We live in a land........................

 

My last post of 2023 and I wish I could bring the year to a close on a cheery note. But I can't. The world has been a shitshow in 2023 and to be honest, I can't really see it getting much better in 2024. So many places of despair around the world. I'm just going to comment on how I see the UK at the moment, and that's depressing enough. I'll confess to going into 2024 with my normal optimism rather dented.

We live in a land which has gone insane. We live in Tory Britain. 

We live in a land where it’s the poor who are condemned, not poverty.

We live in a land where it’s considered normal that working people don’t earn enough to feed their families and have to resort to foodbanks while the richest who profit from their labour get ever richer. 

We live in a land that will not admit to the damage that Brexit has done in so many ways - the venom injected by Brexit is still poisoning public discourse.

We live in a land where the refusal of the EU to bend over backwards for us is condemned as threats and bullying. 

We live in a land that has lost its moral compass and is adrift in the modern world.

We live in a land where all these cruel insanities and many, many more are defended by otherwise rational people because, because.... I don't know why. Haven't the last few years been bad enough to convince people not to put their trust in such a duplicitous bunch?

I am genuinely afraid for the future and genuinely depressed about what’s in store for us. How many bright futures will be sacrificed on the altar of an inept Tory government that’s strong and stable only in its greed and inhumanity?

We live in a land where people who campaign peacefully and democratically for a world are decried in the same breath as terrorists who bomb and kill. 

We live in a land where those who do the decrying are British nationalists who glorify military might and who have a fringe of violent extremism of their own.

We live in a land which demands unity but which offers no compromise or concessions to those who have a different opinion. 

We live in a land where the past is exalted and lauded because the future offers nothing to welcome. 

We live in a land where there are no checks or balances, no written constitution, because strength and stability is said to come from a Prime Minister who can do as he pleases and whose power is unconstrained and unconfined. A Prime Minister whose grasp on reality is increasingly tenuous. A Prime Minister who refuses to be held to account, who speaks in soundbites and never answers questions. 

We live in a land which has gone insane. We live in Tory Britain. 

We live in a land which heaps wealth upon the rich and hoards power for the powerful. 

We live in a land where the inept, mediocre, cronies and neophytes are awarded formal state honours for political opportunism.

We live in a land still in thrall to the Ruritanian fantasy of the Monarchy.

We live in a land where the king remains the only person in the world who still wears a double-breasted suit.

We live in a land where the space for democracy is diminishing and decaying. 

We live in a land where the media doesn’t challenge but cheer leads for the right wing zealots.

We live in a land whose government is strong only in its avarice and stable only in its vindictiveness. 

We live in a land which has gone insane. We live in Tory Britain. 

We could live in a land which has potential. We could live in a land which can offer a future to its people. We could live in a land where hope can flourish. We live in a land where increasingly the scales are falling from the eyes of the deceived and the downtrodden. We live in a land where we are learning that the way out of the insanity is to defeat the Tories. We live in a land which can be better than this. Let’s live in a better land. Let’s defeat the Tories. Make that your resolution for 2024. And a Happy New Year to you all!

Anyone fancy a cold water dip?

Much to my delight, the Caerphilly Local History Facebook page recently posted a photograph of the open-air swimming baths at the Morgan Jones Park. These were built in the mid-1930s after the opening of the Park in 1934. Funded by the Special Areas Commission ("designed to facilitate the economic development and social improvement of certain areas which have been specially affected by industrial depression"), these were part of a group of twelve such swimming baths paid for in this way in the valleys. Now long demolished sadly but the memories remain intact. 

In my day, mid 1950s to early 1960s, it was a magnet for many (most? all?) children in the area during the summer months when they were open. OK, so they were bitterly cold and crowded but they were the place to be in the long, hot summer holidays. "I'm going up the baths", I'd say and, after joining the motley crew that comprised our gang, off we'd go with our towels and knitted swimming trunks (yes, really, home knitted swimming trunks). Bedwas and Machen UDC blue bus from Bedwas Square to the Tanyard in Caerphilly (known locally as Lavender Corner because of the awful smell and where my great grandfather, Jacob Batt, had worked as a 'flesher'. Although, from what I've learnt of the occupation, 'deflesher' is probably more accurate), cross over to the Pic (short for Piccadilly) and then up Nantgarw Road to the Park and the watery heaven that was the baths. Depending on how much money we could scrounge from our parents, we'd have enough for the entry (low coppers in old money) and maybe a frozen Jubbly and a bag of chips afterwards. Facilities were rather crude by today's standards - just the pool and rudimentary changing cubicles with wire baskets for your clothes.

