Pennine Lines w/c 3 July 2023
|| Remaining cool and breezy || Midge-free bliss ||
The Rib || Climber: Tom Briggs
|| Focus on…. ||
Flora
For the last week or so it’s actually been fairly cool for late June, and breezy with it, a welcome turnaround after the warm spell. It’s been fairly pleasant if not decidedly chilly on some of the grit crags of an evening - I actually went climbing with trousers on twice this week! This reminds me of how UK summers used to be, or at least how I remember them to have been, and gives me a chance to bring things back to the moorland environment for a while, instead of things being entirely limestone all summer. Having said that I’m braced for the next heatwave, but for the next week at least it looks alright.
In climbing circles we talk a lot about the rock, understandably, but at this time of year it’s really two types of vegetation which are dominating the scenery of the moorland grit crags. Firstly, my least favourite aspect of the Pennines: bracken.
I feel like I should really be on-brand here and celebrate all aspects of climbing in the North, but my god I really hate bracken. Sorry to bring the tone down a bit, but I can’t lie. Hate the stuff. Horrible.
To elaborate, here’s my reasons for hating bracken. Firstly, it swamps the place, smothering the landscape in a monotone blanket of sickly green. From a photographic point of view if you’re looking at making landscape photos then straight away you’ve lost 80% of the terrain to bracken. This is why I spend so much time during summer walking along the tops of crags like Stanage, Burbage and Curbar; it’s to escape the green, to get above the bracken line.
Grit and bracken at dusk || Climber: unknown
From a practical point of view it just makes getting anywhere off-piste a pain. Narrow paths disappear in a head-height jungle, ankle turning rocks are hidden, as are the ever-present discarded bags of dog muck. But what’s worse even than that, the prospect of smashing through the greenery is rendered a 1000% less appealing once you know any single given bracken frond in there could be potentially teeming with ticks. Bloody Lyme-disease-carrying ticks. A stomach turning thought, especially if you’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter these things and already had the pleasure of having to remove one from your personage. Grim. And that bracken smell which gets carried on the wind, just to remind you of it even when you’re successfully avoiding the stuff. Ugggghhh.
What’s worse is the fact that twenty or so years ago I don’t recall ticks really being a ‘thing’ in the Peak. I literally didn’t sign up for this, yet here we are. I’ve heard various theories about why ticks are so much of a problem these days, including greater deer numbers, but one thing is for sure they are definitely far more prevalent these days and although catching anything nasty from a tick is probably rare still it’s potentially a serious enough of a threat to warrant some caution.
So there we go, that’s my bracken rant. But I should inject some balance to this character assassination at this point; I have to concede that if we didn’t have bracken and endure its smothering green horribleness all summer then we’d also not have the beautifully orange-brown golden sunset-filled hillsides glowing the last light of the winter sun. When all the bracken dies off in autumn each year it really is magic - you can walk around again, and the place suddenly looks amazing. So, I’m trying to keep that thought in my head to temper the bracken-rage.
The best bracken is dead bracken || Cowperstone, Stanage
The other iconic moorland feature we’ll soon by treated to is the spectacle of the heather flowering. On the eastern side of the Peak we’re not quite there yet, but it won’t be long. Well, I should qualify that - on a few south-facing aspects you’ll already see a few patches of vivid purple heather that have been in flower since June. This is the Bell Heather, which flowers early, but most of the heather on the moors of the Pennines is Ling Heather, which is that classic sort of duller smokey pink-purple. When the entire moors flip from brown to pink almost overnight in late July that’s the Ling Heather flowering.
After the green of spring and summer dominating the palate it’s a welcome injection of colour. It’s a fleeting spectacle which rapidly dulls in tone after a couple of weeks of peak colour, but it’s always worth experiencing if you can, although if you time your summer holiday wrong it’s possible to miss the meat of it entirely.
The heather flowering is usually coupled with some sustained cooler periods, so it’s a great time of year to get reacquainted with gritstone if you’ve been abstaining all summer too. We’ve got a few weeks to go yet but we’re not far off. In fact come to think about it, it’s July as I type this, so we’re only a few weeks from September, then autumn….and you know what that means….
Perched between the heaven and hell, Hanging Prow || Climber: unknown
|| SUPPORTED BY ||
|| Recently Through The Lens ||
I chanced upon Molly putting the cool and fresh evening conditions to good use with a rare - suitably attired - ascent of Bumblies in Red Socks at Stanage.
|| Fresh Prints ||
Going all-in with the dead bracken energy this week in the Print Shop.
