Reeth

**I’ve moved my blog to http://www.ianhopkinson.org.uk/, you can find this post here**

In a change from usual service we went to the Yorkshire Dales rather than the Lake District for our summer holiday, this is the land of my father - whose family lived, and still live for the most part around the southern edge of the Dales. We stayed in a cottage in Reeth (2, Nurse Cherry's Cottages), recently built but in the old style. The advantage of this are that it's spacious and the plumbing was not added as an afterthought. I think the cottage was advertised as sleeping up to four people, with two bathrooms and a downstairs toilet it would take 6 pretty comfortably. We are only two, so had plenty of room. We arrived in a downpour but for the rest of the week the weather was pretty good. Reeth is a small village which was once a centre for mining and farming but now is a centre for tourism - lying in the Yorkshire Dales and on the coast to coast path. It's dominated by a large central green, although there are older buildings many are quite modern but built in the same style as the older, using the local stone.

Day 1

A pleasant walk up Arkengarthdale to Langthwaite, and back along Fremington Edge Top. The walk outwards is through pasture and many narrow styles in stone walls with little gates to prevent sheep escaping. Shortly before Langthwaite there is a footbridge across the river which takes you to a short walk through woodland before climbing up through old lead mine workings up onto Fremington Edge Top. We took the route which avoided the hamlet of Booze, considering that it was so small that it was unlikely to have a good quality sign to picture ourselves besides. Nearby is Blea Barf, and at the top of the valley on the road over into Hawse is Lovely Seat, one can't help thinking that when the Ordnance Survey visited the locals had some fun.

The walk along Fremington Edge Top is dead straight along the side of the wall. I wonder whether these walls date to the time of the old iron fence posts in the Lake District - perhaps relating to some Enclosures Act. The wall runs along the edge of wild moorland to the north and after a pleasant, if not a little windswept walk you drop back down towards Reeth.

Day 2

A route from The Green Book starting at Gunnerside, heading to Muker then up Upper Swaledale towards Keld and then back towards Muker via the Pennine Way and so along the river back to Gunnerside. Highpoints were the waterfalls at the foot of Swinner Gill and Kisdon Force. Photographers will know there is a knack to photographing waterfalls such that the water appears milky rather than frozen in time by a short exposure. The problem is this requires long exposures (about 1/2 second) and this is a bit tricky to do without a tripod - a handy rock or handrail must suffice instead. Crackpot Hall was also interesting, the term Hall is rather grandiose but the views down Swaledale were spectacular. Much birdlife to be seen including a greater spotted woodpecker, dipper, spotted flycatcher, grey wagtail, plover - no photos of these since that requires patience, speedy reactions and so forth. Lapwings all over the place.

Day 3

A more restful day today: we headed down to Harrogate and the RHS Harlow Carr garden. This is horticulture, so I'll leave the details to The Inelegant Gardener. It's a fairly lengthy drive down to Harrogate from Reeth - a little under an hour and a half. My abiding memory will be of coffee and Fat Rascal in Betty's Tea Rooms, attached to the gardens but not providing a route in or out. After a morning at Harlow Carr we headed back home via Richmond: a rather smart little town on a steep hillside with a huge castle (and more waterfalls). The Market Square would be spectacular if it weren't for a flotsam of cars which spoil any photo. Sharon and I both seem to suffer from a list which prevents the photography of buildings without post-processing. A balanced diet today of Fat Rascal, sausage roll and icecream, available from the icecream shop in Reeth a mere 100 yards from our door (via shortcut).

Day 4

Back to walking, this time one of my own devising. Starting from Gunnerside we headed up Gunnerside Beck until we reached the lead workings at Melbecks Moor. There a several sets of ruined buildings and mine tailings as you head up the valley. After climbing up through the surface workings we got onto the moor top where were visible grouse, grouse grit stations (where they can pick up grit for their gizzards) and grouse butts from where they can be shot at. You have to get pretty close to grouse before they break cover. Finally, we dropped down into the valley where we got a little lost (and quite badly nettled) trying to find the path through Rowleth Wood. Once on the path through the wood, which is narrow and overgrown, we were further nettled and as I write now a couple of hours later my legs are still tingling from the knees down.

After our walk we visited the Swaledale Museum, which although small was highly informative on the local mining industry - a subject I shall return to in another blog post.

Day 5

Over to Wensleydale for our walk today (from the Green Book), from Bainbridge up to Semer Water (a rare natural lake in the Dales) and then onwards and back via the Roman Road. The Roman Road was very straight, and as usual somewhat disappointing - it requires a great deal of imagination to call up the requisite Roman soldiers. The weather was rather better than yesterday which was overcast and prone to the odd shower; today it is a little cool out of the sun.