On our way home, we'd quite often sneak into Caerphilly Castle and explore the towers, ramparts and moat. This was pre-Cadw and there were numerous breaches in the walls that we could get through. I can't remember any custodians being around because we were never chased away or told not to venture into parts we shouldn't. And there were many of them which are nowadays out-of-bounds, which is a shame because what's left is a pretty sterile castle-experience that you can get anywhere. 

I've come across this photograph which gives the route we walked, from the blue spot in the top left to the baths in the bottom left. I'd put the photograph at slightly later than the mid 50s as, before then, the moat to the right of the castle was the site of allotments with a footpath leading diagonally across it from the Twyn. It was from this side that we got into the castle. A breach at the base of the famous leaning tower was a favourite spot.

Thinking of the baths brings to mind the tragedy in 1961 when a friend, Edward Combstock, drowned there on June 29th. He was just 16 and was a year ahead of me in school. From what I recall, he had hit his head on the diving board and entered the water unconscious. Our gang went to his funeral in Bedwas. Here’s to the memory of Edward, a lovely boy.

In the gloaming

It's still the Festive Season and it is all Christmas Trees, Reindeer, and Kiss Me Quick Under The Mistletoe. Now call me an old misery if you will, but some of these activities have always seemed to me to be best suited to spreading a host of infectious diseases. But I could be in a minority of one on this view. Anyway, a lazy and wet post-Boxing Day afternoon has given me the opportunity to look at our collection of old postcards and I've come across something that drove me into the arms of Mrs Google and diverted me for a while. 

It's a postcard which dates back to 1906 and which was published by the Cynicus Publishing Company of Tayport, Fife. As you can see, we have an acrobatic embrace along with a line from the Victorian song "In The Gloaming". Written by Annie Fortescue Harrison and Meta Caroline Orred, the song is a typical bit of Victorian melodrama about doing the right thing and setting a lover free.

"Think not bitterly of me

Though I passed away in silence

Left you lonely, set you free

For my heart was tossed with longing

What had been could never be

It was best to leave you thus, dear,

Best for you, and best for me."

Mrs Google tells me that it is supposed to be semi-autobiographical because Annie (a lowly daughter of a Conservative MP!) fell in love with the 4th Marquis of Downshire, but gave him up because she was from a lower class and wrote music instead. Some time later, the Marquis heard the song at a concert and realised it was about himself and sought her out, proposed to her and they were married in 1877. It seems to me to be a little too much like the stuff a celebrity publicist would come out with and, if like me, you are suspicious of a happy ending, you will be better concentrating on the artist who drew and published the postcard.

"Cynicus" was the name used by the Victorian artist Martin Anderson who gained fame during the picture postcard craze of the first decade of the twentieth century. Unlike many other postcard artists who produced their drawings for established publishers, Anderson set up his own publishing company - The Cynicus Publishing Company - and for a brief time achieved both fame and fortune. Alas, the success was as short lived as the postcard craze and by 1911 the business faced financial ruin. Poor Anderson lived for the next two decades in poverty and was eventually laid to rest in an unmarked paupers' grave.

Now that's the kind of story we want for Christmas. Bah Humbug!

Mystery Women of Vancouver

Most old photographs are enigmatic, usually providing far more questions than answers. As an example, who are these two ladies, where were they out walking, and when? If you are lucky, you might find a caption scrawled on the back of the photo, but even these can be less than illuminating. On this particular photograph all it says is "This was taken in December on the street". Why, oh why, can't people put more information on the back of photographs. I've got so many unknowns like this.

Colourising the image enhances it somewhat but still raises questions.

