Tag Archives: walking

Our week seemed to have been leading up to today’s outing, the grand finale of the tour, the so-called balcony walk between Pico do Ariero, Madeira’s third highest peak at 1818 m/5965 ft, and Pico Ruivo,  the highest point at 1862 m/6107 ft. This has the reputation of being Madeira’s must-do walk. We couldn’t believe our luck; once again the morning dawned clear and bright – it looked as if we’d be in for a perfect day for mountain walking.

Pico do Ariero may be Madeira’s third highest point but it is accessible by road and good ol’ Messrs Ford, Mercedes and Benz once again ferried us up to the start point. It may have been bright but at these altitudes the air is a bit cool so we were equipped with a few layers of clothing to make adjustments as necessary. After making last minute preparations and making the obligatory “ooh, ahh” noises at the scenery, we set off. Surprisingly, the walk began on what I can only describe as a paved footpath. I couldn’t believe the locals had put so much effort into their walking routes. It is a busy route so I suppose it helps with erosion control.

As we progressed we came across areas that weren’t quite so groomed but, nonetheless, there was a lot of effort involved in maintaining the route, especially regarding handrails. On some of the narrower sections, the handrails may not actually be used but I think one would feel decidedly more nervous were they not actually there. The term balcony walk perhaps seems a little odd so here’s a few shots that should go some way towards explaining the name.

At 6.5 mls/10kms, this walk wasn’t particularly long but there was certainly more climbing. I guess you can’t get up to an island’s highest peak without putting in a little effort. The final assault on the highest point, Pico Ruivo, certainly got the heart pumping but, with our gradual build-up to it throughout the week, it felt reasonably comfortable assisted by a pair of Leki walking poles. To avoid indigestion, we climbed first and ate second.

The weather gods continued to smile on us and the sun shone right through our lunch at Pico Ruivo and on into our eventual short descent on yet another paved pedestrian highway to our faithful vans and drivers. This was a spectacular and very enjoyable walk. A delightful finish to our walking in Madeira, though we still had a free day in Funchal to look forward to.

Feeling perhaps a little self satisfied at completing the walks and most certainly feeling very lucky that our time in the mountains had been blessed with such good weather, our last walking day finished with a return journey to Funchal where we were just in time to invade the Blandy’s Madeira lodge for a guided tour: interesting stuff and good value (€4.50) despite their free taster being very meagre. Well, it had to be done.

[Here's a link to a Google Earth plot of this walk. You'll need to save it to your computer before double-clicking it to open in Google Earth. This one’s a bit weird in that Mr Garmin seems to have thrown a fit. Despite appearances, we definitely did not suddenly dive off left down into a deep valley only to double back and run immediately up the hill again. Curious. Note to self: buy a decent walkers’ GPS.]

After two days investigating the levadas of Madeira, today we were due to head up into the mountains of Madeira to walk from Boca Corrida to Encumeada. We we very lucky on two counts. First, this walk had been closed for about two years following heavy rains and now it was re-opened. Secondly, the weather was absolutely stunning and perfect for walking in the mountains.

Messrs Ford, Mercedes and Benz once again drove us up to the start point. This time, though, we actually had to walk up from there before heading down the other side. There’s something a little disturbing when the first thing you notice at the beginning of a mountain track is a chapel – it makes me wonder what they know that I don’t. I say mountain track but for a chunk of the way it was effectively paved. This differs wildly from our experiences in Spain where the footpaths we’ve seen have been really quite rugged. The Portuguese, at least those on Madeira, don’t seem to want walkers damaging themselves.

We began with our uphill climb, something that we weren’t really used to on this trip but the exercise made it seem pretty comfortable. One of the “sights” to be seen here was the Curral das Freiras, the Nuns’ Refuge.  Nuns from the Santa Clara convent fled to this secluded valley when the island was attacked by those aforementioned parrots pirates. We love mountains when the weather is right and this time the weather was right. The levadas were pleasant and interesting but this was nature in the raw and quite stunning. We were in our element.

From our picnic high point on this walk we began descending and were soon tromping through woodland, a very different landscape compared to the start point. We’d crossed the Exodus group walking in the opposite direction before plunging into the trees, followed by which we had to cross a rickety bridge.

