Start at the Dam

For people who just want the facts and none of what Paul calls my “poetic crap” (i.e. sentences), I finished the Nine Edges today, in about 3hrs 54 minutes. Which is just under my target of four hours.

Here’s the rest, for those of you gifted with textual endurance. It was perfect weather with blue skies and a cool breeze - the best I have seen since I started my training. The runners assembled for a mass start beneath the reservoir dam. There were some weird pre-race rituals to be gone through for some, and I assume that the wriggling and writhing bodies on the grass were stretching themselves. I felt obliged to touch my toes a couple of times before we were released. I was astonished at the pace that people set off at, but felt I ought to keep up, at least to start with. There was quite a split created by a couple of different routes up to Derwent Edge and I had fortunately chosen the shorter. Being me, I had worked out the split times I needed to achieve at each of the checkpoints in order to sneak under my target of four hours and I was nicely on track when I got onto Derwent Edge. I remembered the first time I had run here when I had been horrified at the distant view of Stanage, not even halfway to the finish.

I was going at quite a pace, with a pack of half a dozen people behind me including one woman who was probably using me as a windbreak. I was going well and was ahead of my planned time. When we started the drop down to Moscar several of the pack with better downhill technique disappeared ahead of me, never to be seen again. By the time I was at Burbage North, I was almost 15 minutes ahead of my plan. I knew I was running too fast and would pay later - novice mistake. Of course the big question you are all asking is “how were your nipples?” Throughout my training I’ve struggled to protect myself from jogger’s nipple. I’ve tried plasters, zinc oxide tape, fabric strapping and even duck tape. Nothing stays on. So I invested in some “Nipguards”. The shop assistant made me say it twice. From the Nipguards website, “NipGuards adhere directly to the base of the nipple and are 100% guaranteed not to fall off until you decide to remove them”. I don’t know what the nature of the guarantee is, but I presume it includes consequential loss and I am entitled to a new left nipple at least. Blood was starting to stain my running vest when I met Ruth at Burbage and applied a new Nipguard to the remaining tatters.

Me, drinking water.

From Burbage onwards things got progressively harder and my target time seemed to be slipping away from me as my early pace took its toll. I was also sweating a substance which causes temporary blindness. I eventually found another runner moving at a good pace and we stuck together until I made my lumbering push to the end along Birchen Edge. I almost got myself run over on the road at the finish.

The marshalls at the checkpoints were a great, amicable and encouraging bunch of people and they were no different at the finishing line - thanks to them for a well organised, friendly race along a stunning route. I collected my token for a free pint at the Robin Hood, as well as a t-shirt, and headed over with Ruth for a pint of bitter. We stopped going to the Robin Hood several years ago (can you remember why Kevin?), and it didn’t really float my boat this time either, although the chips looked good.

A great event, and I’m now looking forward to rehydrating in the traditional manner. Thanks to everyone who supported, encouraged and sponsored me. I’ve raised about £700 quid so far for Edale Mountain Rescue, which is well worth the loss of one nipple. Please feel free to post your abusive comments, as ever.

Action Comic

Derby Destroyed

Tim Slater and his brother went potholing in the Peak District and were trapped underground for days by what they thought to be an earthquake. When they finally emerged from the cave they drove towards Derby only to find it had been levelled and that civilisation had been all but destroyed by nuclear conflict. They set off to reach their father in London, using a steam engine which they had commandeered. This journey was serialised in 1979 in the comic “Action” when I, the other Tim Slater, was also 14 years old and like my fictional counterpart had bad hair and national health glasses.

I remember Walker coming into the classroom brandishing the comic. “Look, Slater’s in my comic!” I can’t actually recall Walker’s first name. The protocol was that you only used first names for friends – much like vous / tu, but with more malice. The teachers never used our first names; I can still remember the register being called out, “Berry, Blamires, Bleasdale, Burnett, Cooper…” Of course a teacher using any part of your name was a term of endearment compared to “idiot”, “boy” or the wittier “idiot-boy”. In a German lesson I was idly watching a bee crashing against the window. The teacher didn’t like it much. “Ah Slater, watching a bee for amusement demonstrates the intelligence I’d expect of my puppy. Or your older brother.” Killer punchline.