The photograph comes from a file which I’ve labelled "unknown family photographs and odds & sods". I do not recognise this rather stern pair of ladies, but the photograph must have been passed to me through my family as I’ve got very few random images from other sources. I think it comes from ‘my’ side of the family rather than Mrs P’s. This being the case, the place could be Brighton,  Bristol or South Wales. The lady on the right is not my maternal grandmother but there are some similarities. However, there is a "foreign" feel about the location - the names of the shops, the size of the billboards, the pricing of the goods. I tried searching for some of the shop names, but it wasn't until I got a match for "Millar and Coe" that things became interesting. I found online a 1930s photograph of a street of shops in which there is a Millar & Coe almost next door to a shop called Cordell. Not in Brighton, Bristol or South Wales but in Vancouver in Canada.

Some of my questions are now answered - the place is the city of Vancouver - a place, to the best of my knowledge, nobody in the family has ever visited - and, from the style of dress, I’d say the time is the 1930s. And, given that it's labelled as being in December, I'll assume that the ladies are doing a bit of Xmas shopping. I am, however, still left with the mystery as to who these two ladies of Vancouver are. Ah, the joys of family history. Maybe I’ll uncover a link one day - not out of the question as it took me 10+ years to accurately attribute a couple of other photographs in the same file. My working hypothesis is that the answer may lie with my grandmother’s extended and largely unknown tree of step-siblings from Bristol. 

Knowledge and Competence

Yesterday the Tory Health Secretary Victoria Atkins launched a bitter and ignorant attack on Junior Doctors, diminishing their medical experience by describing them as "doctors in training" as if they're not properly qualified doctors. The reality, of course, is that Junior Doctor is the term for a fully qualified doctor who is doing a 2 year clinical foundation, or has not specialised yet, meaning they're supervised by consultants in their area of practice. If Victoria Atkins was really concerned about medically unqualified people within the NHS, perhaps she should look at the Tory Department of Health, including herself and her junior ministers.

Victoria Atkins, herself, worked as a barrister before becoming a career politician. She has no medical qualifications.

Junior health minister, Helen Whatley, did a couple of years of management consultancy and then a stint at the Internet dinosaur AOL before becoming a career politician. She claims to have volunteered at NHS hospitals in her youth, but has no medical qualifications.

Junior health minister, Andrew Stephenson, was an insurance broker before becoming a career politician. He has no medical qualifications.

Junior health minister, Andrea Leadsom, was a debt trader for Barclays Bank and then an investment banker before getting on the Tory career politician gravy train. She has no medical qualifications.

Junior health minister Nick Markham was a businessman with his fingers in a lot of pies. One of his most notable ventures was his chairmanship of Inview Technologies which went bust in 2020 costing investors over £20 million. He was parachuted into the unelected House of Lords so he could be made a junior health minister without the bother of even getting elected. He has no medical qualifications.

Of the six Tory politicians who run the Department of Health, only one has any real NHS experience. Maria Caulfield worked as an NHS nurse for a couple of decades before turning to politics.

In light of the alarming dearth of medical training and experience within the Tory-run department of health, it's a bit damned rich for Victoria Atkins to try to diminish the expertise of trained and qualified NHS doctors, isn't it? But since when has any Tory adminstration bothered with knowledge and competence as criteria for high office? Certainly not this one. Liz Truss, anyone?

School trips with a difference

Would you believe that we regularly played in and out of these wagons?

I was born and grew up in a Welsh mining village, in the Rhymney Valley, just a couple of miles from Caerphilly. Our local pit was the Bedwas Navigation Colliery, that had the reputation of yielding good quality steam coal for the maritime sector - the clue is in the name 'navigation'. It seemed that every village around us had had a pit at one time and each village had provided hundreds of men and boys to help hew the coal from the ground. Coal brought prosperity, albeit at a pretty low level, to our village, but at a cost. At one end of the spectrum were the fatalities, not that many but there were regular accidents. At the other end, I remember that miners were covered in little blue scars, like tattoos. If you got even the smallest cut down a pit, the dust got in straight away and turned it blue forever - and there was nothing you could do about it. The dust got in to your lungs too but these are part of a story for another day.

