Whacky Signs.

[KeithMacdonald]

25 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

I didn't know there was a football team called Percy!

 

Percy Main Amateurs F.C.

 

Quote

They are currently members of the Northern Alliance Premier Division and play at Purvis Park.

 

[Adam88]

5 hours ago, The Johnster said:

*Those of you whose experience of sheep comes from the lush farms of Southern England or the plump fluffyclouds of Romney Marsh may need some expanation; a Valleys sheep is a different sort of creature altogether.  Bred for wool, the meat is tough and barely edible, and they scrawny, scruffy, and have a palpable 'street' attitude.  They are released onto the mountains to graze, and brought down at the end of the season for shearing, the transhumance that goes back to the bronze age and further, and have to be tough to survive up there. 

 

The War-song of Dinas Vawr

BY THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK

 

The mountain sheep are sweeter,

But the valley sheep are fatter;

We therefore deemed it meeter

To carry off the latter.

...

 

[The Johnster]

2 hours ago, KeithMacdonald said:

 

My son had a similar experience while training in the Brecon Beacons, and was told to not trust the OS maps. A summer's day could start beautifully, with clear blue skies, and high temperatures. Some chaps would drop out from heat exhaustion. About midday, the Atlantic weatherfronts would roll in. Thick mist and then rain (if you were lucky), or thick dark clouds with thunder, lightening and hailstorms (in mid-summer). Some chaps would drop out from hyperthermia.

 

OS maps are the only thing you can trust in Brecon Beacons, but you really have to know how to use them, as well as a compass.  Even then you can be caught out.  I'm pretty good at navigating with a map and Silva compass, but on one occasion walking to a bearing in 10-yard visibility, I set sights on a rock, the cream coloured limestone boulder sort, as there was nothing else of any distinction in my limited field of vision.  So I was a little perturbed when it stood up, gave me an old-fashioned, nay contemptuous look, bleated sarcastically at me, and wandered off...

 

Disorientation is a serious issue.  It is difficult to believe what your compass is telling you when every fibre of your being is telling you that it is wrong, and you must be correct.  Trust me, you're not, and it is, but it is not easy to overcome this feeling once the merest smidgeon of doubt about your position has arisen. 

 

The Beacons are the first significant geology that weather fronts arriving south of Ireland up the Western Approaches encounter, and get the lot; isobars huddle together for warmth and all hell breaks loose, in real time.  Your son's experience, which sounds to me as if those sons of fun, the Army, were behind it, is typical, and the trick is knowing your limits and when to turn back.  There was a serious tragedy some years ago with a group on an SAS selection training course in which three soldiers died from heat exhaustion, and training methods have been altered after the inquiry into this incident.  The Army, and particularly the SAS, needs to train for toughness and endurance, and to promote an attitude of coping with extremes, and it must be difficult for them to devise effective training that both proves the candidate's suitability for the type of combat he will be expected to cope with, and at the same time not kill him! 

 

The SAS are a frequent occurrence up there, and the best thing to do with them is leave them to it.  If they want to talk to you they will, and some of them have interesting stories to tell, but otherwise they are best left alone.  Also not a good idea to use their stone shelters or slit trenches, as you are liable to be very unceremoniously turfed out...

 

Friend of mine back in the 80s joined the Army and did some training in the Beacons and on the Sennybridge ranges.  Came back complaining about the cold and wet, and the pointlessness of it all; 'if we ever have a war, it'll be on the Luneburg Heath, low hills and woodlands for cover, where Armenius 'ad the Legions, nothing like the Beacons, what's the point in training us up there, there's nowhere else in the world like that (well, except Dartmoor, perhaps, and he'd have felt the same about that).  He was wrong.  Few months later he was in the Falklands, terrain exactly like the Beacons but a thousand foot lower, same weather though.  Bogs, tussocky grass you can't walk on without breaking your ankle, sheep everywhere...

 

I hope your son was warned about the Greflogs.  Nobody quite knows what Greflogs are, because nobody that has ever seen one has lived to tell the tale, but they are clearly quite fearsome because no victims' remains are ever found...