After some more serious exercise than we’d had hitherto, Messrs Ford, Mercedes and Benz were waiting as usual at our finishing point to take us to a well deserved and very welcome Coral beer. We felt extremely lucky, this was a newly re-instated 8 mls/13 kms walk  through some very refreshing scenery. Brilliant!

[Here's a link to a Google Earth plot of this walk. You'll need to save it to your computer before double-clicking it to up in Google Earth.]

After spending a pleasant evening in Porto Moniz on the north-western tip of Madeira, our Feb 29th was to be spent going up into the mountains, crossing the central high ground’s so-called “Desert Plain” to wander along few more levadas and down towards the south coast again. Happily, the up component was courtesy of Messrs Ford, Mercedes and Benz in the forms of our two minibuses, leaving us with the 9mls/14.5kms of down on the other side.

We were tipped out right beside our first levada and began with the remnants of last night’s frost clinging on in the shady hollows. We were out in the open with views across swathes of gorse bushes to the distant and much lower south coast of the island. Other than the facts that we were still some way away from the coast and considerably higher, it felt reminiscent of the Cornish coastal path. This was much more my style than yesterday’s excursion into the cloud forest. Of course, the blue sky helped tremendously. Come to think of it, that bit may not resemble Cornwall much, either.

As with yesterday, the levada fell very gradually such that the water ran gently and silently. I was back marker armed with a whistle so I had time to play around a little. Out of curiosity, I decided to use my Garmin GPS to try and estimate the gradient of the levada. I plotted a waypoint at the beginning of the walk (altitude: 4310 ft/1314 mtrs) and another when we hit the two mile mark (altitude: 4262 ft/1299 mtrs). In two miles the levada had dropped a mere 48 feet. Rounding to make life easy, that’s ~50 ft in ~10000 ft, a gradient of roughly 0.5%. Well, it keeps me amused.

Lunch was my highlight of the day, not because of the food which was a basic supermarket picnic of bread, chorizo and Babybell cheese-alike (light – I didn’t do the purchasing!), but because we were in the company of a small flock of chaffinches. The chaffinches, it transpired, were quite partial to small pieces of bread and were particularly keen on torn off pieces of Babybell light. I was over the moon when I held scraps out on my upturned palm and the chaffinches fluttered in to feed from my hand. A female settled for a couple of seconds before flying off with her prize. Great stuff! (I know, I can’t help it, I just love being in touch with wildlife.)

A theme developed concerning wildlife on Madeira. Many of its species exhibit minor differences compared to their mainland counterparts and are Madeiran subspecies. This is true of the Chaffinch. Our Chaffinch is Fringilla coelebs whereas the Madeiran Chaffinch is Fringilla coelebs maderensis. I think describing the differences would be a bit challenging but it certainly looked noticeably different. Just for fun, here’s a composite picture of both, including one from our lunch party, in similar poses to compare – the Madeiran Chaffinch is above.

We needed our pathetic torches again on this walk to get through the longest tunnel of ~1km. Our leader, Donal, noted that the weather at the opposite end of the tunnel (the south side of the mountain) could often be quite different. We plunged in to darkness dimly illuminated by our CSI-style Maglites. About 12 minutes later we emerged into blazing cloudlight. Shortly after wards it began spitting with rain. A little later we were walking through steady and persistent rain. Donal had been quite right. Eventually, however, the rain subsided to reveal Messrs Ford, Mercedes and Benz waiting to complete our journey to the south coast and ferry us to our hotel at Ponta do Sol, where our 15 pairs of soiled walking boots managed to make short work of the hotel reception’s unserviceably white doormat. [Ed: Bloody tourists!]

Two things really impressed us about the Enotel at Ponta do Sol. Firstly, the architecture was noteworthy in that a relatively large hotel was designed outwardly to look like several smaller buildings. The multiple colours reminded me of Villajoyosa in Spain where they are similarly bold with colour, in a pleasing way. Check out the picture; that’s all one hotel – clever! Secondly, when we returned downstairs having showered and changed, the doormat had already been returned to its original virginal white state. Bravo Enotel!

The rooms were very spacious and comfortable, too. When we eventually retired, we propped open our Juliette balcony door and fell asleep to the sound of the Atlantic surf breaking on the stony shore literally just across the road. Very restful!

