Saturday
By the time we arrived at Widdop it was nearly dark. To start Carol off on night walking we used a tarmac path in order to gain confidence from the car park to the top of the first of the three Walshaw Dean reservoirs. It was mild and the sheep were just going to bed.
The forecast for the weekend had been for thunder, torrential rain and hail which is why we ended up doing a night walk instead of camping. As it turned out Saturday was pretty good all day and none of the horrors appeared.
It was cloudy but the moon still gave a lot of light and this then shone off the water, so all in all it was very easy to see and we didn’t need to use our headlamps.
The moon had been full so was doing waning gibbous but rose where I expected it to so we did a bit of natural navigation.
A short but quite exciting walk. And we saw 2 owls on the way up to Widdop.
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| This makes me thinks of etchings |
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| Moon reflected in the reservoir |
Sunday
I decided to return to Widdop by day to prospect for possible camping spots. I didn’t really find anywhere that would fit the bill but had a nice walk and went off in a different direction from my usual trips to Walshaw Dean.
I got down to the fabulously named Pisser Rough accompanied by rumbles of thunder and was just looking at the bridge across the weir when it started to rain heavily so I abandoned that idea as it meant working a way on not very clear paths along the steep sides of the clough. I probably would have done it if someone else had been there but didn’t want to take a chance of falling into the beck and getting wet and stuck.
Instead I more or less retraced my steps. This was quite a bleak walk and I only saw a few people at quite a distance when I got off the main track.
On the way back, the torrential rain came on and was really awful in Hebden and it was easy to see how easily it gets flooded there as it looked like it was about to happen again.
We saw later on that Bradford had a big dump of hail several inches deep in places, so the weather did all turn up but a day later than forecast.
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| Before the thunder |
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| I want to say this is ectoplasm but it isn’t |
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| Steam rising |
[googlemaps https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Walshaw+Dean+Middle+Reservoir,+Wadsworth,+Calderdale+District,+United+Kingdom&aq=0&oq=walshaw+dean&sll=53.66049,-2.04408&sspn=0.018208,0.060339&t=p&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Walshaw+Dean+Middle+Reservoir&ll=53.798775,-2.051525&spn=0.015208,0.025749&z=14&iwloc=A&output=embed&w=300&h=300]
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