I did once dabble in caving. Whilst at school , Dave (who was later to become “Dave the Foot”) and I went potholing in Yorkshire, in a large group led by an improbably named geography teacher, Mr Winterflood. He led us through what must have been caving set-pieces; a sump, a pillar box and the cheese press. The cheese press was a low-roofed cave, deep underground, with the roof gradually sloping down towards the floor until we could only make progress by shuffling along on our bellies. At this point we realised we’d lost one of our party. After some shouting by Mr Winterflood we saw the trembling light from lost boy’s headtorch and we moved on. When I arrived home, hours later, and slept in a hot bath for an hour I still couldn’t get warm. My Mum knocked on the door once in a while to see if I’d drowned. Like Mums do. The fate of anyone unlucky enough to get stuck in the cheese press has haunted me, so Dave the Foot and I stick to climbing above ground, where accidents will hopefully have more immediate and less claustrophobic consequences. I recently channel-hopped to a film called “The Descent”. It was a little way past the start but it appeared to be some kind of cheesy climbing adventure, with a cast of foxy actresses. It turned out to be a caving horror movie, all the more horrifying when you don’t know the genre beforehand. It scared me silly, and I’m definitely not going underground now. The tagline for the film is “scream your last breath”.

Chee Dale

Tim Slater in Trouble

The Route

Another route where I walked rather than ran. In fact, I think if I’d tried to run I’d have broken an ankle; Chee Dale has rounded limestone steps, a lot of mud and stepping stones. Monks Dale is worse. Nevertheless, a bit of an adventure into the Land that Time Forgot.

Chee Dale

Dark Satanic Mill

“The overlookers allowed their thumb and fore-finger nails to grow to an extreme length, in order that when they pinched ears, they might make their nails meet.”

Pinching through the flesh of children’s ears was just one of the practices at Litton Mill in the early eighteen hundreds. The children working in this cotton mill were beaten with leather belts (using the buckle end), kicked, punched and used for entertainment in bone-shattering encounters with the machinery. They were overworked, underfed and left crippled or worked to death. The mill’s owner, Ellis Needham, was aware of what was going on, and was himself one of the keenest and most inspirational abusers of his work force.

Bridge on Monsal Trail

This suffering is revealed in the testimony of one of the survivors of his time at Litton, Robert Blincoe, who some think was the inspiration behind “Oliver”. As he was held down and had his teeth forcibly filed in punishment for some real or imagined misdemeanour, it would have been scant consolation that his suffering would become, less than two hundred years later, so unimportant that it was set to music.

Blincoe had been sent to work and live in the cotton mills by the Church, under an “indenture” agreement. The church at St Pancras had in turn been handed the parentless child when he was about 4. He was possibly the illegitimate son of a clergyman, although the abandoned Blincoe was never actually clear on what his name was so it’s hard to know.

Blincoe’s life at the Mill has more to do with slavery than workplace bullying, and writers at the time thought it worse than slavery. Like many workplace bullies, Needham was under pressure. He had failed to pay attention in the Geography lesson which explains how to locate your factory close to a labour supply, power, transport and the rest. Even today Litton Mill feels a remote spot, a long way from people and good roads. As his business failed he beat the daylights out of his conscripted workforce.

It should be no surprise that many of the people dishing out the beatings had themselves been on the receiving end as children at the mill. Such institutionalised behaviour from one generation to the next doesn’t happen so much in the workplace these days but people may still adopt behaviours from those that they see demonstrating “success”. I’m talking about Dragon’s Den, The Apprentice, Gordon Ramsay and the like. Noticed an increase in people bellowing in your face at work? Have you been invited to explain yourself in front of a braying panel of managers? Is ridicule a common form of address? To some ambitious and impressionable people, reality TV is real.

Litton Mill Today

Litton Mill has now been converted into flats, aspirational types are probably welcome.

Gordon Ramsay was almost bankrupt in early 2009. Yes?

