Eboot – July 2021

eBoot – July 2021

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Contents

Walks Programme ...... 2 Some walks from the July programme ...... 2 13-15 August Dartmoor weekend A walks ...... 3 Wessex Wanderer Railway Walks ...... 3 Walking News ...... 4 Walk Leader Courses ...... 4 Resignation of the Sunday B Walks Coordinator ...... 4 Don’t Lose Your Way ...... 5 Ramblers volunteering opportunities ...... 5 Southwold Ramblers footpath wardens ...... 6 Sighted Guide training...... 6 A4174 junction consultation ...... 6 Feature Articles ...... 7 The Gordano Round ...... 7 Enter the (Black) Dragon ...... 8 The 39(ish) steps ...... 9 In my father’s footsteps ...... 10 Editorial ...... 11 Partners and Sponsors ...... 12 Ramblers Walking Holidays ...... 12 Outdoor Retailers ...... 12

Walks Programme

The July programme can now be accessed from the home page of the Group’s website: https://www.bristolramblers.org.uk/bristolramblers-group-walks.html Following the latest Government announcement that Covid restrictions are to remain in place until at least 19 July, July walks will continue to use the existing booking system. A walkers should note that places on July walks will be allocated on 27 June. If individual members wish to share transport to the start of walks then they may do so at their own discretion, but there will be no official Ramblers pre-walk meet-ups for car sharing purposes. You can find the official Government advice on car sharing here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-safer- travel-guidance-for-passengers#private-cars-and-other-vehicles

Some walks from the July programme Please note that the descriptions here are not an exhaustive list of the walks available. The full and up-to-date programme can be found on the website.

Sat 3rd July – Almondsbury (B walk, 6 miles) The walk starts at St Mary's Church in Lower Almondsbury. We walk past attractive cottages to pick up a lane leaving the village. From there we follow meadow paths, tracks and quiet lanes to the outskirts of Easter Compton, where we will stop for a break. The route back follows the Community Forest Path until we leave it to walk through Pegwell Brake back to Almondsbury. There is one steepish climb en route, and spectacular views across to the Severn at the end.

Sun 11th July – Quantocks (A walk, 15 miles) This walk is focused on the southeast fringe of the Quantocks, starting from Hawkridge Reservoir. We will hopefully enjoy lovely views of the surrounding countryside from Wills Neck (the highest summit in the Quantocks) Lydeard Hill and Cothelstone Hill, and should see Highland Cattle on Broomfield Hill. There are also a number of foxglove-studded woodland paths, including Aisholt Wood Nature Reserve, and we cross a number of pretty fords and streams. We will also take a trip through Fyne Court, owned by the National Trust, where we will walk past the wildlife pond and through the Kitchen Garden. This is a relatively strenuous walk and there are some steep climbs, with a total ascent a little over 3,000 ft. Unfortunately there will not be a pub stop.

Sun 18th July – Pontypool (B walk, 12 miles) The walk starts in Pontypool Park, and ascends via a grotto and a folly to the morning coffee stop at Mynydd Garn Wen with good views of the River Severn and Usk valley. We then traverse over Mynydd Garnclochdy before descending to our lunch stop at the Goose & Cuckoo pub. The afternoon is easier, through woods and fields with a final climb back up to the grotto for a total ascent of 2100 ft.

Sun 18th July – Gaer Hill (A walk, 13 miles) The route starts with a steady incline through Llanthony Wood up to Gare Wen and along the ridge to Gaer hill fort, before dropping down to the Queen's Head at Stanton for the lunch stop at approximately halfway. After lunch we head up to Hatterall Hill and Offa's Dyke Path, following the ridge before descending back to the start. This walk has a total of about 2,500 ft of ascent.

Sun 27th July – Brecon Beacons from the North (A hill walk, 15 miles) Our route includes Fan y Big, Cribyn, Pen y Fan and Allt Ddu as well as a stretch of lower-level walking to the north of the hills. The total ascent is in the region of 4,000 feet. This walk has not always been blessed with perfect weather but is a magnificent outing in good conditions. An alternative walk in the National Park will be offered in the event of a poor weather forecast or the likelihood of very limited visibility.

