June 2020 – Back on the road again

Thirlmere, the Lake District: Walking in a quieter side of the National Park

During coronavirus [what I am referring to as DC] and once we were able to travel to places other than the supermarket, we have sought out some of the quieter areas of the Lake District, as these are easily accessible from our home for the day. Until it was taken away from me I hadn’t realised just how important being able to get away camping and hiking was to my wellbeing. While working friends still had a pattern to their week that wasn’t dissimilar to that BC [Before coronavirus], without the commute, I lost the month we planned in Scotland and the two months travelling around Hungary and Germany, walking around Morecambe, while enjoyable, couldn’t replace these activities. When we were allowed out for the day I was out like a wild animal from a cage.

The hills to the west of Thirlmere, a reservoir between Grasmere and Keswick, are notorious for being boggy and are not everyone’s first choice of mountain. The dry DC spring, open car parks and our search for social distance made these perfect places to walk. We never had the hills completely to ourselves but it was easy to keep our distance from the one or two people we met.

2020 May Ullscarf Thirlmere (2) — Harrop Tarn is straight out an Alpine postcard

Harrop Tarn, Castle Crag and Ullscarf

The short walk up to Harrop Tarn from the Dob Gill car park on the narrow road along the west side of Thirlmere is worth doing for its own sake. This picturesque tarn, surrounded by crags and pine trees, has an Alpine feel about it that will make you want to sit and enjoy. Of course, we were here so that my partner could tick off some Wainwright fells so after a brief stop we carried on uphill. On the way to Castle Crag we had stunning views along the length of Thirlmere and we then wandered between small lumps of land trying to work out which was the highest and therefore the summit of Castle Crag. At least the dry spring meant that we could easily cross the ground which is often sodden. Ullscarf is also only a pimple of a hill but it is a great viewpoint on a clear day; we could see most of the central fells in a panorama before us. We returned by the lovely Harrop Tarn again and down a steep woodland path to the car park.

2020 May Ullscarf Thirlmere (12) — These are generally boggy hills

Armboth Fell, High Tove and Raven Crag

The road along the west side of Thirlmere is narrow and although quiet you will meet other cars. We decided not to drive to the Armboth car park in our campervan and instead parked below Raven Crag at the northern end of Thirlmere and walked along the road. From Armboth car park we took a rough path through the woods and by the stream, picking up a track. Hidden among the trees near the track is Armboth Hall’s charming summerhouse, now a bothy. The construction of the dam at Thirlmere to provide water to Manchester meant the flooding of two villages, Wythburn and Armboth and Armboth Hall is now under water.

Once on the open fell it was an easy walk up to the rocky outcrop of Armboth Fell, skirting around the wetter areas that had reappeared after recent rain. At High Tove we once again had 360 degree views of surrounding fells. You could decide two are sufficient summits for the day and head back down to the car park but we opted to carry on to Raven Crag and headed for the treeline. We skirted around the area marked on the OS map as The Pewits, notorious as a boggy section of the Lake District fells and followed the ups and downs of the conifer plantation until we picked up a path into the trees to Raven Crag. Confusingly there is also another Castle Crag here. The path up to the viewpoint on Raven Crag is in good condition with steps and work is being carried out on the steep path down to Thirlmere.

2020 June Armboth High Tove Raven Crag (1)

2020 June Armboth High Tove Raven Crag (3)

You might have been avoiding these hills to the west of Thirlmere as they certainly don’t look exciting on the map but these central hills have panoramic views and give the few walkers who head there a special sense of isolation.

If I have learnt anything in DC it is that just being out hiking in the fells can never be taken for granted in the future and that every hill has something to offer and appreciate.

Kinlochewe: Our last camping trip before lock down

20.03.2020 Kinlochewe and Lochs Clair and Coulin (23) — Beautiful Loch Clair

Will life become divided into BC [Before coronavirus} and AC [After coronavirus]? And I think I need a category DC (During coronavirus] as this pandemic is likely to be with us for a year or two. Looking back on camping trips we made before lock down they have a happy-go-lucky almost dreamlike quality that I don’t see returning for some time. We took stopping at a cafe, visiting a museum and, of course, camping, not exactly for granted but certainly something we had the freedom to do when we wanted. All this changed in the UK on 23 March 2020 and although things have begun to re-open, as I spend DC standing on a 2 metre line to queue and video calling friends I can’t say the experience is like it was in BC.

Our last BC camping trip was to Torridon in Scotland. We set off in March expecting to be touring this wonderful country for a month and hiking through some of its glorious countryside. Even though our trip was cut short by the virus, we had a wonderful few days before we had to return all the way home.