[KeithMacdonald]

7 hours ago, The Johnster said:

OS maps are the only thing you can trust in Brecon Beacons, but you really have to know how to use them, as well as a compass. 

 

Some (not us) might scoff, and say "what's the point?" . When a decent mobile phone has both GPS and maps for pin-point navigation. The point is : GPS can easily be jammed, then the expensive electronic toys are useless. We routinely have training exercises where just that happens (GPS jamming) - on land or at sea. In the latter case, hopefully, one has had advanced notice by reading the Notices To Mariners, not just wondering WTF is wrong (in an increasingly deperate tone of voice). In either case one is back to Mk.1 Eyeball navigation. Hopefully with a decent Silva compass, and on land, if you are lucky, you might stumble over some wacky signposts.

 

 

 

[The Johnster]

Absolutely agree.  And anything battery powered is likely to die on you especially in cold and wet conditions when you are trying to get safely off the hill after a few hours use, which is when you are most likely to be really needing it.  Smartphone GPS navigation is convenient and user-friendly, a useful tool for hillwalking, but battery technology is not up to the 100% reliability of an OS and the Earth’s magnetic field.  
 

In any case, I take great pleasure in ‘analogue’ navigation as a skill that I am rather proud of.  I don’t go hillwalking any more as my poor old knees are not up to it; I can go up hills but have trouble coming down, but in more recent years have used the phone.  There’s an OS and a silva in the ruccy, though, top pocket and accessible. 

 

 

 

[Jeremy Cumberland]

8 hours ago, The Johnster said:

Disorientation is a serious issue.  It is difficult to believe what your compass is telling you when every fibre of your being is telling you that it is wrong, and you must be correct.  Trust me, you're not, and it is, but it is not easy to overcome this feeling once the merest smidgeon of doubt about your position has arisen. 

This is the traditional advice (and by "advice" I put it into the same category as "Don't touch that, you'll burn your hand... There, what did I tell you?") but in the modern world things are a little different.

 

Fortunately, I learnt to read a map and use a compass as a kid, and even more fortunately I had a lesson in the disorientating effects of fog when I was 16. In Wales, as it happened, when I was staying at Bryn Poeth Uchaf youth hostel, situated about 1000 ft above sea level in the moorland west of Llanwrtyd Wells. I arrived from the east, in sunshine. It was the last day of my walking holiday and all I had to do the following day was find the warden's house about half a mile away to pay my dues, and then walk to Cynghordy station for the train home. The following day we were up in the clouds, and visibility was nil. I set off in the correct direction (south), but after 30 minutes had not got to the warden's house, or encountered anything else I expected to find. Time to get out the compass, to find, rather disconcertingly, that I was heading north, and I must have turned through 180 degrees without realising it. Now with compass in hand, rather than in a rucksack pocket, and with frequent checks of the map, it didn't take me too long to work out where I was and, more importantly, what direction I needed to go in.

 

Jump forward nearly 40 years, to a tale I might have told before on this forum. Starting from Wasdale Head early one morning, I set out to climb Kirk Fell - up by Moses Trod and down by Black Sail, with the intention of carrying on to Pillar, and maybe Red Pike as well. The cloud was down to about 2000 ft, well below the top of Kirk Fell, but it was forecast to lift in the afternoon. The route up was uneventful. Moses Trod is the well-beaten path from Wasdale to Honister, and to reach Kirk Fell, you leave it where there are a couple of small tarns just before its top and strike out to the left, and it was at about this point that I entered the mist. There is a reasonable path up Kirk Fell, rather petering out towards the end as you reach the two summits, about a quarter of a mile apart. I had been here before and had no problem reaching the second, higher, summit without referring to map or compass. Here I had a break, and something to eat.

