Up on t'moors

[andygates]

It's absolutely beautiful out there right now: Autumn is turning, the bracken has died back, and everything is fading and toughening up just a little. The sheep are shaggy (and from the colour tags, shagged); the ponies are fat and hairy and bitey; the ravens are pruuting and braaking; the little ground-living birds are their usual offended selves. 

In lieu of Bala Triathlon I took a hike out from Meldon Reservoir down past Blackator Copse, up to Yes Tor and back.  Blackator Copse is one of these ancient high-altitude oak woods that grows on a granite boulder field; twisty and gnarled, utterly useless to man, it is so ancient it squeaks.  I think the sheep thought I was Gandalf or something; as it was, I let the sheep (fleeing me) pick out a path among the rocks.  Even so, coming out, I went hip-deep in some sneaky sphagnum.  Bah!  The tors loomed overhead like the Rockery of the Gods, picked out in low light and reverberating the deep engines of a C130 doing exercises over the firing range.

The sheer climb up to the ridge (path? what path?) included a fine gauntlet of very surly heifers, all horns and tracking faces and immobility.  One black beastie had a white blaze that made him look totally like the Punisher of Cows.  I didn't give him any backchat, just in case.  The effort of the climb was well rewarded with one hell of a view; this is as high as the high moors get.  Along the ridge to Yes Tor there was a black bird on a white rock.  No -- that's no rock, it's a space station it's a dead sheep.  And that's a raven.  Canny readers can imagine the stretchy red goodness that was going on, but the bird flapped off and berated me from afar while I hiked past. 

Then it was just a long knee-punishing descent over another boulder field before looping round the hills to plunge back to the reservior; 10k of clean, lonely, beautiful bleakness.  The kind of space that has a chap bursting into song and skipping from rock to rock.  Lovely.