We have stayed in Torridon, on the west coast of Scotland, before but the last time we were there together on a walking holiday the UK was at war with Argentina over the Falklands Islands. We were looking forward to a much delayed revisit.

Walks from Kinlochewe

You couldn’t ask for better weather the day we followed the tracks and paths around Loch Clair and Loch Coulin. With blue sky and snow still lying on the mountains, the views over the lochs to the distinctive peaks of Liathach and Beinn Eighe took my breath away. The walk is mostly flat and easy to follow for 9 km / 5.5 miles. More details on the Walk Highlands website.

From the Kinlochewe campsite we walked to Loch Maree and along Gleann Bianasdail. This is the approach to Slioch, the craggy high mountain by the loch, but on a cloudy day we stayed low, walking about 16 km / 10 miles. The walk along the river to the loch is a pleasant and easy 10 km return and takes you by the old cemetery and through beautiful gnarled trees covered in lichen. The footbridge over the roaring waterfall might be where some would turn back but we continued up Gleann Bianasdail. Keep a look out for the wild goats that scamper up the steep hillsides here and are delightful to see, we also spotted some red deer. The views back to Loch Maree as you climb higher are worth the longer walk and the river gorge has some vibrant green Scots pine trees huddled along its banks.

Walking there and back the same way when the views are so varied and awe-inspiring is no hardship and I have no hesitation in recommending the 13 km / 8 mile return trip to Loch Grobaig, a tiny loch in the trough between the mountains of Liathach and Beinn Eighe. Starting at the small car park above Torridon House, the path follows the river, through woodland that soon opens out to moorland and a stony and occasionally boggy path. Beinn Alligin looms to your left, the snowy slopes of Beinn Eighe pop up ahead and to your right are the steep slopes and crenellated ridge of Liathach. Following the river, a dipper bobbed along the rushing water between the rocks. As we gained height we looked back for the views of Upper Loch Torridon. We had Loch Grobaig to ourselves and as we ate our lunch I felt embraced by isolation and magnificence.

In the evening sunshine we stopped to recreate photographs we had taken all those years ago at the viewpoint above Upper Loch Torridon. Our trip was cut short but the memories remain. As I type we can’t return to Scotland yet but we hope it will be sooner than 30+ years [maybe even DC] when we are back there again.

22.03.2020 Over Loch Torridon and campsite (2) — The view across Upper Loch Torridon

We stayed at two campsites

Ardtower Caravan Park is a top-notch independent campsite with views over the Moray Firth from the higher hard-standing pitches. We have stayed a couple of times and the owners are always friendly and welcoming.

Kinlochewe Caravan and Motorhome Club Site is a beautifully positioned site at the foot of Beinn Eighe and in the small village. At night the skies are dark and during the daytime the views and local walking are amazing.

The ups and downs of inheriting a garden

17.06.2016 Hotton (5)

When we moved to Morecambe last November we inherited a garden, having been without one for many years. Although it is lovely to have some outdoor space, unfortunately, the garden that came with our house isn’t a perfect mature garden that requires little input from us. In November, the garden was mostly sleeping and what we seemed to have was lots of empty beds waiting to be filled, a rough selection of uneven paving slabs and pitted and cracked concrete paths and a few over-grown shrubs fighting each other for space alongside self-seeded buddleia bushes and brambles. We tried to remember what it was like in the summer when we had viewed the house but the detail escaped us, we would have to wait and see.

The garden had missed the tender loving care of an owner. Before our occupation our bungalow has been tenanted for eight years by different families. Tenants often know their time in a property might be short and don’t always invest in the garden and in the case of our bungalow neither they nor the landlords were gardeners and they both neglected the outdoor space.

We played a waiting game over the winter, just getting out on fine days and keeping the garden tidy but avoiding disturbing anything that might be interesting as every plant is precious. Some of the over-grown bushes benefited from being pruned in those dormant months. As we worked in the garden we began to spot signs that this was once a loved garden; someone had carefully chosen these shrubs and designed the flower beds and digging we would sometimes find an old label for plants that had once been purchased and planted here.

As spring began to appear we started gently dividing some of the tangled shrubs and we noticed green shoots appearing. Working in the front garden, neighbours would stop and introduce themselves and many of them would tell us stories about the garden. ‘I helped the couple who lived here until eight years ago, we planted over a thousand bulbs in this garden,’ the chap who lives a couple of door away told us one sunny afternoon as we tidied up the beds. That explained the profusion of spring flowering bulbs that had begun to emerge as the days lengthened, we enjoyed bluebells and tulips for months. I like the earthy link with a couple we will never know and it is fantastic that their love of gardening still peeps through. As the year progressed we looked forward to seeing what else would pop up [the middle picture shows some of the plants we have inherited].

