Getting Out Of The Smoke and Into The Country

There comes a time in every Londoner's life when that person thinks "Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, this is a giant, energetic, polluted metropolis full of miserable assholes and if I don't get out of here I might just snap the next time the clerk asks me if I have an Advantage card." That time was nigh so the Beautiful Competition and I packed our bags, booked a train and got as far away from the Big Smoke as we could go, by heading straight west. Cornwall. St. Ives.

Cornwall is an unusual place. Historically speaking, it remained Celtic longer than the rest of Britain, and after the Romans left it remained "Romanized" long after the Saxons set up shop in the eastern part of the island. In fact, after the Roman pull-out, the last remaining operable seaports were out in Cornwall. It's farm and fish country, then it became mining country, and now it's artistic and tourist country. Yellow sand beaches, overpriced restaurants and even the occasional sunny day. So we, along with thousands of other tourists, descended and made the most of nine days out of the City.

We did so with no agenda in mind; this was a holiday designed to relax. It was our replacement for a 'let's go to the beach and drink those little drinks with umbrellas in them served to us by dark-skinned natives' holiday that would have been way too expensive. We got sunburns and I even swam in the ocean a bit (although, I admit, I was gasping at how cold it was) and took a very 'whatever' approach to things.

The first couple of days were 'sit on the beach, putter around town and relax' days. St. Ives is a fairly famous art colony, with its own Tate gallery (!) and a long tradition of landscape and modernist art. The landscape is rocky and rugged, with high granite cliffs dropping into jagged tidal pools where seals bask. It has inspired literary types of all kinds: the Godrevy ligthhouse in St. Ives Bay inspired one Ms. Virgina Woolf to write To The Lighthouse, and the nearby town of Zennor was where D. H. Lawrence composed much of Women In Love. It's not hard to see why: it's a wild land, and its rural nature and tourist draw has allowed it to avoid some of the economic pitfalls that other places in England have experienced. Which isn't to say that stuff didn't exist, just that the vibe was a little less intense.

A massive hiking trail circles the entirety of the area - the South West Coastal Trail - and we did a piece of it, walking into Zennor from St. Ives through fields of heather and over rocks the size of tractor-trailers. Logged a good 9.44 miles on the GPS, and got some amazing pictures.

We planned a trip to the Isles of Scilly, the westernmost point in England some 28 miles off the coast, but ended up scrubbing it the morning of because the helicopters weren't flying due to the mist and fog. Welcome to England! So we saw most of Penzance (the town of the pirates fame) and ended up bussing out to St. Michael's Mount, an island-fortress that is only accessible at low tide, by foot anyway. As we discovered, when the tide comes in and you need to take the ferry back, it costs money! Piracy is alive and well in Cornwall!

The trip was well worth it; we both ended up sunburned, relaxed, happy and destressed. Coming back to London was hard; on our way back from breakfast this morning, Liz remarked that London still smelled badly when it was wet. I agreed; it's like a dog in that it's alright most of the time, but it's really kind of stinky and when it gets wet it only gets worse. So it's good to get out and relax.

On a more personal level, I got a ton of writing done and did some pretty strong thinking about a lot of things - my future, priorities, and so forth. But I'll save that for the Puppet Show.

Pictures here.

Last Thursday Was the Winter of My Discontent

The Valley

Made glorious summer by my decision to take a long weekend and go on a hiking and writing retreat to the North. I needed a little time off; I haven't really had any since before the move apart from the trip to Prague, and that was pretty high-impact touristy. I needed something more chill.

I started with the vague idea of holing up in a country inn somewhere, hiking, writing and drinking beer. My requirements were pretty simple:

• Had to be outside of a major city. Preferably a small town. Preferably with 2000 people or less.
  
• But easily accessible by train and/or bus.
  
• With hiking trails in the area.
  
• Maybe in a National Park?
  
• In a pub. Or at the very least a place I didn't have to go outside to get a drink if all else failed.

In five minutes of Googling, I found the Blue Bell Inn in Kettlewell, North Yorkshire. In the Yorkshire Dales National Park. With train tickets to nearby Skipton and a 30-minute busride, the location was perfect. And miles of hiking trails. And beer. In a small town. It was exactly what I wanted.