The primary school I attended, between 1952 and 1959, was Bedwas Junior Mixed. It was a typical mining village school, with most of the pupils' fathers (most mothers stayed at home in those days) having some connection with the pit, either directly as colliers or indirectly as supplying some service to the pit. Our school outings were very limited, in stark contrast with what my grandchildren have experienced. We had an annual trip, by steam train, to Bristol Zoo, and the occasional charabanc outing to St Fagans, nowadays the St Fagans National Museum of History, at Cardiff. And we also had, for two or three years, a unique day-trip - a visit to our local pit!

Who in their right mind would take young children down a working coal mine now? It would never be allowed in today's litigious and safety-conscious times. And in retrospect, it was a pretty mad thing to do. But, within the context of the zeitgeist, it was a little like a 'take your child to work day'.

We walked the mile or so up to the pit in crocodile file and, after some 'pop' and a biscuit in the pit canteen, we were taken to the pit head under the winding gear. There we were all crammed in the cage and snuggled up against each other. The man in charge of the ascent and descent was Len the Pen and he was a neighbour of ours in Bryn Fedw. I think he said something like "are you ready for the ride?" and then we gasped as the floor fell away. Len let the cage drop a while and put the brakes on. It was dark and he said that we were stuck. Much screaming at this point and then we dropped again. I thought the cable had snapped but the brakes came on again as we got near to the bottom of the shaft - Mr Google tells me that the shaft was around 2000ft deep, and it felt like it. When we reached the bottom, everyone outside, and Len the Pen, were doubled up with laughter. They obviously enjoyed playing this trick on innocent children. It must have livened up an otherwise dull day down the mine.

We didn't venture far from the cage and I can still smell the dank, foetid odour, the likes of which I haven't encountered before or since - a very distinct combination of strange gases. Lights were switched out for a short while and we were shown how miner's lamps were used. At one point, in the distance we heard a long, wailing siren, followed by a bellowing, full-throated roar. Shot blasting at the coal face! It could have been my dad doing that as he was a shot firer for a while. And then it was back in the cage and up to the surface and more 'pop' and biscuits.

If I wanted to be dramatic, I could say that, sometimes, even now, I wake up with my head throbbing and my ears ringing, as if my skull has been tightly clamped in a vice all night. I haven't been to the doctor's about it. It wouldn't do any good. It isn't depression, or stress. It isn't a migraine, or a hangover. It's nothing physical at all. But that’s not true. It's just a memory - a memory from childhood. It is just a memory of a dank, smelly, sweaty, claustrophobic place. I hated the foul, festering hell-hole the moment I set foot down there. I could say that I decided that day that I'd never end up down the pit like my grandfather, dad and others. I could say that I decided that day I'd never set foot in a pit again as long as I lived. I could say that I decided that day I wanted something better. 

But that would be completely wrong. There was never any chance that I would end up down the pit. My parents would never have allowed that, and they often told me in no uncertain terms. And for that, I am eternally grateful.

Looking up to the pit from the bottom of our street - Bryn Fedw. The tips are likely to be reclaimed in the relatively near future. Recovered coal will be recovered and sent to steel furnaces and cement works, with the remaining landscaped back to its’original topography’ - and who can remember what that looked like? Well before my time but I presume that plans exist somewhere.

Moaning about Mone

 

Scottish Tory peer Michelle Mone, who was awarded a seat in the House of Lords by David Cameron for her services for trolling for the Tories during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, has been in the news recently over allegations about her role in a so called VIP lane contract for PPE. PPE Medpro, a company owned and controlled by Mone’s husband, was awarded Government contracts worth more than £200 million to supply personal protective equipment after she made use of the so called VIP lane to recommend it to ministers. Much of the equipment supplied was later deemed to be unfit for use. Mone and her husband stand to gain millions of pounds from the deal.

Mone at first denied she had any involvement in the contract, sending aggressive and threatening legal letters to journalists reporting on facts that Mone now admits were true. On Sunday Mone and her husband appeared on the BBC in a softball interview with Laura Kuenssberg which had apparently been set up by the same press advisor who told Prince Andrew that the best thing to do was to appear in an interview that the allegations that he’d been involved with a sex trafficked teen with whom the sweaty prince appeared in a now notorious photo could not be true as he was unable to sweat and in any case he’d been in a Pizza Hut in Woking at the time. That interview worked well, didn't it? The takeaway from this interview is Mone and Barrowman’s claim that they don’t have the money from the PPE, it’s just resting in their trust fund. Doing what, exactly?