Working in the garden reminded me that every house I have ever lived in has had a garden that needed considerable amounts of work and care. Is the country full of neglected gardens or have I been unlucky?

Over the last three months the garden hasn’t just revealed spring and summer bulbs. We have a honeysuckle that has climbed over the roof of the garage, apparently the only gardening the previous tenants did was to try and keep this honeysuckle in check. In the front garden a rose bush I pruned in the winter has been producing glorious yellow sweet-smelling blooms since April, working down-wind of this rose bush is pure joy. Those previous gardeners clearly loved roses and we have three or four bushes in the front garden. I imagine the elderly couple planning the garden and picking their favourites for scent and colour.

Along with the valued plants, a healthy crop of horsetails have pushed their soft feathery fir-tree like shoots up in every inch of the back garden. We knew we were buying a horsetail-crowded garden, this was the one thing we could remember from our viewings! We thought we had the energy to tackle them but they are robust and vigorous plants and as I pull them out and dig them up I both admire their strength and hate them. Getting them under control may take the rest of our lives!

We are following a long line of retirees to Morecambe and there is plenty of evidence that the previous owners had some mobility problems, with handrails and additional steps. As we were moving the additional flagstone that someone had added to the steps into our sunken back garden, to give our feet more room, our next-door neighbour leaned over the fence and reminisced about helping the guy put that in place. Apparently, he was already very elderly when he decided that he needed some extra help on these steps and he was spotted struggling from his car with this long flagstone.

On the garage wall are two colourful metal butterflies which our neighbour said once decorated the front of the house. Someone adorned the back wall with three squirrel figures that are forever climbing upwards. Clearing some of the brambles I found a stone tortoise and a stone hedgehog, remnants of when the garden was a different place. Garden ornaments are not generally our thing but these fragments feel part of the space and they have stayed.

We have a rear wall that has clearly grown almost organically, the brickwork a mixture of styles and brick-laying competence. In front of this are a couple of sprawling privet bushes. ‘Ray would trim that privet to symmetrical perfection,’ we were told. I don’t go in for much symmetry in the garden and after years of neglect the privet bushes needed more hacking then trimming. I would emerge from among them, twigs and spiders stuck in my hair!

‘This garden has had more attention during this lock down than it has over the last eight years,’ our immediate neighbour remarked the other day. My laugh is despondency-tinged when he says this. He knows that we didn’t plan to spend this spring working on the garden and that we had months of campervan trips planned. But there is no doubt I have been glad to have something physical and tiring to do when we couldn’t go far and I haven’t had the mind-set to write or edit photographs. I don’t turn to gardening willingly but having our own outdoors has helped me get through lock down.

The most useful thing the previous gardeners left us was a system of water butts. This survived the tenants and landlord and were just ignored behind the garage. With such a dry spring we have been so glad to be able to capture what water there is.

We have planted a tree, a couple of bushes of our own, some herbs and patched up the paths but we are trying to avoid letting the garden suck up all our money and disrupt the finances. I have a forlorn dream that all the work we have done this spring will mean we can just potter doing a bit of light pruning in future years. We’ll see!

Grado, northern Italy: A great choice for easy cycling

Grado (1) — Wildlife-rich wetlands of Friuli-Venezia Giulia near Grado

At the moment, with coronavirus restrictions, I can only dream about campervan trips. When we are able to travel again, Italy will be on my list of places to revisit as I always enjoy finding some of that stunning country’s lesser known sights. Tucked away in the north-east of Italy, near the Slovenian border, is the Friuli-Venezia Giulia area, a lovely part of Italy that we only found thanks to our lack of planning.

Our campervan trips to mainland Europe are only ever sketched in, with little detailed planning. We were therefore excited to have the opportunity to explore somewhere new as we drove over the Slovenian border into Italy’s Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Invaluable in this exploration was a guidebook we had picked up in Slovenia by chance that showed the wealth of natural protected areas in this corner of Italy; it seemed like our sort of place and we decided to stay for a while. From the guide I learnt that Friuli-Venezia Giulia has it’s own Fruilian language and is packed with landscape variety, from wildlife-rich flat coastal wetlands on the Adriatic to the splendour of the foothills of the mountainous Dolomites and also has plenty of history.

We chose Belvedere Pineta Camping Village as it gave us good access to the excellent network of dedicated bicycle paths around Grado. This is a large and rambling site that was quiet in late May. Set among the trees, insects can be a problem but this does mean that there is plenty of bird life. We would eat breakfast entertained by jays, a nuthatch, magpies and blackbirds and in the evenings scops owls made their sonar-like calls overhead and fire flies lit up the bushes. One morning we watched a hare lolloping around the empty pitches at the furthest edges of the site.

