Footprints Newsletter of the Derbyshire Dales Group of the Ramblers January 2020 Editor: Martin Phillips Nick’s Natterings Nick Stephens (Chairman) Our recent AGM attracted the usual group of faithful followers (26 out of a total membership of 548 !). That meant that 522 members missed the brilliant talk by our Footpaths Secretary, Martin Bennett, about our unique & precious system of public rights of way. We should protect them and enjoy them! At the AGM, I, as Chairman, gave a year’s notice, as did the Minutes Secretary. There is an urgent need to fill the post of Secretary (currently unfilled) and the potential requirement for a Membership Secretary and a Programme Secretary. We do need volunteers in order to keep the DDR Group functioning. Sue Weatherley, who has put in more work for Ramblers than I have space to list here, is resigning her posts of Area Access Officer and from the Local Access Forum. She briefly described both jobs at the AGM. Thanks, Sue! (See page 10). It is sad to report the death of David Barker, (obituary on page 11). Thanks to John Searle for all his sterling work as a Tuesday walk collector. Welcome to Andy Jeffries who is taking over the role. Whilst we achieve an impressive walk programme, some walk collectors have been struggling to fill their walk programmes. So PLEASE volunteer to lead a walk - it’s not difficult. Recent First Aid Courses have been well received. The Chesterfield Walking Festival and the recent Area walk hosted by Amber Valley both got good reports. The recent bad weather and serious flooding has meant that several of our walks had to be cancelled since many paths (and roads) were under deep flood water. Due to too much DDR admin work (AGM, surveying footpaths, etc) I haven’t found the time to recce some of the walks I was due to lead, relying instead on Google Earth / Street View/OS Maps). This approach thwarted some of my attempts to complete sections of the Portway. Near Stanley, a half mile section of 12” deep quagmire beat Dave Williams’s record for mud! Another walk from Alport Heights, in pouring rain, with just 3 of us, was halted when the ford at Folley Well was 2 feet deep instead of its usual 2 inches. Diverting, only to be faced by rampaging bullocks, we decided to call it a day! Footprints January 2020 Page 1 of 12 Yorkshire Wolds Way 17-22 June 2019 Anne K Fletcher I joined a very small group of lovely ladies in June to walk the Yorkshire Wolds Way. The Way is 127 km (79 miles); however, our group walked an extra 5 miles with detours to accommodation, which varied from Inn, Farm, Glamping Pod, B&B to a Hotel in Filey. The walk started after a train ride to Hessle and a coffee stop in a pub beside the Humber Bridge. Initially, the walk began along the Humber Estuary as the tide was out, but it was not long before our boots were walking over the underlying chalk of the Wolds and finally finishing on black reef of gritstone at Filey Brigg. The route takes you through many interesting little villages. Market Weighton whose claim to fame is the Yorkshire Giant. We also had a wonderful stop for a peaceful lunch in one of the best preserved, deserted medieval settlements, Wharram Percy. We walked alongside fields of arable cereal crops: corn, wheat, barley, peas and rapeseed, all edged with wonderful wild flowers; we saw so many amazing red poppies. We also spotted hares and heard plenty of birdsong, especially skylarks singing up high. We encountered some intensive pig farms, sheep pastures and a few beef cattle, and we also passed a few unusual art installations in the landscape. Hence this special landscape much loved by artists and writers: David Hockney, Winifred Holtby and Philip Larkin to name but a few. Footprints January 2020 Page 2 of 12 In fact every now and then we would pass a very long curvy, carved, wooden bench inscribed with a poem. An ideal resting spot to admire the view and have a coffee break. We did detach ourselves from the outside world, but from time to time we did try to discover what was happening to Frank Lampard, (we now know that he has moved from Derby to Chelsea Football Club). We had a wonderful time and could thoroughly recommend this walk, well waymarked in most places, to members. Thanks go to Elaine for planning and guiding us on this wonderful walk. Maps and Me Dave Williams Do you remember your first map? I ask because I recently came across the first map that I ever possessed. It came into my possession when I was about nine, bought for me by my mother when shopping in King’s Lynn, the nearest town to the village where we were evacuated. I seem to remember that it cost 2d, quite a low price for a linen based map at the time, which I put down to the fact that it had no cover. Maps were not readily available at the time due to the possibility of invasion, still thought possible in 1941. This was the stage of the war when signposts on roads had been removed and railway station names had been painted out. How a map became available on a market stall is still a mystery to me. The map was Geographia’s ‘No 1 Clear Road Map of South East England’ and covered the area from Poole to the French coast in the South and from Burnley to Hull in the North, at a scale of ten miles to the inch. There were only two colours, black for place names and red for roads. The size of print used for settlements and the thickness of roads indicated their importance. My main use of the map was to locate where relatives lived and to plan imaginary journeys between them. Also to locate the towns that we heard on the wireless had been bombed the previous night. Footprints January 2020 Page 3 of 12 About a year later, we had returned to London where we found that my father was in the Home Guard (Dad’s Army) and attached to a mapping unit for which he held an Ordnance Survey map of the area. I was soon introduced to this OS map, which gave me a head start when three years later OS maps featured in Geography lessons at school. About the same time, my horizons were broadened by a Daily Telegraph War Map of Europe. On this I followed allied bombing raids on Europe and, perhaps more significantly, the advance of the Russian armies from Stalingrad to Berlin in the East, the invasion of Italy in the South and, closer to home, the invasion forces from Normandy to the Elbe. All this was useful information when post-war Geography lessons were concerned with France, the Rhine and the Danube, and history lessons with the unification of Italy. I still have this map too, although in urgent need of some sellotaping of its seams. A year or two later I had reached an age where I could go off hostelling on my bike and my mapping interests became centred on OS quarter mile to the inch maps, mainly of East Anglia, but other Southern areas ‘just in case’. A move in the 1960’s brought me to Derbyshire and my first ‘serious’ walking using the OS 1:25,000 maps. The move also necessitated my first car, a converted Commer Cob van, the equivalent of the Hillman Husky car. A glut of road maps from the AA and most of the petrol companies followed, although the OS inch to the mile maps (soon replaced by 1:50,000) remained the staple one. Tongue in cheek, I might say that those who use the current 1:25,000 Pathfinder maps ‘don’t know they are born’. The first series Provisional Edition maps were printed in three colours, black for place names, field boundaries and grid lines, blue for water, brown for contours. Needless to say, there was sometimes confusion between grid lines and field boundaries. Footpaths, county and parish boundaries, power and pipelines, were all black lines, dotted, dashed or a combination of the two, plus sometimes other symbols. No wonder that parish boundaries were sometimes unintentionally walked. The Pathfinder series I find excellent but rather regret the increasing use of acronyms (PW = place of worship), inevitable perhaps as more information is packed onto them, and usage, especially of old churches, frequently changed to warehouses and restaurants. Studies with the Open University in the 1980’s introduced me to another form of map reading, that of geological mapping. This, involving thinking in three dimensions as well as time (non-conformities), has proved one of the most intriguing and satisfying forms of working with maps that I have experienced. At this time I also got a ‘Peter’s Projection’ of the world, quite a revelation. It took this for me to realise how vast the continent of Africa is and to realise how great the distortion is in Mercator’s projections. Footprints January 2020 Page 4 of 12 My experience with foreign maps has been limited. I have found none that compare with our OS ones. The French Institut Geographique National ones being the best of those I have used. As we have passed into the IT age so has my use of maps changed. I still use Landranger maps for planning some walks and car journeys but increasingly use the Derbyshire Mapping Portal site for planning walks in this area.