The Route

I’ve finally come to the difficult conclusion that I’ve been overtraining or I have a virus. I’m knackered. So I took a rest from running and did this stroll instead.

The Pub

I’d wanted to try the Three Stags Heads in Wardlow, but it wasn’t open in the daytime. Instead I went to the Anchor Inn at Four Lanes End outside Tideswell. It has an unusually cheery exterior for a Robinson’s pub, with hanging baskets and tubs of flowers instead of the usual bleak permafilth rendering. A good pint of Hartley’s XB, a steak sandwich with chips, really friendly, good service. Couldn’t fault it.

The Anchor

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.

Small Horse

A flatter run than the usual gruelling stuff around the Dark Peak, a nine mile circuit in the White Peak, starting at Hartington. The village is well known for its production of Stilton at the creamery and the little cheese shop in the centre of the village. Hartington was one of only seven places licensed to produce Blue Stilton (the village of Stilton is not one of them), but the creamery has been taken over by a competitor and will be closed.

Maybe this tragic loss to the village could have been avoided if the new Face of Stilton, Gizzi Erskine (see her photo here) had been appointed earlier by the Stilton Cheese Makers’ Association. She is “genuinely passionate about Stilton” and also has creamy skin with blue markings (tattoos in fact).

No doubt one of the first things that Gizzi will draw to the attention of potential turophiles is that Stilton is a bedtime hallucinogenic. In 2005, the British Cheese Board tested the effect of consuming different types of cheese before bedtime, in order to test the truth of “eating cheese at bedtime gives you nightmares”. Happily, they found that it does not, but that the type of cheese you eat can affect the nature of your dreams, with Stilton promoting the weirdest ones:

Looking North Along The Dove

In The Mighty Boosh, Tommy claims that “Cheese is a kind of Meat”. At first sight this seems utter nonsense, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. In Russia, the poorest people survive largely on potatoes with over half of Russia’s potato production being in small family plots. Average potato consumption is around a pound of potatoes per person per day. They seem able to produce a sufficiently balanced diet by incorporating dairy products, typically cheese, into their potato-based diets. Cheese is indeed a kind of meat. A tasty yellow treat.

Just outside Hartington is Lower Hurst Farm, which specialises in organic beef from its Hereford cattle. I haven’t particularly jumped on the organic bandwagon but it does seem to coincide with excellent meat and well cared-for animals. The butchery opens for business on the first Friday and Saturday of the month. That is to say, as I found, that means it’s closed on Friday 31st October and Saturday 1st November but open the following weekend. Hope that helps. All of the meat is excellent but after an extensive piece of tasting carried out by Big Kevin and myself, I reckon that one of their steak “French Cuts” is the best - La bavette d’aloyau (or bavette de Lulu as we mis-pronounced it for a year). Well worth a trip and you can see the Hereford cattle roaming happily in the fields.

The Pub

There are some nice enough pubs in Hartington but I decided to check out the Staffordshire Knot in Sheen. It seemed perfect to me. Great pint of Pedigree – smelled of neither eggs nor wet dogs. Quarry tiled floor, real fire, no muzak, pleasant bar staff, no TV, no kids. No customers either. Being just outside the village and not quite on any of the popular walks, it was deserted. Real shame. Worth a visit.

The Staffordshire Knott

The Eagle Stone

This run is one of my favourites so far. Although it’s 14 miles it is broken up into bite-sized pieces; Birchen Edge, White Edge, Froggat Edge, Baslow Edge and back to Birchen and the start point near the Robin Hood Inn.The route is littered with evidence of neolithic man; stone circles, field systems, cairns, standing stones and more. Even the natural rock formations are dramatic, such as the Eagle Stone on Baslow Edge.

Wellington's Monument

Which of these two characters is the greater? Firstly, lets look at Nelson. He’s a bit of a one trick pony really. And his one trick isn’t that nice - he’s a bully. With his trade-mark cry of “ha-ha” he’s always on hand to mock the afflicted and to dish out beatings. Admittedly some of the bullying is quite inventive, such as forcing victims to hurt themselves whilst he shouts “stop hitting yourself”. He is though, rather one dimensional.