Having survived our leg loosening walk on day one and stayed overnight in Santana on the northern side of Madeira, today was to to be a walk from Queimadas via a waterfall at Caldeira Verde to Ilha which would introduce us to the esteemed levadas.

Madeira was once completely covered in woodland. Indeed, madeira means wood in Portuguese. The ancient woodland, the laurisilva [laurel forest], is more of a cloud forest in places and acts like a giant sponge soaking up water which filters through the ground and vegetation. The levadas are small manmade drainage channels – mini canals – designed to catch the water as it seeps through and to channel it into reservoirs/tanks where it is used to irrigate the crops. The network of levadas which criss-crosses and winds around Madeira is huge; there are 2500kms/1500mls of the things.

Having seen La Rigole, the canal that feeds water into the Canal di Midi in France, I was expecting canals on a similar scale but the levadas are narrow, only about 45cms/1½ft wide. Here’s our first view of one flowing beside a sizeable track. The gradient is very carefully controlled such that the water flows very gently and, we noted, almost completely silently. Small they may be but, even like this, constructing 2500kms of them manually would have been a huge task.

That first sight of a levada is very deceiving though; the levadas do not always look that tame. In fact, they rarely do. More often, the levadas look as though they are clinging to the side of a near vertical mountain face which, in some cases, they are. Walking along them can cause the ol’ teeth to be gritted just a tad, particularly if there is no hand rail. Fortunately, in the more precipitous places, there are hand rails. Check out the drop beside the levada in the picture here. Given that the walkway shown did not exist before this levada was built, one wonders how they actually built it. To me, that turns the construction effort into something quite staggering. In some places, construction workers were lowered in baskets, apparently.

So, we have a channel with a consistently gentle fall winding its way around and occasionally going through mountains; there are tunnels which also had to be manually built. We were told we’d need decent torches and now we could clearly see why. [That’s a flash picture, BTW, not daylight.] Sadly our CSI-style Maglite torches didn’t quite seem up to the task so we didn’t see clearly. Poor choice! [Ed: How do those CSI guys get a decent beam in broad Las Vegas daylight, I wonder?] Anyway, walking along some stretches of the levadas is most like being a child again walking along the top of a brick wall but with a bigger drop on one side. Get the picture? You get used to it, though.

Now imagine trying to pass streams of other tourists tromping towards you from the opposite direction. This is where the hand rail really comes into play: one turns sideways ensuring that their rucksack is hanging over the fence into space rather than obstructing the narrow path whilst the other turns sideways with their rucksack to the mountain, and shuffle sideways past each other. Simples!

The laurisilva is often quite dense though there are breaks which offer you a decent view down the valley.

We stopped at a waterfall at the head of a there-and-back valley for lunch but didn’t hang about too long because the altitude was making stationary life a little cool. We retraced our steps before hanging a left and descending to Ilha where our transport took us for a reviving coffee before ferrying us to our next hotel at Porto Moniz.

[Here's a link to a Google Earth plot of this walk. You'll need to save it to your computer before double-clicking it to up in Google Earth.]

OK, so we’re not actually on Madeira to dance the lambada. We are actually here with Explore! to walk, amongst other things, some of the famous levadas. Levadas are irrigation channels but more of these later. Madeira is essentially a large, formerly volcanic mountain and the main “other thing” that we are targeting is the high ground (~1800m/5500ft) in the centre. Explore! runs small group holidays, some cultural, some more active, and this is our sixth with them.

Our group on this trip is 14 strong, plus the leader, Donal, who unsurprisingly hails from the Emerald Isle. As well as trying to get our ears tuned in to Portuguese for our first time – it sounded to us a bit like Spanish with a Russian accent – we had to tune our ears in to Donal’s lilting brogue. Yesterday, we became convinced he was telling us that, at some time in its early history, Madeira had been invaded by parrots until we finally realized he was saying pirates. Duh!

Today we were heading out to the eastern point of the island for what seemed like a modest limb loosening walk of 4½mls/7kms. Actually, I suspect that relatively gentle start is designed mostly for the tour leader, giving them a chance to assess the abilities of their new set of charges. To get to our start point at São Laurenço, we drove past Madeira’s other engineering highlight (other than its levadas): the airport runway extension which is a large flyover (no pun intended) supported on huge concrete pillars. They are clearly very proud of their runway, on Madeira.