Before reaching the campsite we used the guide to find the Doberdo Lakes Nature Reserve where lakes have formed in depressions [poljes] of the limestone / karst. We had some trouble reaching the lake as the road was closed due to road works; however the diversion took us to a parking spot on the northern edge from where we walked through the woodland to the jungle-like reedy edges of the lake. The best views over the pretty lakes were from a high crag that we hiked up to and where there is climbing and a climbers hut at Castelliere Gradina. We also stumbled upon World War One defensive tunnels cut into the rocks.

Cycling north from the campsite there is an excellent traffic-free cycle lane alongside the main road for the 6.5 km to Aquileia. We returned this way but got to the ancient Roman city of Aquileia on a longer route following quiet winding lanes [11.5 km] after turning left from the campsite entrance. This took us through large flat fields of crops and vines and alongside drainage ditches and canals. We stopped often to take in the agricultural scenery and see the ducks and geese on the water. Aquileia is popular with visitors and has information boards to describe the sights. We walked along the Roman harbour remains where the now silted-up river made it difficult to make much sense of what you could see. For a small fee you can visit Aquileia Cathedral which has some stunning early mosaics.

Grado (4) — Boats in the harbour of the smart resort of Grado

Cycling to Grado through this low-lying landscape is an easy 7.5 km from our campsite on dedicated paths and it is popular with all abilities and ages. The short distance look us a while only because we stopped so often to admire the views across the lagoon and see the wildlife; we were particularly excited to spot a pair of African sacred ibis. The town of Grado is on an island in the Adriatic and we were cycling over a five-kilometre long bridge that crosses the dramatic and panoramic waterscape of the lagoon. Grado is a classy resort with a harbour full of boats and a well-kept promenade dotted with sculptures. We wandered through the town’s attractive historical centre and found its cluster of ancient churches that use re-cycled Roman columns and have sixth century mosaics. The Basilica di Santa Eufemia has a pulpit resting on old Roman columns and is covered by a brightly coloured Venetian canopy. The octagonal baptistery is 5^th century, as is the Santa Marie delle Grazie that again has re-used Roman columns and capitals in its interior.

You could cycle to the Valle Cavanata Regional Nature Reserve from Belevedere Pineta Camping Village [it is just over 30 km round trip] as there are dedicated cycle routes all the way. Alternatively you could stay at one of the many campsites to the east of Grado and be nearer. We opted to drive to the Valle Cavanata visitor centre on the Grado lagoon so that we could cycle around the nature reserve. At the visitor centre we were given a free map showing cycle routes that allowed us to explore the area at our own pace. This reserve is a paradise for casual bird watching and near to the centre we stopped to watch the flamingos and egrets. Cycling out towards the Adriatic coast on sandy tracks we met flocks of bee eaters. At the coast we cycled along the top of the dyke with views across the sea until we reached Caneo. Here small fishing boats were moored in tree-lined creeks and we watched two coypu swimming along the Isonzo / Soča river at the estuary. We returned a different way along the minor roads by canals and drainage ditches and by fields of cereals and fruit trees. The area is well organised for cycling and popular with German and Dutch visitors. On the way back to the campsite we stopped at one of the many roadside stalls to buy fresh strawberries, asparagus and red onions that are grown here.

It was only from a recommendation by a couple we got chatting to on the campsite that we heard of the small town of Palmanova, about 25 km north of our campsite. We drove to the town that sits inside a 16^th century Venetian nine-point star-shaped fort and was only completed in the Napoleonic era. We found parking for the Blue Bus outside the walls and entered the town through the Udine Gate, one of three gateways, after taking a look at the aqueduct system. A short walk along the main street and we were soon in the huge central square, the Piazza Grande, the scale of which feels out of proportion for the town. Reconstructions of military and water management equipment from the past sit in the square and six roads radiate from this large piazza, each grandly flanked by two statues. Palmanova was built as an experimental utopian community as well as a defensive fortress city against the Ottomans; however, for some reason this charming town had little appeal and in the 17^th century people were paid to encourage them to live there.

We moved on to Riserva Naturale Regionale Del Lago di Cornino. This small lago provided a perfect short halt, with parking above the lake that is an almost unbelievable vivid clear turquoise and sits prettily among trees and high crags. After lunch looking over the view we sauntered around the circular lake footpath. Peering through the trees over the water, we fortunately spotted an adder hanging ominously from a branch over the water before we alarmed it. Overhead numerous griffon vultures, reintroduced to the area, circled slowly. No doubt if we’d been a victim of the adder they would have made a tasty meal of us!

Grado 6 — Lago di Cornino is brilliant turquoise