The simple fact remains uncontested no matter how Mone tries to spin it. There was a global catastrophe during which millions died, 200,000 in the UK alone, countless millions of others had their lives blighted, jobs lost, families destroyed and grieving. The natural response of any normal decent human being when faced with tragedy on such an immense scale is sympathy, grief, empathy, and compassion. That, however, was not the reaction of Mone. Their response when confronted with unthinkable human tragedy, was to profiteer from it and take advantage from it in order to enrich themselves. It’s obscene behaviour. Just because others did the same thing that doesn’t mean that it’s OK. It means that Mone and her husband are just as nasty and bereft of a moral compass or a basic grasp of human decency as they are.

Kuenssberg did not ask Mone about the legal threats she’d been making to journalists for reporting on facts Mone now concedes were true. Instead Mone, yet again, was allowed to play the victim. The excuses she gave were as convincing as Prince Andrew’s sweating story and equally likely to backfire. Her only sin, she claimed, was to lie to the press about her involvement, which she pointed out was not a crime. She insisted that she was being made a scapegoat for the gross incompetence of the Conservatives, a party she was happy to support until very recently.

Mone and her husband are currently being investigated by the police for their role in this sordid affair. Both vehemently deny any allegations of wrongdoing. But they are just the latest in a long line of awful, greedy, entitled, amoral opportunists who automatically assume that their wealth and status will insulate them from the laws and obligations that bind the rest of us. And, the truly appalling thing is, they’re right.

Irrespective of the outcome of the police investigation, none of this would have happened had David Cameron not given Mone a seat in the Lords or if the Tories had not opened up a preferential route to lucrative government contracts for friends and associates of cabinet ministers. Both of these events point to the rotten corruption at the very heart of the Westminster system. The House of Lords is institutionalised cronyism. it makes cronyism and patronage a central tenet of government. The Lords doesn’t need to be reformed, it needs to be abolished. We all know Starmer will do neither. Mone is what you get when cronyism becomes an institution and a central pillar of government. We are so used to this way of doing things that we no longer appreciate just how corrupt the British state is, to its very core.

While we’re all face palming over the audacity and rank entitlement of Mone and her husband, there was another very British example of audacity and rank entitlement which you might have missed. Keir Starmer is very fond of telling us how much he’s changed the Labour party, an assessment with which former Tory MP and erstwhile Conservative leadership candidate Rory Stewart wholeheartedly agrees. On Sunday Stewart announced that he’d be happy to serve in a government led by Keir Starmer. Stewart saying he would be open to serving as a minister in Keir Starmer’s cabinet shows that Labour is the new Conservative Party and the original Conservative Party is the new BNP. Eton and Oxbridge educated upper middle class white men are so dripping in entitlement that they believe they have an automatic right to prominent political positions, and Labour, under Starmer, is now so right wing that it’s a party that a man who stood for the leadership of the Tory party only four years ago feels that he’d be comfortable in. Stewart’s biggest problem is that he’s probably too left wing for Starmer to be comfortable with him.

Peace For Our Time : But What Time?

Despairing at the total absence of any signs of peace in the Middle East, my mind turned to earlier peace efforts and that most famous return flight from Munich: the one undertaken by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on the 30th September 1938. Amongst other things, I wondered how long the journey took him. Why such a ridiculous question should have come into my mind at a time when the difference between life and death in Gaza seems wafer thin, I have no idea. But I was determined to discover the answer.

There is a lot of information available about that journey. Chamberlain was returning with a meeting with Hitler, Mussolini, and Prime Minister Édouard Daladier of France: a meeting at which the future fate of Czechoslovakia had been decided (without the active participation of the Czech Government). On his return to Heston Aerodrome*, Chamberlain waved his famous piece of paper and spoke of peace. Later that day, in Downing Street, he issued his famous promise of "peace for our time". We know what kind of plane he flew in (a Lockheed 14 with the registration number G-AFGN), we even know Chamberlain's ticket number (BA/WS 18249: the actual ticket was re-discovered a few years ago). But how long did the flight take?