Nelson

Wellington, on the other hand, has a real breadth to his portfolio. He’s an active environmentalist, scientist and inventor, and charming and shy. He has a further talent, along with Hendrix, Marc Bolan, Dave Davies (Kinks), Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top), Dave Grohl (Nirvana), Kirk Hammet (Metallica), Lenny Kravitz, Keith Richards, Michael Shenker, Eddie Van Halen and more. He plays the Gibson Flying V - an iconic guitar. You can just about make out its shape in the photo of a Wombles live performance. And finally, Wellington was the only Womble to strike out in a solo career, with the critically underrated single “Rainmaker”. Wellington wins.

The Wombles

This route of around six miles starts at Moscar on the A57 (part of which is known as the Snake Pass) and then turns to give a great view of Ladybower Reservoir before climbing onto Derwent Edge and returning.

Devonshire Coat of Arms

The Snake Pass was completed in 1820 by Thomas Telford for the Duke of Devonshire. The name of the pass comes from the Inn, which in turn took its name from the snake that appears in the Duke of Devonshire’s coat of arms. It has a long track record of serious and fatal accidents. In 1907 a charabanc ran off the road at Moscar, killing three people and injuring several others, including a passing pedestrian who unsuccessfully tried to evade the doomed vehicle and was thrown through a wall.

My Capri

I was fortunate that I received a couple of warnings from The Snake before I hurt myself. I drove along it each day, faster and faster, learning each bend and overtaking spot and tempting fate. Also, I learnt another lesson when I was easily overtaken by a Vauxhall Nova carrying a great deal of speed out of a corner whilst I wrestled with the sideways-loving Capri. Not so lucky was Rik Allen, drummer of Def Leppard. In 1984 he crashed his Corvette Stingray at Moscar and subsequently lost an arm. This didn’t ultimately impede his contribution to Def Leppard, through some cunning modifications of his drum kit. Both the Stingray and the Capri are all bonnet, so that’s probably the cause, in a way.

Crashed Charabanc at Moscar

Corvette (Armin Kübelbeck)

The Pub

Although the Snake Inn is probably the closest pub, I didn’t fancy sitting by the A57 for a pint, so I chose to try the Strines Inn. It seemed a fine pub, although I sat outside and only briefly went inside to get a pint of “Farmer’s Blonde”. Derided by some as being a bit nondescript and watery I found this local brew to be well kept and a pleasantly thirst-quenching alternative to an “isotonic recovery drink”.

Strines Inn

OK, it isn’t strictly true. Weasels didn’t rip my flesh. Nettles did, but there isn’t a Frank Zappa album called “Nettles Stung My Legs Quite Badly”. The closest Frank has to offer me is his 1970 album “Weasels Ripped my Flesh” as an accompanyment to this awful run.

I was trying to squeeze in a long run before setting off on holiday so I hastily planned an extension of a route I’d already done, in a loop from Pentrich at the south to Wheatcroft at the north. I chose my running clothes with equal haste and put on a pair of shorts which I should have left in the 1980s where I found them - legs are best covered up when heading into uncharted undergrowth.

After the initial easy detachment of running over familiar ground I became lost whilst looking for paths buried beneath new crop growth. Power-drizzle soaked me in a way that an honest downpour can’t. I reached the threshold where I wished I’d brought something to eat. The path steepened through cowshit and mud, towards Wheatcroft. Just before Wheatcroft the path weaved into a sea of nettles, with a clearance broad enough to allow only the passage of a slim snake. Turning back was way further than carrying on and I’d had enough, so I ran through the 100 yards in my short shorts, whimpering as I was stung. Several lessons learned.

The route then swung close to Crich Stand - completed in 1923 as a memorial to the 11,000 Sherwood Forresters killed in the first world war. I kept my head down in the drizzle, looking up occasionally to see where Crich Stand was. It doesn’t just look like a lighthouse, it is a navigational aid to distraught runners.

