Paving The Way

The spacey feeling of yesterday has stayed with me. I had no choice but to return to work today, but it has gone rather slowly. I came up against a design issue and every possible approach seemed clumsy and difficult to implement. Experience was telling me that there was an elegant solution out there somewhere so I felt reluctant to embark on a route I was certain was going to be abandoned at some point in the future.

I braved the rain mid-morning for a short walk and a chance to get a blip, only to realise, once on the moor, that I had left my memory card behind. I returned and fixed a few bugs before heading out again into the rain, only this time to discover, having once more got up on the moor, that the camera had a flat battery. That's never happened to me before. The feeling began to grow that it was going to be one of those days!

Inspiration still wasn't coming so late in the afternoon, having fully checked the camera before leaving, I set out yet again, this time for a run. I settled into a rhythm along the paved trail to the trig point and found the solution I was looking for. It's elegant and relatively simple to implement. And that's what I'm in the middle of doing now. I feel like I've salvaged something from what was looking like it was going to be a real dead loss of a day.

This section of the trail has been down a year or so now, but recently it's been extended right across the top of the moor to the trig point where it now joins up with another quite recent section of stone paving over a very boggy area. It was a bit of a shock when I came across all this recent work a few weeks ago. My first reaction was one of horror. They had laid these flagstones alongside a perfectly good old path, large sections of which were pretty much always dry. It seemed a bit over zealous. I'm not quite so horrified now. The land either side of the trail will recover and the flagstones will bed in and in time look more natural. We have a natural tendency to see our current version of the landscape as the definitive one and want to protect it from change, but - although it seemed like it today - this is not a truly wild place. It's very much the result of a long history of our interaction with the land. This trail is yet another development in that history and one that will afford more people access to the highest area. I have to admit that I welcomed being able to run across there today without getting miserably damp feet! The moor is as wet right now as I can ever remember seeing it.

Thanks for the hearts and stars and comments on yesterday's first winter tree. I'd almost forgotten how much you enjoy them! Once again, your feedback means so much to me. I really, really appreciate it.