This walk was a there-and-back affair, winding its way in an undulating fashion through an almost desert-type landscape with the Atlantic Ocean on both sides – more dramatic than picturesque. I personally find rocks a little on the dull side, preferring animate objects, but for those with the correct interest I’m sure the geology would prove fascinating. Courtesy of Donal’s instruction, I now know that things called intrusions exist in formerly volcanic regions. An example is shown in the picture on the right; just to the left of centre (Natalie Imbruglia?) are a couple of lighter strata stretching vertically from the shore to the top of the cliff.

We didn’t give Donal any concerns, everyone making it to the easternmost tip of Madeira without mishap where most of us chose to scale the 200m highpoint for the view (or just because it was there) before settling down to a packed lunch. There was also a wildlife highlight for those of us who prefer nature with a pulse. At our lunch spot a few LBJs (Little Brown Jobs) were hopping and flittering about. They looked a bit like Spotted Flycatchers but were more strongly flecked and behaving very differently. The birds turned out to be Berthelot’s Pipits (Anthus berthelotii), according to an information board (and Donal). They are resident to the Canary Islands and Madeira. Well done Carol for snagging a recognisable shot.

Chalk up a new one for our bird page – eventually.

We returned to our transport and noticed we had happily missed a rain shower as we were driven to Santana on the north side of the island for our second night followed by our first encounter with a levada the next day.

[Here's a link to a Google Earth plot of this walk. You'll need to save it to your computer before opening it up in Google Earth.]

4:40 AM is not a very friendly time for check-in desks to open at London’s Heathrow airport. I started investigating my travel options and discovered, according to one friendly parking service lady, that “they” had only recently begun opening check-in desks before 5:00 AM and that, consequently, their regular shuttle bus services and didn’t begin before 5:00 AM. Neither did the “meet and greet” services, effectively valet parking where one drives to the terminal and is met by a man who zooms off to undeclared destinations with ones car, begin until 5:00 AM. So, we seem to have adjusted early morning flight times without adjusting the support services. Sound familiar? Regular long-term parking still works but you have to summon the bus rather than having a regular circuit being performed. We opted for a taxi, which was to be £65.00 plus, of course, a decent tip for the poor sleep-deprived driver.

3:30 AM is not a very friendly time for a taxi to come calling. [Ed: it’s about an hour’s ride from home to Heathrow, to be safe.] An hour or so earlier and it would be worth toughing it out by staying up and not bothering with bed. Naturally, going to bed early doesn’t work ‘cos you just lie there awake until you’d normally have hit the sack. So, bed it was with our beauty sleep rudely curtailed at 2:40 AM by a very gentle alarm courtesy of Nokia.

All our bags were packed and ready to go …

[Ed: O Hell, did you have to?]

… and, sure enough, our sleep-deprived driver arrived on the dot of 3:30 AM to collect his two sleep-deprived but excited passengers, one of whom almost left his bag in the porch, complete with dancing shoes. Dancing shoes? Yes, well, Carol did say we were off to Madeira to do the levadas. Dreadful Portuguese puns aside, mercifully the driver was awake enough to notice and retrieved my bag for me.

With Heathrow just beginning to wake-up, check-in was a breeze. Luck continued when we were handed an exit row and, with the TAP plane only about 50% full, we had a very comfortable 3hr 15min flight to Funchal, Madeira, where we were greeted by Donal, our tour leader, and sunshine. Funchal is pretty much an amphitheatre of buildings clinging to a steep, curved mountainside surrounding  a harbour where cruise ships frequently call. Actually, Madeira being little more than a 50-mile wide collection of volcanic mountains, all it’s settlements are really amphitheatres of buildings clinging to steep mountainsides.

Madeira is on the same time zone as the UK [Ed: sensible people.] so we were settled in our hotel room by 11:30 AM in plenty of time to try something local for lunch. We found an appealing restaurant with street tables and I couldn’t resist what is apparently a popular Portuguese rendition of salt cod called Bacalhau a Brás. Not being keen on salt cod, Carol chose some very tasty grilled squid and, since the home team had named their beer Coral, Carol also fancied a glass with her name on it, albeit misspelled. I kept her company. Well, you can’t let a lady drink alone. And very good it all was, too.

