Category: Uncategorized
Easthope
Making the most of the dry and warm weather – another Wenlock Edge walk, from the car park at Presthope. The route as far as Easthope follows the Shropshire Way, but it’s not been been heavily walked. One short section of path has vanished altogether, requiring a deviation (a short walk along a busy road), and the route across the fields has new crops growing on it. Where are all the waymarkers? As we approach Easthope, a red kite glides high overhead – the second time we’ve seen one hereabouts recently.
From Easthope, we follow the minor road up to the crest of the Wenlock Edge, and descend to the old railway track. The passenger service between Wenlock and Craven Arms ended more than 60 years ago; freight from Wenlock to Longville finished in 1964. Now the trackbed provides an excellent surface to walk back to Presthope; though the sun filters through, there’s not much of a view – just one or two windows in the forest.
Great War Railways
Just published to “Geoff’s Rail Diaries”, an account of Friday’s fun at Apedale – turtles, a diver, a Baldwin, a Brigadelok and much more – and lots more pictures. Visit “Tracks to the Trenches“.
The Toot and Clee Burf
No, we’re not in far-flung foreign parts! Clee Burf is the southern summit of Shropshire’s Brown Clee, and the Toot? That’s how it’s labelled on the OS map, but why is anyone’s guess. It’s a quiet bit of scrubby hillside on the southern flank of the hill. This was a pleasant walk – a fine afternoon, with air washed clean by yesterday’s rain, and a fresh breeze – perfect! An easy ascent takes us past Nordy Bank hill fort, and the heather is in bloom on the higher ground. There are one or two other walkers out; we didn’t count them, but we’re talking in single figures. No tea rooms or ice-cream vans on Brown Clee – could that be why?
The Buzzard Baldwin
No 778, a WW1 Baldwin, makes a fine sight accelerating away from Page’s Park station on the Leighton Buzzard Narrow Gauge Railway.
It’s the Industrial Railway Society’s AGM – before the meeting, there’s a trip up the line – and before the trip up the line, there are a couple of “false starts”, just for photographers. Great stuff!
More photos will eventually appear on “Geoff’s Rail Diaries” – but not tonight…
Quiet ways from Morville
It’s a dry and mild afternoon, with the chance of some sunshine. The field paths continue to be worth avoiding, but there are quiet tracks and lanes north of Morville. The drive to Aldenham Park looks private, but it forms a public footpath, which leads to the unsurfaced track to the pools at Hurst Farm. From here onwards, we’re on a hard surface. We return to Morville along roads which, like so many others in these parts, are very quiet.
After the rain – Sher Brook and the Tackeroo
After yesterday’s torrents, today would be bright and sunny – until mid-afternoon. More rain was forecast, coming from the south-west. We’d better head north-east to make the most of it – somewhere that perhaps wouldn’t be too bad underfoot. So it proved, despite the path down to the valley being a stream. Most of the water had behaved reasonably well, even the large puddles here and there could be circumnavigated easily. None of that deep sloppy mud we’d struggled with around Croft Ambrey…
We’d been up here a few weeks ago, so we planned a circuit mostly to the south of our earlier route, though there is some overlap. Again, we walked anti-clockwise – down beside the brook – this time on the opposite bank – then back up to the plateau, returning to the car mostly along the trackbed of the “Tackeroo railway”, the military railway built to serve the camps up here during the first world war. The sun had behaved quite well too, disappearing finally behind the advancing clouds as we set off home, the first spots of rain falling not many minutes later.
Tackeroo – The Military Railway on Chasewater Stuff’s Railway & Canal Blog
First attempt
I’ve been using Blogger for some time (more than five years) – perhaps I should have a look at WordPress? I’ve imported the old Blogger content – clearly, it will need some tidying up.
Think of this for now, as “work in progress”. In the meantime, visit geoffspages blog on Blogger
Moving pictures…
I started putting up video clips in the late 1990s – very short, very small and pretty low quality – those were the days of dialup connections – and analogue video – and a video capture card… Not to mention the time it took on my old 486 to process each clip.
Broadband and YouTube, and the advent of digital camcorders, have revolutionised online video, and for the last 18 months or so I’ve been uploading video to the YouTube site. More recently, I found time to digitise all the old Video8 tapes, recorded between 1994 and 2000 (I was worried that they would be deteriorating). Having done that, I began to replace all the remaining “old” WMV clips on the “Rail Pages” and “Rail Diaries” sites – and this evening, the last old clip was replaced by its YouTube equivalent*.
The full set of videos (many of which never made it to Geoff’s Pages) can be found (in fairly random order) on the “Geoffspages Channel” on YouTube; alternatively, look for the “V” against Rail Diaries menu entries…
* I think… There could well be one or two still lurking, forgotten
More videos
The DV tapes needed a good sort out – their contents had not been recorded in a particularly logical manner, and one or two recordings had been forgotten. Here are a couple that emerged from the digital rummaging, from opposite ends of the railway spectrum…
geoffspages.blog 