Day 6

Final day, today we went back to Wensleydale for a walk from the Green Book starting at Aysgarth Falls and taking in Bolton Castle. The Falls are a bit of a disappointment, the approved viewing locations are a little distant from the falls and are rather confined. Richmond falls offer something similar, with slightly peaty-brown water cascading over flat slabs, but with much better access. Bolton Castle, on the other hand is rather impressive, visible on the valley side for many miles it is a solid, square chunk of masonry. It was built for Richard de Scrope in 1379, and is quite substantially intact.

The Yorkshire Dales are quite different from the Lake District: the peaks are less peaky, the valleys wider and more gentle, although the moors can be bleak when the wind blows and the clouds come down. There are also a lot of picturesque waterfalls, not in the style of the Lake District which tend to be frenzied plummets down ravines but cascades over broad rocky shelves. Villages like Hawes and Reeth can get quite busy as the day goes by but out walking we scarcely saw a soul. The stone walls are all pierced with small stone stiles, which have been the distinguishing feature of this holiday.

More photos here.

Photographs, videos and GPS

This post is in part a memory aid but it may be interesting to other amateur photographers, and organisational obsessives.

My scheme for holidays and walks out is to take cameras (Canon 400D, Casio Exilim EX-S10), sometimes a video camera (Canon Legaria FS200) and a Garmin GPS 60 which I use to provide information for geotagging photos rather than navigation, although I once used it as an altimeter to find the top of a cloud covered Lake District mountain. Geotagging is the process of labelling a camera image with the location at which it was taken.

I save images as JPEG, I should probably use RAW format on the SLR but the workflow is more complicated and I rarely do anything particularly advanced with images after I’ve taken them other than cropping, straightening and a little fiddling with contrast. Once home I save all the images from a trip to a directory whose name is as follows:

Z:\My Pictures\[year]\[sequence number] – [description] – [date]

So for my recent skiing trip:

Z:\My Pictures\2011\003 - Hinterglemm – 29jan11

I leave the image file names unaltered. Padding the sequence number with zeroes helps with sorting. The idea of this is that I can easily find photos of a particular trip just using the “natural” ordering of the file system, I don’t rely on 3rd party software and I’m fairly safe from the file system playing sneaky tricks with creation dates. The Z: drive on my system is network attached storage, so it can be accessed from both my desktop and laptop computers. I back this up to the D: drive on my desktop PC using Syncback and I also copy it periodically to a portable drive which I keep at work. Syncback synchronises the files in two directories, I use this in preference to “proper” backup because it doesn’t leave my files in a big blob of an opaque backup format (I got burnt by this when using NTbackup in the past). The drawback is that I can’t go back to a snapshot in time but I’ve never felt the need to do this.

In addition to the images, I also save the GPS file in GPX format to the directory, this is downloaded and converted using Mapsource which is Garmin’s interfacing software. GPX is a format based on XML so is easy to read programmatically and even by humans. I do little inside Mapsource other than converting, and for a multi-session trip, stitching all the tracks together into a single file. Another handy tool in this area is GPSBabel which converts GPS data between a multitude of formats.

I use Picasa for photo viewing and labelling: it’s free, it has basic editing functions, it allows labelling and geotagging of photos in a fairly open manner and it does interesting stuff like face recognition too. As well as all this it links to Google’s web albums, so I can share photos, and it talks nicely to Google Earth.

Both geotagging and labelling images use EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) this is a way of adding metadata to images; nice because it’s a standard and the data goes in the image file so can’t get lost. EXIFtool is a very useful command-line tool for reading and writing EXIF data, and it can be integrated into your own programs. Software like Picasa, and websites such as Flickr are EXIF aware so data saved in this format can be visible in a range of applications. 

It is possible to geotag photos manually with Picasa via Google Earth but I’ve collected a GPS track so this is not necessary. There are free software packages to do this but I’ve written my own for fun. The process is fairly simple: the GPS track has a timestamp associated with each location point and the photos from the camera each have a timestamp. All the geotagging software has to do is find the GPS point with the timestamp closest to that of the photo and write that location data to the image file in the appropriate EXIF fashion. The only real difficulty is matching up the offset between image time and GPS time - for this I take a picture of my GPS which shows what time it thinks it is and label this “GPS”.

In fact I usually label photos after they have been geotagged: photos can be exported from Picasa as a Google Earth compatible KMZ file and then upload into Google Earth along with the GPS track in GPX format making it possible to see where you were when you took the photo, which makes labelling easier.