You may notice the patterning on the street in the above picture. Most of the streets and paths/sidewalks in Funchal sport patterns made from a mosaic of black and white tile pieces. As far as I could tell, the pattern in each street was also unique. Laying the mosaics must have been very painstaking work but it was well worth it and makes for an attractive finish. Being a quiet Sunday, I managed a snag a sample picture of one of the more ornate side streets, unimpeded by pedestrians or cars attempting to flatten tourists standing in the middle of the road and armed with snappy cameras.

An enjoyable if painfully early start. The walking begins tomorrow.

Having re-acquainted ourselves with the New Forest last September, courtesy of waiting on things medical, we had rather optimistically booked ourselves into a year-round campsite there for New Year. New Year in the New Forest: seems almost poetic. At the time of making the booking, I was expecting some temporary incontinence but I was still thinking stress incontinence. As we now know, the level of it was rather more severe following my prostatectomy on 2nd December. In the light of our more complete knowledge, we rearranged our booking for late March. There was, as it turned out, an additional problem at New Year: snow. Towing a caravan/trailer down to the New Forest in snow would never have been an enjoyable or, indeed, sensible task.

When it came to the re-arrangement we lucked out. We went down a few days early and arrived in stunning (for March in England) weather. Traffic was light and the sun was shining – the journey was a dream. With the exception of one day, the run of glorious weather continued for the 12 days of our stay. Unhappily, I wasn’t the only attendee with a damp problem; our caravan, Billy, has come out in sympathy to show moral support. At his recent service, the “engineer” reported the beginnings of water ingress in his near-side rear quarter. If that wasn’t enough, he’s leaking water back out of the pressurized on-board water system into the external container. I know exactly how he feels! I’d just as soon he wasn’t showing quite such a level of support, however.

I wouldn’t normally think that visiting an essentially broad-leaved deciduous forest in winter would be so enjoyable but enjoyable it was. With no forest canopy, all the ample sunlight was filtering through the bare branches of the trees and hitting the forest floor. Additionally, the forest floor’s undergrowth (largely bracken) had died down for the winter and was dormant so the views through the well-lit trees were very good. Of course, different weather would have produced a different story but it was all very pleasant.

We were there over the theoretical beginning of spring and the wildlife was beginning to wake up to its spring tasks. We had plenty of bird life around our pitch feeding on feeders we had taken with us (for the first time). Expecting the forest tracks to be quite muddy, we had armed (legged?) ourselves with Wellington boots and indulged in several nature rambles of 3-4 miles or so. I wasn’t quite as watertight as the Wellies but any leakages were not severe enough to stop the enjoyment. The nature highlights were the year’s first butterflies emerging in the form of the sulphur-yellow Brimstones and I managed to snag a pair of Pond Skaters in flagrante delicto, poor things. Actually, I didn’t notice that they were a pair in a passionate embrace until I loaded the shot on my laptop back at Billy. It’s amazing how blind I can be staring through a view-finder.

The low point was being attacked by a New Forest pony. Commoners have grazing rights and their ponies, plus a few cattle, wander about essentially freely. The ponies are quite famous and are usually very placid, though tourists are requested not to interfere with them and advised to give them a respectably amount of space. In this case, we were giving the pony in question a wide berth but it took it into its head actively to pursue me. It crossed about 60ft/20m of open ground to get to the path down which Carol and I were walking and followed us down the path before turning its rear-end towards me and lashing out twice with both hind legs. The first kick missed but the second was more successful and made contact with my right hip, fortunately only relatively lightly. Had it been my stomach, I’d have been less philosophical about it, I suspect.

