Chores, TV and English Walks

Saturday, 5 July 2014

It started raining on Friday night, and when we woke up it was raining, so spent morning doing domestic chores.  The sun came out after lunch, so I left Brian working on the computer and went for a walk.  The tide was out so walked on the rock self to discover what the little hut on the far side of it is.  Turns out it houses life saving equipment.  Continued on over the golf course and came back and sat on one of the benches overlooking the sea.  It was such a beautiful afternoon the other woman sitting on the bench turned out to be a twitcher and she was taking photos of the rookery at the edge of the cliff near the golf course.  Her husband is into diving, so I learned about another activity which operates out of Seahouses.  

I watched as they prepared the boat for diving on Sunday morning

A boat full of divers leaving Seahouses early Sunday morning

She was complaining about the lack of mobile coverage in England so I was telling her about the NBN debate in Oz.  I was explaining that Turnbull's plan disadvantages the people who live in rural areas in Australia, and she said that there is a similar debate going on here.  Apparently the Post Office is complaining that it cannot compete with the private parcel delivery service in the remoter parts of Britain and want to stop this aspect of their business.  With conservative governments in both Britain and Australia  "open for business" is the go, so long as it is for private profit!

Played Scrabble on the iPad in the evening.  We usually watch TV at night.  There are a tremendous number of "free to air" stations here, but they are very similar to the ones at home.  Reruns of just about everything.  To top it all, the BBC has gone sports mad - Wimbledon takes precedence over everything, but that is supplemented with large doses of over enthusiastic reporters raving about the Tour de France which started in Yorkshire this year plus the World Cup football.  As someone who can't abide all the sport broadcasting in Oz I'm flabbergasted by the coverage here.  I told Brian the other night that I'm sure it is because the western world is "male"!  Don't think he agreed with me though.

On the subject of TV.  We do enjoy the program "Pointless".  It is a type of quiz show where 100 people are surveyed with the question and the objective is for the contestants to come up with the most obscure or pointless answer.  It is quirky and often the contestants come up with an answer that scores 2 or 3 but the object is that it has to be 0.  It is very British centred which is probably why we have not seen it in Oz. 

There are lots of programs similar to Grand Designs.  While all the sport was going on we watched one called "A place in the Sun: At home or away?"  Brian has a running commentary about it which runs along the lines that none of them have done much research and most of them don't know what they want!  The other that we watched often are the reruns of MASH.  There have also been a few good movies, but nothing to write home about.  At one stage we even saw one of our favourites "As time goes by".

SUNDAY, 6 JULY 2014

Another beautiful sunny morning.  The first day of our last week in England.  I went for a walk on the beach and when I got back, Brian suggested we could do the walk we had talked about with the very helpful woman at the Wooler tourist information office.  It is a new walk in the Northumberland National Park and had been written about in one of the brochures we had found at the house we are staying in.  She explained that there are a lot of "finger valleys" in the Cheviots but most of the walks are linear, and walkers like circular walks.  Being an optimist I believed her but the College Valley walk from Hethpool was the straw that broke the camel's back.  I'm sorry that I was so angry about it and that Brian had to put up with me cursing and swearing as we progressed through the second half of it, but I will never ever go for another walk like this in an English national park.

Apart from a few cars cleaning up after a party in the National Park the night before it started out as a nice walk.  It was on a small road beside a river and we could see what looked like trails on the other side. 

This is the youth hostel with two tipi tents - part of the accommodation for the party on Saturday night. 

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When we left the road, the directions were to turn left after crossing the river into some trees.  In this environment that is a bit like the description someone else reported on about going across the paddock with the sheep in it!

There was no way mark to be seen anywhere near the start of this new part of the walk.  So we went on up further to what looked like a track.  The description of the walk included a cya (cover your a....) statement about it being steep, so we took it that this was the steep bit, but when we got there we could find no alternative route down.  So down we came and retraced our steps to find a break in the trees which is where the way mark should have been.

I agree. The instructions were that 'just before the second gate leave the track and bear left down through the trees'. Well I was interested in how we had missed the turning. The turning had all the appearance of a small gap in a privet hedge! Definitely no sign or waymark. The whole point of signs and waymarks is that they be placed in situations which are unclear or there is some ambivalence about the exact direction. It should be noted that these instructions were in the 'Northumberland National Park - Visitor Guide 2014' although it should be stressed that the authorities are constrained by the interests and influences of private and often influential land holders not to mention the world wide shift to small government which often gives low priority to social investment.  

We could see that the trees formed a kind of wood, so we walked through them, me thinking that the track had to get better.  But there simply was no track unless you call this one -

The black dot two thirds up and centre is me chest high in bracken!

 


The things that look like posts are not actually posts, they are shields protecting small oak trees!

 The vegetation on either side was so high a short person would have difficulty seeing where they were going.  I couldn't see what was under my feet but could feel lots of rocks, long grass and water.  By this time we were so far in we were hoping it would get better because the thought of going back was horrible.  About two hours later, it did get a bit better.  But not much.  The best part of it was the bridge across the river that got us back to civilisation.  But that's it as far as I'm concerned.  Never again will I believe anything anyone tells me about a walk in an English National Park.  

Which brings me to my favourite gripe concerning the putative term 'National Park' for large areas of English countryside. It would be far clearer, from the viewpoint of the international visitor, if the original and more accurate term 'Commons' were used. The existing 'National Parks' contain many farmhouses, hamlets, some villages and in some cases at least one town. Also, crop farming and the grazing of domestic sheep and cattle are widespread. In the New Forest, for example, animal husbandry of feral horses is permitted and domestic cattle and horses are allowed on occasions to run free in this so called 'National Park'; and also the cropping of the forest is allowed albeit to approved foresters as a private business activity - all in the claim of conserving the park's environment. Essentially the problem lies in that Britain started far too late (1951) in gazetting these so called national parks.