I eventually found the answer within an archive recording from the BBC. The clip is from the original report made as the plane landed at Heston and features the sonorous tones of the famous reporter, Richard Dimbleby. Near the beginning of the broadcast, Dimbleby comments on the poor weather in England but says that the Prime Minister had good weather for most of the return flight which took "something like three and a half hours - a little less than that actually". You can find the full nine minute broadcast from September 1938 on the BBC Archive website - it makes interesting, but poignant, listening.

Around the same time that Chamberlain was making his three and a half hour flight, the German poet Bertolt Brecht, living in exile in Denmark wrote a poem entitled "From A German War Primer" One verse from the poem says:

When the leaders speak of peace

The common folk know

That war is coming.

When the leaders curse war

The mobilization order is already written out.

War grows from their peace

Chamberlain ended his famous "Peace For Our Time" speech with the following request to his audience: "And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds".  A verse of the Brecht poem seems to almost echo the thought:

It is night

The married couples

Lie in their beds. The young women

Will bear orphans

Much maligned ever since, I think the importance of Chamberlain's apparent 'appeasement' of Hitler is underestimated. It did buy time for British forces to be better prepared for a war than they otherwise would have been. But that's a debate for another day.

* Despite a widely held belief, Chamberlain did not land at Croydon Airport. It was Heston, to the west of London, not far from Heathrow, and now buried under the Heston Service Area on the M4.

They must think we are all idiots

It's unbloody believable. Do they really think that we are all idiots?

Both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have claimed that they've lost all of their WhatsApp messages from the Covid pandemic period. Conspirancy theorists would say that it's strange that this coincides with the time when they caused the premature deaths of thousands of people by allowing the virus to spread like wildfire in care homes, and squandered billions of pounds in fraudulent covid contracts and support schemes.

Now, pretty much anyone who has ever got a new phone knows that it's easy to transfer app data such as old WhatsApp messages as these are stored on cloud servers and not locally on the phone. So their excuse that the messages were lost when swapping phones is absolute twaddle. Furthermore it's beyond belief that they're seemingly going to get away with conducting government business via WhatsApp and then overseeing the destruction of the records of what they were up to.

Imagine if ordinary people like you or I had caused even one death, or lost a thousandth of the cash the Tory government wasted on covid fraud and dodgy PPE scams, then tried to escape responsibility by insisting all of our communications from that time period somehow got "lost". We wouldn't just find ourselves up in court on charges like manslaughter or fraud, they'd probably throw perverting the course of justice at us too for the deleted messages.

But somehow the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time are seemingly getting away with nothing more than a ticking off from the covid inquiry for their outrageous behaviour and subsequent deletion of crucial records, because the whole system is rigged in favour of well-connected establishment elitists. Where is the challenge to what they've claimed to be the case? Where is the report from the forensic IT specialists? As is so often the case, it's one set of rules for ordinary people, and another infinitely laxer set of rules for the establishment insiders who actually have the power to destroy countless peoples' lives and waste billions of pounds in public funds.

Summer Holiday 2023: Swaledale Part 3

Normally, I write my posts on walks fairly close to when we've actually done them and when the memory is at its freshest. But I'm continuing describing aspects of our North Yorkshire stay several months after we've returned home. And I'm rather enjoying doing it this way. It's giving me the opportunity to look back on the photographs I took at the time and relive the landscapes we walked through. Perhaps this is a better way of doing things?

This walk I'm about to describe is one of the iconic Swaledale routes - up Gunnerside Gill. A small valley branching off Swaledale into the moorland north of Gunnerside. It was the site of intensive lead mining in the 18th and 19th centuries and still contains much evidence of its industrial past. Just our sort of place for a walk and it was a cracker.