So I booked the room and train tickets and had a couple of weeks to look forward to it.

I took Friday and Monday off work because the bus didn't run on Sundays and I wanted to take advantage of my time there - two full days of hiking plus travel days. I arrived in Kettlewell early in the afternoon on Friday, checked in and immediately headed out.

Now, National Parks in the UK are a little different than they are in the US at least as far as trails go. The parkland was formed in the 50s, but obviously people have been living there far longer - for thousands of years. So it's a full, working rural area where people make a living from their farms. It's not like hiking through Yellowstone or the parks in Washington - it's more like hiking through rural Ohio, through people's fields and pastures and sometimes their backyards.

The trails vary greatly as well, from paved one-lane roads to unpaved country roads to bridleways for horses to tracks through fields - sometimes just a bit of trampled grass. And they aren't always well-marked; more than once I got lost trying to figure out where I was supposed to go next, because signs tend to hide or have been knocked down. Other times, they're just blank or very hard to read, or so general that you can't quite tell where you're supposed to be.

Kettlewell is in a valley (as most towns are) and most of the trails head up into the hills so you can get out on the moors. The first day I started winding up a trail and made it as far as a farm before I turned around - I didn't realize that I was actually on the right trail, I thought I'd ended up on private property. Turning around was damn lucky though because soon after I did a storm rolled in and started dumping a sleet and rain combination on me. By the time I got back, I was soaked.

The next day I picked up a poncho from the helpful village store along with a guidebook to walks in the area - which combined with the ordinance survey maps I had with me was perfect for getting around, because the OS maps helpfully do not label any trails, and the book used fairly recognizable landmarks.

Snowy Moor

Day 2 started out innocently enough; I decided to do an approximately 10-mile loop to the next town, then across the moors and up to a mountain called Great Whernside. The hike ran for two miles along the river, passing through low pastureland broken only by the characteristic stone walls. I saw plenty of wildlife, from sheep to lambs. And rabbits, and grouse. At Starbotton, the next village, I began climbing to the hills. As I climbed, the sun disappeared and things started to get cloudy - especially back towards where I was hiking yesterday. At one point as I reached the high moors I could see the rain falling in the area I had just covered - so I pulled out the poncho and prepared for it.

The rain was heavy. Really heavy. Heavy like sleet, then hail, then heavy English snow.

Hard Rain

You can see from this picture exactly how hard the rain was falling - luckily it was at my back most of the time, but it eventually covered the trail, so much so that I got lost and had a really hard time finding my way back and almost trampling a grouse's nest in the process. I wasn't cold and I wasn't wet, but the area I was in was also really boggy and one wrong step could have had me knee-deep or waist-deep in some really cold muddy muck - not what I wanted when I was five or six miles out of town. I reached a small country road that was the last ditch before climbing Whernside and the weather up top looked even more miserable. I met a couple of hikers who had just come down and had stopped for tea (hey, this is England after all) and talked to them about the trail - it was rocky and slippery and likely concealed under snow by this point, and very steep. At one point the weather looked like it was going to clear so I decided to chance it, then got summarily worse so I turned around and took the road back to town. All in all, clocked about eight miles that day and still had a great time.

Day 3 I decided to do a southern route, which would take me not up a mountain but across the high moors, through some forests and back along some ruins. The weather was much more cooperative - even though I had the poncho there was no rain, and the walk was incredible. The high moors were absolutely deserted, although I did meet a couple of other hikers later in the trip. The climb was gradual; it took about an hour and a half to get to the top but I stayed up for another hour and a half, including the time I got lost and ended up way the hell off course but in the middle of an amazing moor, with more rabbits than I've ever seen before in the wild. I also saw hawks, although they were smaller than their American counterparts, and the corpses of rabbits - so there were probably foxes around as well, even if I didn't see them.

In all, I clocked about 20 miles between all 3 hikes, wrote around 10,000 words, took about 10 pages of notes for a couple of projects, and came back completely relaxed and refreshed. It was exactly what I needed, and today was one of the easiest and hardest days at work: hard to go back, but easy because I was so recharged and chill.

One or two of these a year and I'll be a much happier camper. Hiker. Whatever.

Complete Yorkshire Dales National Park Picture Set on Flickr.