividing it like a cake. Looking at the results, you’d think: earthworms. The ground under London is Swiss-cheesed with cavities. There are the most famous – the London Underground and its many, many abandoned stations, and the extraordinarily extensive sewer system pioneered by Joseph Bazalgette, the “Sewer King“, an engineering marvel now threatened from above. But around them, burrowed into the sponge of subterranean London, are countless other mysterious voids. The church catacombs, most notably at Camden. The military bunkers and citadels and their extensive tunnel networks. The pedestrianways winding between Heathrow’s terminals (above), hauntingly endless when you’re dragging your suitcase down them. And then there’s the Fleet, London’s lost river, gushing back and forth through the sewer tunnels as the tide waxes and wanes, a trickle of its former self but still powerful enough to drown the unwary.
And through all this, the dead air of London’s ancient breath…
In.
Out.
Photo: Mike Sowden 2011.
Further reading:
- The real & fictional tunnels of London, at FictionalCities.
- Oh, and be sure to track down a copy of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, book and BBC TV adaptation.
Nobody Expects The Orkney Haar
Surely my eyes have blown a fuse. The world is blank – not a hole (because holes are *in* something) but a total absence, a blackness filled with light.
Vertigo sweeps over me. And…that strange muddled sense of depth, like when you’re drifting off to sleep in a darkened room and suddenly you can’t tell if the ceiling is a million miles away or pressed against your face.
If I look down, the illusion is broken by the ship’s side-wake, curling outwards like scraped butter, but if I tilt my gaze so everything disappears from my peripheral vision, I’m floating once more. The view is a featureless aether lit by a coin of light wan enough to stare at. I drift, spiritually untethered, a sense of peace filling my entire….
…!!!!
Dear god.
Obviously. Obviously they would have…sounded the...fog-horn. Because we’re…in fog.
But…couldn’t they WARN us first?
Suddenly the horizon is back, in the time it takes you to read this sentence.
Behind us, the ship’s wake appears and lengthens. Are we picking up speed? No – it’s the fog we’re emerging from, revealing the mark of our passage like a meteorological magic trick.
Here in Orkney, a sea-fog or haar can descend at any time. In this case it’s in the middle of a sunny July day (2009).
This confuses me. Fog needs the kind of cool, damp air you’d find in Winter? But then I remembered the haar I met in August 2006 when I slept rough on the Orkney Mainland. Why fog in summer? The answer is wind, or rather a lack of it – during the Winter months, the incessant wind picks up enough to blow the fog away. It’s always around, developing wherever there’s a pronounced temperature difference between sea and sky …but Winter is more adept at moving it along, presumably to make room for some real weather.
A few days later, I emerge from my tent at Chalmersquoy on Westray after an afternoon nap to find everything smudged with haar. I watch (cursing at my camera’s inability to do it justice) as it rolls down from the hills and blankets the middle of Pierowall bay, a strip of cloud as discrete as a contrail – and as it dissipates, the buildings at the opposite side of the bay emerge, rising like the Golden Gate…
Images: Mike Sowden, 2009.
Megabus: No-Budget UK Travel (If You’re Tough Enough)
I’m hollow-eyed and bleary today, and I haven’t had enough coffee. A little later I’ll be pootling round York, picking up travel essentials and converting my Brit money into Euros before jetting off to Austria tomorrow afternoon. Tomorrow will be my second visit to London in 3 days, and yet again I’m using the train.
If you know what rail prices in this country are like, you might now be wincing. Yes, there are smart, effective ways to whittle your train fares down to something vaguely affordable, but even with forethought, research and expert haggling over the phone, there’s only so much you can do. And frankly, the amount you have to plan ahead is…irksome. I’ve taken the train from York to London, almost always exactly the same service, for prices ranging from £12 to £88, one-way (with returns anything from £28 to £infinity).
It’s a fickle, wearisome mess.
Yesterday, partly by bus and partly by train, I got to London and back for £10. (more…)
Balderdash! – Busting 5 Myths About England
Ah, England! The mist-shrouded Arthurian ruins, the rolling green hills dotted with sleepy hamlets, nuns on bikes free-wheeling over cattle grids, tankards of warm beer, castles and orchards, jodhpurs and shooting-sticks, where monocles legally replace spectacles and more than two people will automatically form a queue, where everything is quaint and quintessential and steeped and…
On and on.
Planning a first-time trip to England soon? It’s possibly you’ve been told things about the place. Silly things. Things that will mislead and ultimately disillusion you. And that’s no fun at all. So in the interests of having an exciting and fascinating holiday in a truly exciting and fascinating country, let’s burst a few bubbles here. (more…)
Travel: What Makes Bad Places *Bad*?
One of the nastiest experiences of my life was having coffee at the Paragon Train Station in Hull. (more…)
England’s East Coast: Jacket Required
I love how warm and inviting the seafront at Hornsea gets this time of year.
I always come away thinking “next time, I’ll bring a deck-chair. Really get comfortable, you know?”.
And maybe go for a paddle! That would be just lovely.
A Scilly Swim (But Not Yet)
The approaching shoreline is an arresting one. A few yards up the cream-coloured beach it’s England – well-kept hedgerows, chalk-dust paths, everything with that tamed look so welcoming to Anglophiles. Except this is the Atlantic. All around, the UK continental shelf is having one last fling with the open air – a scatter of low granite islands, nibbled inwards with half-circles of white beach as if the place was drafted with a pair of compasses. There’s so much sky it gives me a kind of reverse vertigo…
But I’m not looking upwards. I’m looking down.
When can we go swimming, Dad? (more…)