Frank Zappa stumbled across the name for his album on the cover of the 1956 magazine, “Man’s Life”. The other stories inside the magazine don’t disappoint either:

Zappa commissioned Neon Park to produce the Weasels album cover, challenging him with the magazine, “This is it. What can you do that’s worse than this?”.

The album is categorised in Wikipedia as “Jazz fusion, Experimental rock, Avant-garde”. Never mind; leafing through the 1956 magazine amused me instead.

Nettles

Crich Stand

Millstones at Stanage

I read somewhere, maybe Hal Higdon’s marathon training guide, that you should be prepared to go out and train whatever the weather. I’ve generally stuck to this principle, but now that my runs are getting beyond 2 hours it is asking a bit more. Nevertheless, since I don’t know what the Peak District weather will throw at me in September for the Nine Edges event, I’ve committed to “no excuses” training.

And so I came to be running around the bleak Hallam Moor in a steadily worsening downpour. Not so much down, as sideways. The only tarmac section on this run is a quiet lane called Rod Side, which runs parallel to the A57. The rain is fired at me from the west, into my face. I shuffled along with my head down and my shoulder into the wind. If I crouched behind a building and waited for the rain to pass I would have got even colder and I could have been waiting a very long time, so I carried on.

Once I turned south and onto Stanage Edge at least I could look up again. The top of the edge is pocked with numbered bowls carved into the gritstone. Apparently chipped out to provide drinking water for the grouse on the moor, and numbered to make sure that the stonemasons were correctly paid for their work. Some, on sloping slabs, have sophisticated channels radiating from the bowl to maximise their water collection.

Grouse Facility

Earlier on in this anti-clockwise route I passed the Redmires reservoirs. Close to the reservoirs there are extensive lumps and grooves in the ground, which are the remnants of trenches dug by the Sheffield City Battalion during their training in World War One. Two thirds of the men lost their lives in the Battle of the Somme.

Aerial View of Redmires

Excerpt from A guide to the Peak of Derbyshire...By R. Ward

The most obvious rock climb up the crag, “Original Route”, follows a groove and is graded Hard Very Severe. One of the easier climbs on High Tor, but about as hard as I have done. I found it exhilerating and tiring when I inelegantly lead it a few years ago. The sense of exposure above the A6 is incredible but not as intimidating as some other routes. When I arrived at the top, where the path comes within a few feet of the edge, I was interrogated by a passing tourist as to whether I had “just climbed that”. Sometimes sarcasm really is the only answer. I then brought up my two partners, one of whom was whey-faced and beaded with sweat. Perhaps he had been “seized with appalling apprehensions” as suggested in the excerpt from the Reverend Richard Ward’s snappily titled “A Guide to the Peak of Derbyshire Containing a Concise Account of Buxton, Matlock, and Castleton, and Other Remarkable Places and Objects Chiefly in the Northerly Parts of That Very Interesting County”.

Fear. From The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin.

Of course, fear is a very personal thing and we all have our irrational little phobias. Sybil Fawlty’s mother for instance “Sybil’s mother is a bit of a trial, being afraid of rats, doorknobs, birds, heights, open spaces, confined spaces, footballs, bicycles and cows. And death. She’s always on about death.” As my route approaches the village of Bonsall it awakens one of my own fears. Alien abduction. Bonsall has a reputation, not just as a lovely Derbyshire village, but as a hotspot of alien activity. One of the many examples was in 2000 when a Bonsall woman, Sharon Rowlands, captured video footage of a UFO flying above Bonsall. The footage was considered so convincing that it was hurriedly bought up by an American film company. There have been many such sightings near Bonsall over the years and the Barley Mow now hosts The International Bonsall UFO society meet each month.

In August 2007 several people reported seeing lights hovering over Belper. The Ripley and Heanor News subsequently ran a story claiming that the lights were not alien spacecraft but Chinese lanterns, sold by a Ripley firework shop to an unindentified woman from Marlpool and launched the same night as the sightings. A hasty cover-up operation clearly. I keep running.

The Barley Mow also has an annual international hen race.