13-15 August Dartmoor weekend A walks It is still possible to arrange to join this walking weekend, organised by and for members of the Bristol group.

Contact: Geoff, Keith and Carew The walks will be in the Okehampton area; participants should arrange their own accommodation. Three walks are planned: • A walk on Friday, starting late enough to allow time to drive down from Bristol • A full day walk on Saturday (perhaps our own version of the 10 tors) • A walk on Sunday, ending early enough to drive back to Bristol. If you would be interested, please email [email protected], [email protected] or [email protected].

Wessex Wanderer Railway Walks by Wessex Wanderers

After an absence of a year, there will be a short programme of Wessex Wanderer Railway Walks in 2021. So why not come and join us on a walk, led by experienced members of the Ramblers, and claim your free Wessex Wanderers souvenir pen! These walks start from stations along the Bristol to Weymouth railway line - for full details please refer to: www.wessexrailwaywalks.org.uk or telephone 0117 933 4998. The first walk will be on Wed 7th July, from Bradford on Avon. In case of any Covid restrictions which may be in place, booking is essential and numbers on walks will be limited.

Walking News

Walk Leader Courses by Carew R We are planning to run a couple of evening sessions in September for new walk leaders. The first session would focus on planning and leading walks, and the second would be on navigation, with an optional extra on one of the local orienteering courses. The sessions would be broadly based on material produced by the Ramblers, and would be informal, with plenty of opportunity for discussion. If you would be interested in participating, please contact [email protected]

Resignation of the Sunday B Walks Coordinator

By Ikuko S W It’s been 7 years since I became coordinator for the Sunday B group. Boy how kind and supportive people were despite the obvious misgivings they must have had (I was very new to the Group then)! My memory is dotted with lots of happy things.

However any social groups, in order to thrive, need new people to bring in fresh views and ideas.

Hence, I intend to step down at this year’s AGM. So if you’re interested in becoming the B walk coordinator please do let the committee know. I will give you full support as you settle in. You can contact the committee at [email protected]

Don’t Lose Your Way by Anon “Once a Highway; always a Highway”. No more. As many will know, the existence of Rights of Way is about to become entirely dependent on their registration on the Definitive Maps held by the Highways Authorities. No registration means an unregistered old footpath will soon be lost forever. Ramblers HQ has undertaken a massive planning exercise since 2015 to track down those potential paths that seem to have dropped off maps, and produced a plan (link below) listing just under 50,000 miles of such paths in England and Wales. The next step is to decide which of these paths are viable and should be the subject of application to restore to the Definitive Map. The ones across Heathrow may be a lost cause, but many others not so. HQ is preparing toolkits of information and guidance for local groups to gather evidence and to appoint Coordinators of these efforts. HQ will use Assemble on the Ramblers website to help form teams of Researchers and Archive Volunteers (to look at maps and other sources to search for evidence on the ground). If you are interested in this work, please make your way to the Ramblers main website. Meanwhile, for those who wish to assist in this work, Bristol City Council PROW team have kindly offered a brief Zoom explanation in mid July, of how they process such applications. Anyone who is interested in this please contact Roger Britton, before 1 July, at [email protected] https://dontloseyourway.ramblers.org.uk/map

Ramblers volunteering opportunities The local area is currently seeking a number of volunteers to help the Ramblers protect existing pathways and ensure access to the countryside for generations to come.

Don’t Lose Your Way Coordinators Avon Area is seeking coordinators as described in the previous article for the following locations: • Bristol • North Somerset • South Gloucestershire For more information, see: https://volunteer.ramblers.org.uk/opportunities/16011-don-t- lose-your-way-team-coordinator-2020-11-18

Footpaths Secretaries Footpaths Secretaries take part in consultations on proposals to change the path network. Avon Area is currently seeking Footpaths Secretaries for: • B&NES • Kingswood • Yate For more information, contact Jeff at: area-secretary@avon- ramblers.org.uk

Southwold Ramblers footpath wardens The Southwold volunteers are committed to footpath improvements, and work on Thursday mornings every other week. Their current main focus is replacing stiles with kissing gates, though they also perform a number of other tasks, assisted by the South Gloucestershire Ranger when required. Unfortunately their working party is currently much diminished, and they are desperately seeking further volunteers to assist in their work. If you might be interested in swinging the odd sledgehammer in a good cause, please contact either Keith Weller or Keith Budd ([email protected]).