 

With the mist and the break, I knew not to trust any sense of direction I thought I might have. The top of Kirk Fell is something of a plateau, perhaps half a mile in diameter, and perfectly safe, but there are potentially dangerous crags on several sides. In particular, the route down to Black Sail is something of a tricky one, and not a place to miss one's way. So I got out my compass and looked at the map. I was rather surprised that the direction I was being pointed in was not at all the direction I expected to go, but I had absolute faith in my compass and my ability to use it, and headed off in that direction without question. When I reached the edge of the plateau, there was no path heading down to Black Sail. This wasn't particularly odd - it is easy to go some tens of yards astray in quarter of a mile - although I was rather disappointed in my navigation. Sometimes it pays to head deliberately to one side or other of the direct line, to know which way to turn when you reach a particular feature, but I had not done that on this occasion, so my choice of whether to turn left or right was more or less arbitrary. I chose left, because if I missed the path to Black Sail, this way would bring me to a different path, directly down the front of Kirk Fell to Wasdale Head. After all, if my navigational abilities weren't up to even the simple task of finding the Black Sail path off Kirk Fell then I may as well return to the pub.

 

The edge of the plateau has a sort of path, and following it was easy. After a while I heard the sound of a stream. Look at the map. As I thought, there are no streams at all on this side of the mountain. I stop to eat some biscuits. I am in no danger, the summit plateau is perfectly safe, but I am now losing all confidence. I continue, and in a short while I find the stream. Look at the map. Nothing. And I haven't met the expected path down to Wasdale Head either. Oh well, I'll continue on the track round the edge of the plateau. A lot later than I expect, I do finally meet a path down, which I take to be the one to Wasdale Head, and of course I follow it. I meet some people coming up and have rather a surreal conversation when they ask me where I am going (Wasdale Head), and they query that I am not going to Great Gable. Great Gable, I think. That's the other way, surely. In fact, that would be the path I came up an hour or so ago. I resolved to get off this mountain as quickly as possible.

 

As I begin to emerge from the clouds, I find a couple of tarns and a path heading down to the right, which is surely the top of Moses Trod. It takes quite a while longer for the clouds to clear from my mind, though. Sitting down by the side of the path, with Wasdale Head in clear view below me and the clouds beginning to lift from the surrounding mountains so I am in absolutely no doubt of where I am, I get out my compass. As I by now suspected, the red end of the needle was pointing south.

 

Apparently, compasses demagnetising and pointing in the wrong direction is an increasing phenomenon, with our carrying so many other magnetic and electronic devices in close proximity. For me, it was probably the magnet on my binoculars case, which often shared the same rucksack pocket with my compass.

 

There is a clue to a compass being reverse polarity, which I had noticed on Kirk Fell but its significance failed to register. Most compasses are balanced for the northern or southern hemisphere, according to where they are sold. This is because the nearer pole will pull that end of the needle downwards, and so northern hemisphere compasses have more weight at the southern end of the needle to compensate. On Kirk Fell, with the weighted end of the needle pointing north and being attracted downwards, the needle was far from level, with the red end clearly pointing upwards.

 

I now have a new compass, and another useful lesson learnt. I still have faith in the Ordnance Survey, though.

[33C]

I tell the current unruly youth, "DON'T LOOK AT THAT CAMERA!"

They always do......

[jcredfer]

Mk 1 eyeball is more accurate than electrics, as it gives immediate feedback from the scenery. {no matter how limited that might be}.

 

I used to take the A-level PE and D of Ed Gold candidates to the Brecons for their training and assessments.  Not far from Crickhowell there is an area near the top, which is fairly flat, which contains a number of smallish pools.  They were tasked with 8 figure references, for a couple of these and had to arrive at the correct side of the pool.  It didn't need mist, fog and blasting rain, as the water in the pools doesn't stand up enough to be visible, {well, not normally} until a few paces away - by which time it's too late for a quick dodge to the left or right!

 

Nearby, there is a Cairn marked on the map.  Away they go - and I just wait, for them to tell me that there is a mistake on the map and the Cairn simply doesn't exist {Some interesting comments {!?!}, from them, as they recheck, re-pace, take bearings etc!}.  I think it's quite possibly / probably one of the wild country equivalents of the "Trap Streets", OS use to catch people who may be attempting to avoid copyright.  That one is quite near Blaenonneu Quarry and one of the caves, which I was informed was where Welsh Chartists had taken refuge, so worth getting them there for a lunch break and explore, with a bit of real life history.  {Good for those less than friendly weather days, too.}

 

[Steamport Southport]

I always think it's hilarious that to go from North Wales to South Wales by train you have to go via England!