We’d taken our bicycles, too, and tried our first post-operative bike rides of any real note. We started with a quite modest 8 miles but very soon thereafter indulged in a 27-mile round trip to Bucklers Hard, an historic 18th century ship building village. Several ships for Admiral Nelson’s fleet were built here from oak trees felled in the New Forest. Since one galleon required about 2000 oak trees, I began to see why there are tracts of forest with no trees at all. Such were the delights of the unseasonal spell of weather that we also cycled to the south coast to enjoy a seaside ice cream, as if we weren’t taking in enough calories in the form of alcohol. (It’s completely unfair that alcohol contains any calories at all.) Not only did we find a particularly splendid ice cream but we were also entertained by a gaggle of paragliders drifting back and forth along the cliffs of Barton-on-sea while we ate it. Paragliders make a wonderfully colourful photographic subject, especially against a clear blue sky.

So, all in all a great time. Like my caravan, I may not be 100% watertight yet but, if, as I did, I can embark on 4-mile walks and 25-mile bike rides without too much in the way of consternation, then life is definitely on the way to returning to my kind of normal.

Our first full day at Charmouth and whole new stretch of coast to investigate. We decided to come out in sympathy with the airlines not adding to the carbon dioxide emissions by not using our car and walking from the campsite. Our intended target was Golden Cap, about 4 miles away. Golden Cap is, apparently, “the highest ground between The Wash and Land’s End”. So, much of that 4 miles would be up and the climb up would doubtless make us puff but the views should be worth it.

We began by following the “Coast Path Diversion” signs quite a distance inland as it avoids a considerable stretch of eroding Charmouth coast now deemed too dangerous for Joe Public. Naturally in a land of rolling hills you have to climb the heights several times rather than just once but it’s all good exercise. After a considerable amount of puffing, panting and pausing for breath we reached the summit: 631 feet according to my Garmin GPS device for walkers who like technological toys.

The views would have been worth it were it not for the fact that we were suffering from a heck of a lot of haze, today in particular. We’ve had quite a few days with surrounding haze and, though no commentators have mentioned it, I’m beginning to wonder if it has anything to do with that nasty volcano thingy blowing its top in Iceland. No, probably not. I did, however, get a chance to look down on a soaring buzzard, which is not something I’ve managed to do before. Maybe I should have lugged the big lens up with me. Nah!

We had chosen to go by an inland route and return along what remains of the Coastal Path. It wasn’t very much; after about 2 miles we were encouraged back inland and ended up on our outbound inland route. Never mind, it was all very pleasant and allowed us to call in to The Royal Oak pub in Charmouth for a very fine pint of Palmers “200” (5.0% – at last, a beer with a decent gravity). It seems that King Charles II stayed in Charmouth having escaped in 1651; escaped from what I’m afraid my history does not recall. Duh!

We returned to Billy having tromped up and down for 8½ miles.

We needed supplies and zoomed off 4 miles or so into Axminster, famous for high quality carpets for hundreds of years and for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s (sp?) River Cottage Canteen for the last few years. Incidentally, I wonder how Hugh’s mother sewed his name tags into his clothing at school? With a name that long the shirts wouldn’t have been wide enough. But I digress …

We wandered into the Minster church to be greeted by something I’ve never before seen in any church: a carpeted floor! Only in Axminster.

We’re beginning to get very used to these unusually clear skies with not a cloud in sight. We’re also beginning to get used to unusually clear skies with neither aircraft nor their attendant vapour trails in sight, though our hearts go out to the poor stranded folk scattered around the world. It is beginning to get tempting to connect the two phenomena, no doubt erroneously. With the absence of plane exhausts, though, we certainly should be seeing a reduction in global dimming.

Global dimming is an interesting idea which, if I’ve remember/interpret it correctly, hypothesises that particulates from jet aircraft in our atmosphere reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the earth’s surface. Thus, the atmosphere’s temperature doesn’t rise as much as would be expected. An absence of the modern world’s usual global dimming was noticed in American skies during the no-fly zone imposed following “9-11”. (Ed: now look, it really should be 11-9; a 911 is a desirable Porsche.) Date formats aside, the worrying aspect is that global dimming is thought to be masking some of the effects of global warming and that global warming is actually worse than we think (for those who believe in it, anyway).

Still, since we are apparently now blanketed in an invisible layer of volcanic particulates, maybe we’ve got geothermal global dimming replacing the usual technological travel global dimming. Whatever the situation, fortunately I’ve yet to hear any commentator mutter the extremely worrying phrase, nuclear winter.