Sighted Guide training by Sight Support (West of England) Can you help a blind or partially sighted person to join your walking group? We all know just how good walking can be for your physical and mental health – and the potential to make new friends and enjoy the beautiful countryside around us feels more important than ever. Sight Support can offer you all the training and information you need to become a confident sighted guide, enabling another person to get out and enjoy the great outdoors. Join our Virtual Sighted Guide Training Session on: 30th June, 7.30pm via Zoom Please call or email for more details: 0117 3224885 or [email protected]

A4174 junction consultation The A4174 Ring Road provides a link between the A4 and Bath to the south and the M32 and the M4 to the north. A new scheme proposes making extensive changes to several junctions along this route, including

alterations that will hopefully make routes more friendly to pedestrians and cyclists. If you live in the area or use these routes, you may like to explore and provide feedback on the current proposals. These can be found at: consultations.southglos.gov.uk/A4174Improvements

Feature Articles

The Gordano Round by Chris S You may or may not have heard of this Round; you may know it; or you may count it as your favourite local walk. A look on the internet or the map (Exp154) shows that it can be all things to all people. We ignored it because it’s on our doorstep. The events of last year changed all that. On the Gordano round we enjoyed fine views, the coast path, and plenty of wildlife and wild flowers. The route crosses picture- book countryside and offers very many variations using other public footpaths you can find online or on the map. The full route is 26 miles, but don’t panic! Apart from all the possible short-cuts, the full length actually consists of two rounds connected by link paths. The original round does indeed encircle the Gordano Valley including Portishead, Clevedon and Clapton. The two towns are easily avoided if you wish, and that is what we did during the pandemic, shortening this walk to around 12 miles or less by choosing alternative footpaths from the map. The route goes very close to Cadbury Camp, close enough for a short side trip and a great picnic, and you can add Cadbury Camp Lane for a view of all the rich people’s houses. We were amazed how many had been demolished and rebuilt in recent years. The other loop is around 12 miles as waymarked, though I don’t think we have ever done it without one or more of the easy variations. It forms a circuit around Lower Failand and is almost completely rural. It’s a wonderful walk so close to the city. This loop also includes views of Noah’s Ark Zoo so you may see a giraffe or rhino as we did! Favourite spring variations included Priors Wood near Portbury for bluebells, and West Tanpit Woods for the wild garlic. We also chose to start from Leigh Woods quite often; sometimes going through the woods, sometimes using part of the Monarchs Way and returning over Ashton Court estate. With so many options from 2 to 26 miles, I really do commend this route if you’ve not already enjoyed it.

Enter the (Black) Dragon by Ceiswyn (Ky) B I blame Carew. All right, so technically it was my own choice to respond to his advertisement, take a day’s holiday from work, get up ridiculously early, walk for over 23 miles, and climb rather a lot of the Black Mountains in excellent company, but he’s the one who put the idea in my head and I never could back down from a challenge. Our elite teamTM were in excellent form, with one of us having cycled half to death recently and two of us having done a hill walk the previous day. Fortunately any initial weariness was dispelled by the good fortune of finding a ten pound note in a hedge, and the resulting discussion of ice cream options. That got us up the first hill – the Black Dragon, as those who’ve walked the challenge route know, has a bit of a hot start – and then we were silenced by the view of the sea of clouds in the valleys below us, and curling like waves breaking over a distant ridgeline. The uphill from there was gradual, with the sun sometimes at our right Sugarloaf island in its cloud sea hand and sometimes behind, and the constant hill breeze dispelling the heat of one of the first real summer days of the year. Strolling along the ridge with the world spread out to both sides was surprisingly easy going, and when we reached Waun Fach none of us hesitated before continuing past the point of commitment to descend the spiky spine of the Dragon’s Back. Some of us may have had some regrets at Mynydd Troed, whose steep and stony slope and false summit are a heartbreaking ascent before lunch. However we reached the trig point within the initial estimate (any rumours of running that you hear should be put down entirely to endorphins and fatigue poisons, though I will not specify whose) and munched our sandwiches looking out across Llangors lake, with the western Blacks a faint blue bulk just visible through the haze. The early part of the afternoon was thankfully easy, with only a minor climb before descending into the valley and easy walks on minor roads and paths, shaded by trees and once with a brook rippling alongside. There was only one minor fly in the ointment, but that was easily avoided if Pen Allt-mawr looming ahead you didn’t look up.

