nature & scenery

The Great Northern and London & North Western railways opened the southern section of their joint line from Melton Mowbray to the junctions at Welham and Drayton in 1879. It included a tunnel at East Norton and this viaduct over the valley at John O'Gaunt. The railway closed to passengers in 1953 and completely in 1964. HFF and a great weekend!

Inside out... A bleating lamb caught my attention. Mother was in the field but junior had got out somehow. HFF & have a great week end!

Almost taken over by nature now and lost in the greenery GCR Bridge 356 over Rothley Brook to the south of Rothley station was built by the Great Central Railway in the 1890s but has never carried a railway line. The main line actually runs on a very high embankment about 100yds east of this location. It was provided by the GCR to compensate a landowner for the building of the railway embankment which cut off and orphaned part of a larger field and needed this occupation bridge over the river to access it. It has clearly not been used for many years. HFF and have a great holiday weekend.

Our 7.5 mile walk was pretty straightforward: down the steep-sided hills into the Manifold Valley, follow the disused trackbed of the former Leek & Manifold Light Railway, climb out of the steep-sided valley and walk back to Grindon on the top. Anyone who knows this part of the Peak District will know that the River Manifold is a "disappearing" river. Depending on the volume of rainfall the river fluctuates from normal flow to a completely dry bed as the porous limestone soaks up the water. This bucolic view is an intermediate situation!

Sunset over Porthmissen Beach Trevone near Padstow.

Last weekend we did a 7 mile Bank Holiday walk around the Manifold Valley & passed New Hall in the village of Waterfall as we climbed up out of the Hamps valley. This was a short detour off our planned route to have a beer at the Red Lion in the village. From "Staffordshire Past Track": The village of Waterfall is situated in the Staffordshire Moorlands, north-west of the town of Ashbourne. It is a very typical Moorland village with its buildings built of stone. The place name is a descriptive one and comes from the fact that the River Hamps falls into a subterranean watercourse between the village of Waterfall and Winkhill. HHF from the Peak District and have a great weekend.

Dwarfed by the Rocky Mountains a Canadian Pacific freight train heading by 4 unidentified locos - probably EMD SD40s - passes Kananaskis heading east towards Calgary. I was attending a Mobil Oil Tectonic Geology course through the mountains and should have been listening to the description of the rock outcrops here but the chance of a photo of a train in this fabulous landscape was too much of a diversion. Mount Yamnuska, right, & Old Goat Peak, centre, are part of the Rocky Mountain Front Range and the abrupt change between the steeply dipping, folded & thrusted rocks in the west and the flat lying Interior Plains rocks to the east is dramatic. Here Middle Cambrian carbonates have overridden Cretaceous Belly River Formation along the McConnell thrust fault. (I may not have been listening but I still have the field notes!)

The sun shines over beautiful Kynance Cove on the Lizard peninsula. Lizard Point, the most southerly place in Britain is on the horizon.

The scale of the fabulous compressional tectonic features of the Front Ranges of the Rocky Mountains are definitely best appreciated from the air and the participants in our Mobil Oil field seminar were privileged to have an overflight of the Rockies on the last day of the course. I was living in The Hague, the Netherlands, at this time and working on the sub-surface Alpine tectonics in the North Sea. Superficially the Geology of Holland is pretty boring but 1000m below the surface in the Dutch offshore all hell breaks loose and believe it or not it looks just like this! It could be a seismic cross-section through the Lower Cretaceous oil fields in Block Q1. The subsurface oil and gas fields in the Foothills west of Calgary are trapped in analogous thrust anticlines.