First of all though, perhaps I should explain some of the local terms for landscape, or topographical, features. The little valley we’re heading for in is a ‘gill’, which comes from the Norse word ‘gil’, meaning ravine or gully. The stream running through a gill is a beck, from the Norse ‘bekkr’. This one we'll be following is Gunnerside Beck. Look at any map of the Yorkshire Dales or the Lake District, and you’ll find more Norse words. Examples include ‘foss’ or ‘force’ for waterfalls and ‘fell’ from ‘fjell’ meaning hill or mountain. Even the word ‘dale’, meaning valley, originates from an old Norse word, ‘dalr’. Norse people first settled in these uplands more than 1,100 years ago and they've certainly left their mark.

A straightforward route: follow the gill for a few miles, climb up a steep bit and then follow a track back to the starting point in Gunnerside. The elevation profile tells it all - up for 3.5 miles and then down for about the same distance. Overall, I would rate the walk as high moderate. Most of it is fairly easy, but there are some steep bits, a lot of undulations, rugged terrain, and some very thin trails with steep drops. Well worth doing.

A rather beguiling gate, offering an invitation to move into the woodland bordering the beck. I like these transitions from one phase to another.

Lots of water coming down the beck which as rocky a streambed that I've come across. I presume that the steep gradient of the flow means that anything small is quickly scoured away.

And in amongst the ferns, the footpath winds its way alongside the beck.

And we come to the first substantial remains of the lead mining industry that played such a key role in Swaledale’s history. I'm standing on what’s known as a dressing floor. Do you see those open-sided stone chambers up above? They’re known as bouse teams and that’s where the mined material was stored before being ‘dressed’. In this process, women and boys, some aged as young as nine, separated the valuable ore from the worthless waste. It was a very labour-intensive task and that’s one of the reasons why the mine owners used women and children – they were cheaper than men. Can you imagine how busy, noisy and dusty this place must’ve been back then? Dozens of people would’ve been toiling away beside the beck, smashing up the rocks by hand and sifting through it for the precious ores of lead. It was a very demanding physical process and the noxious lead would probably have poisoned many of those working here in one way or another. Lead poisoning is awful and is associated with abdominal problems, learning difficulties in children, memory loss, kidney disease, high blood pressure, reproductive issues and problems relating to the central nervous system. And this sort of exploitation is still going somewhere in the world.

Looking up from whence the beck flows. The steep slopes leading down there are composed almost entirely of rubble and spoil from the workings. This is part of the Bunton ‘hush’, where water would’ve been used to enable open-cast mining. As in most hushes, this one followed the line of an existing, natural streams. although a few hushes would’ve followed an entirely man-made water course,  In either case, a dam would’ve been built at the top of the slope and water released, either to expose the ore vein or to wash away debris as miners went to work with pick and shovel. The water’s still there and the exposed bedrock remains. There are hushes on the other side of the valley too – rocky ravines that cut into the hillside aren’t the result of natural processes. 

Water, water, everywhere. And this wasn't even a stream. Just overspill from the recent rains.

This photograph shows the two different methods of accessing the ore-bearing rock at Bunton Mine. This old adit entrance is the only visible sign on the surface of a level driven into the hillside to reach deeper veins of galena, the lead-bearing ore. The deep gash of rubble  in the hillside above is the hush, the result of water being dammed above the lead seam and released in a rush. The overlying debris would be washed away, exposing the ore-bearing rock, which could then be extracted at the surface with picks and chisels.

Looking downstream with the waste heaps prominent. The scale is quite amazing and compares with anything we've seen as a result of tin mining back home in Cornwall.

I think this photograph says it all! It was quite a slog to the highest point of around 1700 feet on the walk. To be fair, this relaxation was only momentary and Mrs P was soon back on her feet, raring to go again.

A rather dramatic sky over the moors.

A little more blue sky in this view. Give it a few more weeks and the heather will be in flower. Should be quite spectacular: shame we are going to be back home when it comes out.

Our walk was just a few days before the 'Glorious 12th August' when the moors would resound to the sound of gunshots blasting Black Grouse such as these out of the skies. And they call it 'sport'! 

Looking down over Gunnerside to the patchwork of fields and barns leading down to the Swale. Villages like this are rooted in the landscape and merge seamlessly with their surroundings. Shame that all urban developments couldn't achieve the same.

Right at the start/end of our walk looking up the beck from the bridge in Gunnerside.