Tag Archives: Peak District

Shining Tor, rainbows and the radio antennae

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Back to Shining Tor today, 2 miles from Buxton in the Goyt Valley. A steady ascent to 600 metres on a slabbed path apparently airlifted from abandoned mills in the Pennines to save the environment being ruined by walkers. The views along the way take in pretty much every Peak in the Peak District, Manchester, Cheshire and further with some blisteringly clear moments and the odd rainbow.

Weather was a bit changeable with freeze your socks off stuff at the top. At the trig point by the dry stone wall was what looked like a large fishing road and a shorter pole stuck in the ground a few feet away.

A man was huddled behind the wall bundled in clothing with an array of equipment laid out on the ground next to him.

“Morning, do you mind me asking what this is?!”

“Amateur radio. I’m chatting to people on the top of other mountains. It’s been my hobby forever.”

“Wow, what other mountain tops?”

“Right now Portugal and Greece, it’s not such good conditions today though. I was up here on Tuesday, just above the cloud and I was chatting to someone in Australia. You’d be surprised, there are always people on mountain tops around the world chatting to each other. Mostly nerds like me!”

This is possibly my favourite Peak moment. Just imagining people on mountain tops, randomly chatting to other enthusiasts across the world.

The circular walk continued across to join a sweep of a path that goes from the Errwood Reservoir to the Cat and Fiddle distillery halfway between Buxton and Macclesfield. The sun came out, Sid ran out of dogs who tried to savage him and it was back down to the start.

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Baby steps

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Back to everyday blogging. A leap I didn’t anticipate or think about before today. Where to start? Peak life. Where the weather turns on the spin of a coin, tiny frogs scramble out of the pond in mid September and there is a freshness to the air that defies description.

Today a five mile walk around the Goyt Valley two miles from Buxton. Following this trail. With varying cloud coatings.

It’s taken quite some fannying around setting up this blog [I know]. MyDaftLife probably involved the same ‘one step forward/delete’ process back in the day with less options. I would have done it with a cacophony background of family life (love) and the extraneous shit families with disabled children are forced to deal with.

I yearn for those days. Not the shit mind, that simply becomes more and more baffling.

When Connor died, a neighbour who had a grandchild in Rosie’s class told me she had a daughter who died in her 20s and the pain eased with time. I couldn’t understand how she had never said she had a child who died, how she didn’t blurt it out to everyone she met, how it wasn’t etched all over her being. I couldn’t understand how Rosie’s mate had an auntie they would never meet and took no comfort from her words. Talk to the hand, missy (I howled in my head) this unimaginable pain is going nowhere. Ever. How could it?

She was right. Over years the pain has imperceptibly shifted into a deep love I carry in my heart and hold ferociously, leaving only moments of breathtaking pain. That is quite something.

As are these hills.

[Photos taken on the way to the start of the walk in the rain, looking back walking up from the reservoir, ahead up the path, ahead further up the path towards Cheshire, and left to the Cat and Fiddle pass to Macclesfield.]

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