 

 

 

[Colin_McLeod]

On 25/09/2023 at 09:45, Steamport Southport said:

I always think it's hilarious that to go from North Wales to South Wales by train you have to go via England!

 

 

 

 

Or that part of  County Donegal in Southern Ireland is further north that the whole of Northern Ireland.

Edited September 26, 2023 by Colin_McLeod
See melmerby's post.

[Colin_McLeod]

From the instructions for a solar light.

[Hroth]

20 minutes ago, Colin_McLeod said:

From the instructions for a solar light.

 

Ummmm.....  Yes!

 

[F-UnitMad]

1 hour ago, Steamport Southport said:

I always think it's hilarious that to go from North Wales to South Wales by train you have to go via England!

 

 

 

Apparently it's also quicker to do that by road, too. I used to work for the West Midlands depot ofa South Wales haulage company, and we covered North Wales - that tells you something!!

Mindyou, once in North Wales, when you got out of an obviously Welsh lorry, to ask for directions in an English accent, to a place you couldn't pronounce - if looks could kill...... 😱😱😱🤣🤣

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, Steamport Southport said:

I always think it's hilarious that to go from North Wales to South Wales by train you have to go via England!

 

 

 

 

Papers!

 

 

[Nick C]

1 hour ago, Colin_McLeod said:

 

Or that County Donegal in Southern Ireland is further north that the whole of Northern Ireland.

One I learnt recently - you can cross the border from Czechia to any of it's neighbours, travelling in any of the cardinal compass directions. I believe the same applies to Switzerland.

[Guest]

Slow down for the fake police car because it might be hiding a real one...

 

[AndrueC]

3 hours ago, Steamport Southport said:

I always think it's hilarious that to go from North Wales to South Wales by train you have to go via England!

Llandudno to Cardiff by car is best done via England as well.

 

My Dad used to say that he could get to London quicker than he could get to Cardiff. I assume he meant by train since it's 4.5 hours v. 5 hours by car it seems.

Edited September 25, 2023 by AndrueC

[Michael Hodgson]

16 minutes ago, AndrueC said:

Llandudno to Cardiff by car is best done via England as well.

 

 

Or by push-bike, with all them hills in the way.   B*gg*r that.

[kevinlms]

If I were going to (doesn't matter where) I wouldn't start from here!

[Hroth]

51 minutes ago, kevinlms said:

If I were going to (doesn't matter where) I wouldn't start from here!

 

and

 

"That way be quicker, but that way be prettier!"

 

[Ian Morgan]

3 hours ago, 30801 said:

Slow down for the fake police car because it might be hiding a real one...

 

 

The trolley poles on the police car do not look long enough to reach the wires ...

 

 

[melmerby]

13 hours ago, Colin_McLeod said:

 

Or that County Donegal in Southern Ireland is further north that the whole of Northern Ireland.

Not exactly

Only the small part of land north of Ballymena, Co Donegal up to Malin Head, the Garvan isles plus Inishtrahull are further N than any of N.I.

The northern tip of Inishtrahull being the most northerly part of the Republic.

Also the most southerly part of N.I. is further south of any of Co Donegal.

[Colin_McLeod]

11 hours ago, melmerby said:

Not exactly

Only the small part of land north of Ballymena, Co Donegal 

 

My post clarified. 😀

[martin_wynne]

How frequently?

 

 

 

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, martin_wynne said:

How frequently?

 

 

So, you're trying to screw a hook onto the bedroom door to hang your dressing gown on. The door moves, you fall awkwardly and get a sprain. There's no ice in the freezer with which to ease the pain.

 

So, you order ice cube trays, a door wedge, and those stick-on hooks.

 

Happens all the time.