I use www.gpsvizualiser.com to create images of GPS tracks on top of satellite images, this is a bit more flexible than just using Google Earth, I must admit to being a bit bewildered with the range of options available here. Below is an example where height is coded with colour.

As I go around I sometimes take sets of images to make a panorama. The final step is to stitch together these multiple images to make single, panoramic views, I now use Microsoft Image Composite Editor to do this, it preserves the EXIF data of the input image and does a nice auto-crop. My geotagging program flags up images that were taken close together in time as prospective panoramic images. The image below is a simple to image panoramic view (from Hinterglemm)

I mentioned video in the title: at the moment I’m still a little bemused by video. I use the same directory structure for storing videos as I do for pictures but I haven’t found album software I’m happy with or a reliable way of labelling footage – Picasa seems promising although the playback quality is a bit poor. ffmpeg looks like a handy programming tool. Any suggestions welcome!

Hinterglemm

A view up the Saalbach-Hinterglemm valley, Hinterglemm is in the distance

Mrs SomeBeans and I have been skiing again, staying in Hinterglemm in the SkiCircus area of Austria. Hinterglemm is the upper of the two main villages in a valley running east-west, Saalbach is the larger village and gets more sun but the lifts are spread out around the village. We went with Inghams, flying from Manchester to Salzburg, the transfer time is about 2 hours, with a stops at Zell am See and Saalbach which are both relatively close. Salzburg airport can’t really cope with the number of package tour flights it gets in a short period.

Conditions last week were fantastic, for the first four days of our holiday we didn’t see a single cloud, temperatures were fairly low but there was no new snow during the week. Skiing was best between about 8:30am-10am before most people, other than the locals, had got out on the slopes. I suspect getting up at 7:30 every morning is not most people’s idea of a holiday.

Hinterglemm has a lot of lift capacity out of the village, a short gondola ride takes you to a set of four chairlifts on the south-facing side of the valley and two longer gondolas take you to summits on the north facing side of the valley. The link to Saalbach on the south side of the valley is a bit odd: from Saalbach it an an old 3-seater chair lift, followed by a long t-bar drag lift and an old 2-seater chair lift. The return from Hinterglemm the link is a bit easier but still involves a short t-bar. A nice range of skiing with some big wide pistes, pistes through trees and a few long black runs on the north-facing side of the valley which we didn’t try out. The area is pretty well linked up with some circular routes, and the ability to get to pretty much anywhere in the linked are in a couple of hours at most.

We stayed at the Hotel Glemmtalerhof in a large north-facing room looking towards the Reiterkogelbahn which could have accommodated 5 people. The hotel is right in the middle of the village with only a short (~200m) walk to either the Reiterkogelbahn taking you onto the south-facing slopes or the Unterschwarzachbahn taking you to the north-facing slopes. Food was fabulous and overall a good hotel. Drawbacks were that is was a bit noisy, since it sat on the middle of the village and there seemed to be an awful lot of smoking being done in the reception, cafe and bar area. Across the valley, right next to the Reiterkogelbahn, was the Hotel Alpine Palace Wolf which looked very posh and maybe worth a go in future.

Some of the other guests were a little odd: Sunday night as Gala dinner night featured a dessert buffet, which they ate from copiously pretty much all the way through the meal. Mrs SomeBeans, qualified to teach food hygiene, observed sufficient prodding and sniffing of the desserts that she preferred not to partake.

Once again we were plagued by “other people”. This time the party who didn’t realise that “Boarding at gate 7” meant: “get on the plane”, and one of whose children spent the flight gently pummelling my back through the seat back – I was calm since I decided to treat it as a free massage!

Overall a very good holiday with some fabulous skiing: this trip was unusual in that we were able to travel in term time – normally we are restricted to school holidays. I suspect the lift system in SkiCircus copes fairly well with February half-term, so might give it a go then next year.

A selection of photos:

This is "twinkly snow", as you ski past it the ice crystals twinkle.

Mrs SomeBeans and I on a chairlift, we're a bit camera shy

Great snowfields near the top of a mountain

The Leoganger Steinberge, a panoramic view from Wildenkarkogel

Looking towards Hinterglemm,invisible over the edge, with pretty clouds and icicles

Obviously I captured GPS data, we covered about 180 miles in 7 days including uplift

More photos here, along with captions.

Christmas Calendar 2010

For the past few years I’ve been making my own calendars, as a Christmas present. As best I can I use photos taken in the stated month. This year half of them are taken by Mrs SomeBeans and half by me.

The cover image – A Caiman Lizard, living at Chester Zoo

January – our house in the snow, and the dark – a small amount of white balance fiddling required to reduce the orange cast from the sodium street lights.