Unfortunately, Pen Allt-mawr doesn’t go away if you don’t look at it. And even more unfortunately, our cars were on the other side. I shall draw a veil over the 1,800 ft ascent from the bottom of the valley, after 17 miles of walking. I, for one, had nothing left in my legs by this point; but since there was no actual alternative option, we just kept on going up. Slower and slower, taking a few steps and stopping, pausing for emergency chocolate and a rest that seemed to do no good at all, never seeming to get any closer to the summit; and then suddenly I was just there, at the jutting rocks, with my friends leaning against them in attitudes of relaxed enjoyment waiting for me. And from there it was easy. Hopping between the rocks of the stony trail along to Pen Cerrig-calch, skipping down to Table Mountain, and from there our shadows stretched eagerly ahead of us in the honey-gold evening light as we trudged the final hundred metres back to our cars. It was over – and yet somehow a part of me seems to have been left on the slopes of Pen Allt-mawr. For even now, as I sit in my living room listening to the traffic going past the end of my street, trying to concentrate on the latest software updates, a part of my mind is filled with the pitiless sunlight on the coarse hillside grasses, the vast blue sky all around, and the bubbling bright song of the skylark. Photographs copyright © Ceiswyn B, May 2021

The 39(ish) steps by Carew R My daughter Lucy lives in a part of Los Angeles that is built on hills. Very attractive, and architecturally varied. Residential streets tend to follow contours, with flights of steps connecting them. Lucy sent me a GPS track prepared by a runner, linking about 40 flights of steps. This, naturally, set me thinking. About Clifton, initially. Built on hills, attractive, architecturally varied; and with numerous flights of steps... Using the loose criteria of i) at least a dozen steps ii) on a pedestrian through route, it didn’t take long to assemble a circuit that includes 20 flights, for an evening stroll of a couple of hours. The Centre and Kingsdown offers even more, with up to 33 flights, depending on whether you include shopping centres and university and hospital campuses. While there are some excellent steps elsewhere in the city (such as Totterdown, or around Troopers Hill), I reckon this will be hard to beat.

In my father’s footsteps by Roger B On Sunday 18th June 1939, my father, just turned 19, and a friend, took the night train to Windermere for a Lakes walking holiday. The plan was a fortnight circuit around the Gable, Sca Fell, Hellvelyn massifs that form the volcanic heart of The Lakes. Each day was to end at one of the hostels established by the newly formed YHA, arriving “under their own steam”. They collected their third ally outside the station and set straight off for Day 1. Up to Orrest Head, down to Kentmere and on to their first night, at Longsleddale, a 'grand hostel with Billiards and Table Tennis...’ Day followed day. Kidsty Pike, Patterdale, an ascent of Hellvelyn via the ‘famed Striding Edge in broiling sunshine’. Keswick and sunburned feet from Derwentwater. To the Borrowdale hostel, opened only six weeks earlier, amazing in its all red cedar construction. Up over Great and Green Gable and down to lonely Black Sail, only recently converted from a bothy. Wasdale Head and then over the ‘corpse trail’ to Boot and the ‘grand’ Eskdale hostel. Hardknott Pass, Duddon Valley, Coniston Old Man. Then a zigzag around the Langdales, Harrison Stickle, Pavey Ark, Grasmere, Hawkshead and finally a walk along the banks of Windermere to the ferry.

