Escape to Continue

Windgather

A 14 mile run with 2800 ft of ascent, completed entirely in the rain. Within minutes of leaving Buxton I was on the moors and amongst occasional relics of the now-dismantled Cromford and High Peak Railway, including the sealed-up entrance to the Burbage Tunnel. The first section of the railway was completed in 1830 and operated as one of the highest railways in England before the final section was closed in 1967. It seemed unlikely terrain for a railway - stationary steam engines were required to haul trains up the steepest inclines - even though the route attempted to avoid the greatest difficulties. In “Pictures of the Peak”, published in 1891, Edward Bradbury describes the rail’s tortuous route; “the sky-scraping High Peak Railway, with its corkscrew curves, that seem to have been laid out by a mad Archimedes endeavouring to square the circle.”

Cats Tor

From Shining Tor the Cat and Fiddle road is visible. Another tortuous route, and another Peak road with a claim to be one of the most dangerous in the UK. It is popular with bikers, although it isn’t quite so much fun if you adhere strictly to the recently imposed 50 mph speed limit. The pub at the top, also called the Cat and Fiddle, is a Robinson’s pub and has therefore concentrated on goodish, cheapish beer in typical Robinson’s surroundings. It was used for a long weekend in 1916 by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and his mistress, the actress Colette O’Niel.

Shining Tor, Cat and Fiddle in the Distance

Bertrand Russell was a talented and influential mathematician as well as a philosopher, logician, historian and a pacifist who was a founder of the anti-nuclear movement. His philisophical outpourings included his assertion that sex outside of marriage is not necessarily naughty if the people concerned love each other. Russell, who married four times, must have loved his companion at the Cat and Fiddle, a 20 year old actress (he was 44 at the time). In the film “Hindle Wakes”, released less than two years after her trip to the Cat and Fiddle, Colette O’Niel plays a character called “Fanny Hawthorne” who has a naughty weekend with a young man. This predates the 1930s origins of Method Acting.

Russell was an atheist, and was rather irked that most religions appeared to be constructed in such a way that they could be neither proved nor disproved. He thought it unfair that he should be required to disprove these religions and illustrated his point through the “celestial teapot”:

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”

Obviously Russell is ridiculing religion by choosing to use a teapot to illustrate his point, it was probably considered quite a surreal suggestion in 1952; a time when Harry Secombe was considered a master of absurd comedy. The modern equivalent of the Celestial Teapot is the Flying Spaghetti Monster, pictured here in the work “Touched by His Noodly Appendage”, part of a religion called Pastafarianism. It was created in protest at attempts to teach Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolution in Kansas schools. Pastafarianism is celebrated each year on the 19th of September, “International Talk Like a Pirate Day”.

Where does this leave Bertrand Russell? Was he a Bill Wyman-like celebrity who had a penchant for younger women, or the founder of modern Pastafarianism?

Touched by His Noodly Appendage

The Route

The route is taken from the book “Discovering the Moors and Dales of the Peak District” by Jerry Rawson and Roger Redfern. It has great photographs by Jerry Rawson and it’s worth trying to get hold of this out-of-print book, if only for the photos. I was lucky and found a copy at Oxfam online.