February – ski-ing in Westendorf in the Austrian Tyrol

March – A hellebore, Mrs SomeBeans will have taken this one

April – some sandstone from the Sandstone trail, this will be from close to Frodsham.

May – Allium and a bee, bees are difficult to photo because they move around so much

June – The bark of the Strawberry tree

July – A lilac-breasted roller at Chester Zoo, a photograph from a works day out

August – A building at Trentham Gardens – for some reason this makes me think of India

September – Helenium, Mrs SomeBeans making good use of the macro lens she allowed me to buy!

October – A gilded water-buffalo at Biddulph Grange, every garden needs one

November – Witch hazel leaves taking their autumn colour

December – Frost, fog and weak sun by the Shropshire Union Canal

Caerwys - a breezy spring walk

Off to Afon-wen and Caerwys today for a brisk walk featuring steep walking through woods, spring flowers, llamas, highland cows and a newt. You can see the route here:


View Caerwys in a larger map

It's a walk from "Walking in the Clwydian Range" by Carl Rogers, real men make up their own walks from OS maps and scouting missions but I'm lazy. A cool spring day today, in the distance we could still see the odd patch of snow on the hillsides. The trees were bare but the flowers had started to come out:

Clockwise from top left: Primrose, violet, wood anemone, and celandine

There were many birds out, singing away enthusiastically. I was going to show a picture of a woodpecker which we heard tapping away very close by, but we didn't see it so it would really have been a conceptual piece so I'd like you take that conceptuality one step further and imagine a picture of a tree with an unseen woodpecker in it. Caerwys is the home of llamas, which I also treat with a degree of respect, since they spit if you offend them:

Although it's a very rural location there are both signs of modern industrialisation in the from of quarries and sandpits and also the remnants of older work, including this lime kiln:

And also this rather creepy corrugated iron building which put me in mind of "Jeepers Creepers" or "Deliverance":

With a vivid imagination, a walk in the countryside is never boring! We walked through the village of Caerwys, which is quite pretty - many of the houses seem to be well-made from the local limestone. No photos though, mainly because the streets were full of parked cars which are an aesthetic abomination and I don't like photographing people's houses in close up - it seems rude. However, I had no qualms about photographing this fine house across Ysceifiog Lake which was created for fishing by the Earl of Denbigh in 1904:

We next passed through a small nature reserve: Y Ddol Uchaf, which is a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) whose information board promised newts, and lo - I saw that there were newts and it was good:

On the final stretch back to the car we were treated to these handsome chickens:

And some Highland cows, we first sighted some of these in the distance across a field then we passed close by to another group behind a photography unfriendly fence then eventually coming to some easily accessible ones in photogenic mud:

This one, is the bull in the group, I'm a country lad and was easily able to identify him as such by dint of his sizeable testicles (which I refrained from photographing):

So there you go, a memorial of our Easter Sunday walk immortalised for when I am old and incapable of leaving the house.

Westendorf

Mrs SomeBeans and I have been skiing for the last week, and this is a small set of photos from our trip. The family will be subjected to the full 120 photos but you, gentle reader, get the edited version. We went skiing in Westendorf, in the Austrian Tirol, this is where we learnt to ski in January 2001 (a tale of misery, pain and addiction).

On our return we discovered that Westendorf was the village my mum visited most summers. We've been back a few times since, each time there are a few more ski lifts, pistes and restaurants to try. Last week was half-term in the UK and several European countries, so airports and so forth were pretty busy. We managed to avoid most of the crowds by making an earlier morning start and keeping to the quieter bits of the mountain.

The first few days of our trip were cold and clear, actually that's not quite true, it was clear at the top of the mountain and murky at the bottom because of an inversion layer (meterologists: feel free to correct me)

The cold weather was associated with snow, which covered the trees:

We saw sundogs, once again, but I found them impossible to photograph using my compact camera, however I did catch an okayish picture of a related effect - the pillar of light is a real effect you can see with your own eyes - not lens flare.

If I'd have dropped down the slope a little to take the photo the brightest spot would be floating a little way above the ground. Mrs SomeBeans saw this but kept quiet, assuming she was hallucinating! I believe it's caused by a reflection of sun from aligned plate-shaped ice crystals in the air.

Over the last few years there's been a big change in ski wear - most people now wear ski helmets, here you can see me sporting my new purchase:

Mum was with us this time, she's a bit leery of trying downhill skiing but does a bit of cross country skiing:

You'll notice that few people feature in my photos, this is because I am something of a misanthrope - more of which later. As we left Westendorf it was snowing once again... and we returned to England yesterday to more snow overnight.