I know all this because my father kept a log and created a narrative booklet, adorned with sepia photos from a 5/- Box Brownie camera. In it he recounted the ups and downs of any walking holiday. The broiling sunshine, then the rains that swept in before they could don their capes. And their occasional meetings with a group of ‘three London girls’. --- Wendy took my father’s journal. For my birthday she, together with Nigel, recreated the likely path of that 1939 walk, mapping and scheduling it. And then she located and booked accommodation. I found a baggage transfer company. We booked it all for May 2020, with my sister coming from Australia to join us, but Covid destroyed that. So we put all the bookings back a year and, this May, Wendy and I walked it. Our beginning was truncated by the Covid shutdowns of BnB accommodation and, thankfully, I was

exempted from the exertions of Great Gable. Otherwise, we largely followed my father’s path of 80 years ago. Clambered up the same peaks, followed the same tumbling stone paths, lunched over the same waterfall. In many cases, the paths remain utterly unchanged, the stone bridges over ghylls and streams bearing the same ancient attraction for us, as for him and his party. They’d had to visit the Eskdale cobbler for minor repairs and they’d then taken the miniature railway to Ravenglass ('a dead and alive hole'!). We too sat on the tiny train, but our burnished locomotive gleamed in the sun in a way his would not have. They walked the road back from Ravenglass to the Eskdale hostel but it is no longer '…the loveliest lane I have ever walked.’ Especially, we visited the hostels in which he stayed. At the end of this piece is a link to a wonderful website that lists, and gives background to, every YHA hostel that has ever been. All but three of those 1939 hostels remain to this day, some as independents. Keswick, Stonethwaite, Eskdale, Coniston Coppermines, Elterwater, Grasmere. Wendy managed to book us into the now independent Thorney How hostel at Grasmere. We approached it, by crossing Easedale Beck over the same stone bridge, and walking up the same stony lane, as 80 years ago. At Thorney How, his group met up with the ‘three London girls’ they had last seen at Wasdale Head.

“Saturday 1st Our last day in the Lakes unfortunately. With the three “London girls” and Harry we [made our way] over Red Bank and down to Hawkshead where we had a good lunch. Then on by the side of Windermere to Bowness Ferry where we met a lot more old friends, all going home together. After a good supper together we found the [night] train and bagged a couple of compartments, saying goodbye to the Lakes after a really grand holiday.” Eight weeks later, war was declared. One of the London girls became my mother. Thank you Wendy and Nigel. https://calmview.bham.ac.uk/GetDocument.ashx?db=Catalog&fn ame=YHA+Historical+listing+of+all+youth+hostels+and+associa ted+accommodation+Y900003.pdf Photograph courtesy of Roger B.

Editorial Finally, summer! And I hope that you, like me, enjoyed some really pleasant strolls in the sunshine before the nettles and bracken started to close in...

Fortunately these long summer days carry the opportunity to travel a bit further afield, to new paths that we haven’t been trudging all winter; or even just to rediscover favourite local paths that have finally dried out enough to be passable again. But based on my recent experiences with one of my favourite paths from last summer, wherever you go, I advise taking secateurs. Ceiswyn (pron. KICE-win)

Partners and Sponsors

Ramblers Walking Holidays Ramblers Walking Holidays is the Ramblers holiday walking partner. If you book a holiday with Ramblers Walking Holidays and let them know that you are a Bristol Ramblers member, this Group will receive a contribution (£10 for UK holidays, £20 for short haul, £30 for long haul). See https://www.ramblersholidays.co.uk/faqs#tab-the-walking- partnership Note that this has no impact on the price you pay for the holiday.

Outdoor Retailers Most outdoor gear shops offer discounts to Ramblers members.

Cotswold Outdoor Cotswold Outdoor is the Ramblers national sponsor, and their discount is 15%.

Taunton Leisure Taunton Leisure sponsors this local Group, and also offer 15% discounts, rising to 20% at their regular special events.

You are receiving this communication as a member of the Bristol group and you have previously asked to be kept informed of the Ramblers work by email. If you no longer wish to receive communications like this, please update your mailing preferences at www.ramblers.org.uk/my- account.