This was our day to move the strenuous distance of 40 miles from Wareham to Charmouth. The journey would take only an hour or so and we wouldn’t be able to pitch up on the Charmouth site before midday so we spent our last morning wandering Wareham one last time and snapping the intriguing church of St Martins on the Walls, so-called because it sits atop the earthworks that constitute the Saxon town walls.

Our journey went uneventfully and we were offered a pleasant pitch with a high aspect and views. Of course, being high it is also exposed to the chill wind that is helping to keep our weather fine. We’d been getting excited about the possibility of w-fi access at this site. We could have an hour for £4.50 or four hours for £6.00. The second option sounded interesting until we were told that it was four hours in a 24 hour period. What bloody good is that? I want to post blog entries, not surf the web. Spreading four hours over the week would be useful. I could buy a week’s worth for £20. No thanks.

After getting our home for the coming week established, we sauntered three miles or so to Charmouth and back. There isn’t as much of Charmouth as I thought. Judging by the various “Coast Path Diversion” signs, there isn’t much of its Coast Path left, either. Coastal erosion seems to be a particular problem in these parts. Is it all those fossil hunters, after all?

The clear skies free of clouds continued. The clear skies free of all commercial air transport also continued to the chagrin of those poor souls trying to get somewhere. With our modern transport systems disrupted by unseen volcanic ash lurking about in our atmosphere, we decided to try an altogether more atmospheric form of transport.

Running from west to east (or east to west?) across southern Dorset is a curious narrow ridge of high ground reaching about 600 feet. It is curious because there is an unexpected (by me, anyway) short break in the ridge at Corfe Castle. More accurately, Corfe Castle is at the break in the ridge since the break in the ridge is the reason for Corfe Castle’s existence; the  castle was built to guard the gap. The ridge runs towards Swanage on Dorset’s coast, just below Poole harbour, where it dives beneath the waves to re-emerge as The Needles formation on the Isle of Wight (it says here).

We made a reasonably early start and grabbed one of a few free parking spots directly beneath Corfe Castle. from here we climbed up onto the eastern part of the ridge, known as East Hill. After admiring the views of Corfe Castle from this high ground, we made the approximately 5 mile trek along the ridge and down into Swanage.

Although we were quite capable of retracing our steps and walking the 5 miles back to our car, we were particularly keen to treat ourselves to a ride on the Swanage Railway. The Swanage Railway Trust is a charity staffed by volunteers and runs a steam locomotive service between Swanage and Norden, just west of Corfe Castle. At this time of year, every other train is actually pulled by a diesel locomotive but it is naturally the steam loco that is the big draw. With broad smiles on our faces, we purchased two singles back to Corfe Castle.

We had an hour to wait until the next steam service so we went down onto the front and indulged in some more childhood memories by buying a plate of cockles (Carol’s choice) and a plate of whelks (my choice). More smiles.

Returning to the platform we found the waiting steam locomotive ready to pull a train of various mixed carriages; one was a corridor carriage looking like something out of an Hercule Poirot adventure. No contest. We nabbed a compartment in the corridor carriage and began playing Hercule Poirot. Shortly a smiling ticket inspector arrived and punched our tickets for Carol, also smiling broadly. Everyone on the train was beaming. I don’t recall the last time I’ve seen such a large percentage of humanity smiling so much. For that elusive “feel good factor” in times of recession, bring back stream trains.

The journey was great fun, though I’m not entirely convinced that the type of motive power makes a great deal of difference ensconced in a passenger carriage. Much of our relatively brief journey was spent outside the Hercule Poirot compartment, leaning out of the window snapping away and getting the occasional speck of ash in the eye. This ash came from the stream loco rather than from Iceland’s irritating volcano. So, maybe the choice of motive power does, indeed, make a difference.

We rounded off the afternoon with another trip back in time to the Square and Compass public house in Worth Matravers. A passing local in Wareham had recommended it to us declaring that it hadn’t changed in  hundred years. I can believe it; it had no bar, as such, just a counter at which orders were taken. Lurking somewhere in the dark depths was a staggering array of mostly ciders, with three token beers also being on offer. I enjoyed a pint of a cider rejoicing in the name of Port Wine of Glastonbury, and a pasty. More smiles.