Hiking
Here's a postcard from the South Downs, the new National Park. We were a group of seven or eight from the GOC West Kent group. This was billed as a 9½ mile linear hike from Falmer railway station to Lewes railway station, along a portion of the South Downs Way in the National Park.
Very definitely not the Alps, nor even Dartmoor or the Lakeland Fells, it's the furthest I've hiked off road so far, with the added pleasures and pressures of hiking in a group from the club. Plus of course the orchids, the pretty colours and the far views of the Sussex Weald and the coastal cliffs.
An early autumn ramble with GOC London around the water park at Rickmansworth, a short ride on the Metropolitan Line out to the north west of London. The venerable Grand Union canal (this section completed 1814), river Colne and some gravel pits are crossed by numerous footpaths which made a pleasant tour amongst the wildlife.
Our lunchtime stop at a pub alongside a canal lock was followed by a small hill up to countryside on the edge of the Chiltern Hills and then back down to Rickmansworth.
A day trip to Penrith and Keswick by train. Mike suggested a little hike in Whinlatter Mountain Forest, for its views and variety of routes. We parked at the national mountain bike centre, which is equally a national level kiddie hell-hole. But as usual the majority of the tourists stayed very close to the car park so we were able to enjoy the views over Keswick towards Skiddaw, Helvellyn and a brief view of Scafell Pikes. All very clear in the spring sunshine.
Always difficult to get on the train back to London but especially after such a fleeting visit. Good for me to walk on a few slightly rough paths, those plus the climbing had made me usefully sore this morning back in West Kensington.
A bus ride to hike one of the Calanques. Just a bus ticket there and back, another 3 Euros well-spent for the bright sunshine and the clear air above the azure sea.
Hiking the Calanques underneath the Massif of Mt. Puget (564 m.) between Marseille and Cassis isn’t a lot of altitude and it’s not a huge distance. The scale of the rocks is big enough but the problems are the sun (and maybe the wind) and the loose limestone. The closeness of the sea, giving the impression that should one slip, the result would be an inevitable slide through seriously sharp scree and over a vertical cliff in to the dark turquoise Mediterranean. The cliffs being but 400m. is scant consolidation... it’s possible to drown in a puddle just a few inches deep etc. Cap Canaille is 394 m. (the orange cliff in the distance) and the Col de La Candelle that I was hiking is 433 m.
But this precarious but very solid terrain between cliff and sea is home to a wide variety of plants and trees, many apparently thriving on solid rock in blatant botanical improbability. The paths lead from view to view with, as coast paths do, the implicit understanding that the sea remains on the same hand. The daring heights and improbable passes thrill as much as the variation in vegetation with altitude.
The climbs, looking innocuous but actually many tens of metres of altitude and leading to a different botanical zone, beguile with their apparent simplicity only to ensnare with multiple successive pitches requiring true three point scrambling.
Looking back in a “did I do that?” manner was yet again thrilling. The South Downs path was never like this and the scrambles in the Avon Gorge in Bristol that I learnt scrambling on as a child are now fenced off and labelled dangerous. Full four times those scrambles counts in the Calanques a mere dashing of the line on the map. Something to be expected along the route of a grande randonnée. Not that I’d enjoy it more heavily laden than with a day pack.
Calanques are very Marseille: not glacial valleys that became flooded like the fjords but tortured and uplifted rock that was once sea bed.
And the final convenience of the Calanques is the bus ride home and dinner in a restaurant with a fine jazz saxophonist and xylophonist busking nearby...
