Not Silsean

Here's a map from the web site where I found the picture of the new cairn, and here's another picture of the cairn and the stretcher those brave souls used to move the stones. The map clearly shows Silsean as the southerly peak and that was the one I climbed.  Anyway it had the same shape cairn on it. My OS map also agrees with the above. So I don't think there is any dispute about where I was standing. 

Here, incidentally, is what it looked like a few years ago before these good souls built the cairn and when the top was marked by a post.  You can see how churned up it was by the 4-wheelers or whatever.  It is still churned up around the cairn but not anywhere near as bad.

But now take a look here. This appears to be a reputable site.  To save you time here is the salient part:

Moanbane / Silsean - Which is which? I spent some time enquiring into this and the evidence points to Silshean or Shilshean being the northern end. Firstly, the OS letters for Wicklow record a Silshaw Brook in 1838, to immediate north of mountain. Liam Price says that the northern end is known locally as Shilshean in the 1940's. Seamus MacDonnell from Kylebeg, a local hill farmer who grew up in the area, told me that he thought Silsean was the northern end in Feb 2010. It's not clear entirely what Shileshean derives from - Price speculates that it may be connected to Solais or Soilse - Soillseán - a place of light. The Shiney Flags glen may have an echo of this and be related to the name - the shine or light is from from water glistening as it flows down the rocky slabs. Moanbane could be from Móin Bhán - the white or fair coloured bog (bog cotton or pale sedges) but there are other possibilities: it is also worth noting that the SE end of the hill is most associated with turf cutting - the Black Banks. I enquired also in King's River Valley and the name Shilshean or variants doesn't seem to be known there - it'd be over the other side of the hill. They just called the whole hill, Moanbane - so perhaps Moanbane applies to the hill as a whole with Silsean being the northern end or side. I suspect that the confusion arises in a similar fashion to Corrigasleggaun above, the first editions of the OSI sheet 56 carried forward what appeared on the old Wicklow One Inch map - Moanbane as the NE top, no name on the SE top. Hillwalkers have long been aware of the name Silsean (from Price presumably) as being associated with one of the tops but given that the NE top was labelled Moanbane, assumed this was correct and that Silsean by default must be the SE end. The name was supplied to OSI when feedback was requested after the 1st edition of sheet 56 was published - who also labelled it on the SE end. But the evidence  points to erroneous assumptions being made and careful checking of the record points to Shilshean being the NE end of this hill.

So now I am altogether confused - was I standing on Silsean or was it in fact Moanbane?

Not Moanbane

One thousand apologies - it was Silsean not Moanbane, and it seems the new cairn was built in 2010 which just shows how often I climb the peak.  The two peaks are kind of joined so it was easy to make the mistake. For those of you who NOTICED the lack of pictures in my last post, here is the cairn.

Barefoot Moanbane

The dog has hurt her belly, went to the vet to be cleaned up and antibiotics, so is convalescing for a few days.  Instead of my usual run with her I biked through Valleymount, taking the "Water Hole Bypass" (any suitably adventurous local will figure this out), stopping at the first forestry track on the left past the summit. After removing shoes and top and suitably hiding these and my bike I set off for my very first mountain adventure barefoot.  Moanbane is by no means the highest in the Wicklow Mountains but the view from the top is still stunning.  Someone has kindly built a very smart cairn instead of the former wooden post marking the summit. Today it was clear and I could see to the West the whole of our lake and far, far into the interior of Ireland, and to the East all of the major Wicklow peaks and the sea in the distance.

The barefoot bit worked OK. No need to worry about filling one's shoes with muddy water in the numerous peaty boggy bits. The first part is through forestry area and the route follows what, I suppose, once was a fire break. It is now less than a track, but so, so beautiful.  The floor is covered in mosses with numerous little streams crossing. Because there is still a small gap between the trees here, the sunlight filters through and highlights the many greens.

Once I broke out of the forested area it was rough grass, moss and heather underfoot. The most prickly was last year's heather, but quite manageable providing you check where you put your feet.

Some might call it a hill.  But my father said anything over 1000' was a mountain and on that basis it is a mountain. At the top, just past the cairn aforementioned, there is a lake. "Lake" is an overstatement - it is about 10m x 30m and not more than a few inches deep. That's the water on the top. Underneath it is squishy peaty muddy stuff which is nice to wade through. My love of mud predates and perhaps is a precursor to Alison's recent discovery of healing clay.

Memories of the BBC Research Department 2

Now where did I get to?  Ah, yes, I had just become a fully fledged Research Engineer in Special Projects section under Stan Edwardson.  I found this video of Stan, strange how now he looks so young yet then he seemed relatively ancient.

If Stan ever reads this I trust he will forgive me, but we used to joke endlessly about about his vetting of our Tech Memo's and Reports. As section head he had, of course, to vet everything that left the section, and after a vetting session one's style and sometimes one's content was hardly recognisable so the game used to be, how little could one get away with writing seeing as Stan would re-write it all anyway?

Here I designed a prototype receiver for the CARFAX radio traffic warning system which Stan so loved to demonstrate, see R&D Report 1979-10.  The photo in my previous blog shows one of the RF transistors used in this "straight" or TRF design. The CARFAX system was cellular in operation - a bit like today's cell-phones only medium wave, so susceptibility to interference from adjacent cells was an important consideration. Some rather tedious work followed R&D Report 1982-05.  Sadly the system was never adopted. The original Carfax is, of course, the cross-roads at the centre of Oxford.

In a later project the CARFAX receiver was integrated into a "car radio" design intended to demonstrate some digital techniques like PLL tuning, a digital bar-graph tuning indicator, a hand-made angle encoder for volume control and so forth.  Nowadays all that is standard fare but back then... The whole thing was shoehorned into standard car radio width and height, but it was two or three times as deep as a normal car radio. So Stan referred to it as the "long bonnet (or hood) car radio".

I shared an office with Andrew Lyner whose humour and no-frills view of life I greatly appreciated.

Another engineer, Dr Susans or Susie to us, was somewhat longer in the tooth than Andrew or I, indeed he was almost part of the Special Projects section furniture. His office seemed to be the height of disorder and yet he could find a relevant document within seconds if you asked him a technical question.  He had a voice a bit like a rasp and, for a hobby, made lace bobbins from exotic timbers.

The other main work of the section at this time was on radio data on VHF f.m. (now known as RDS) and on a.m. I was particularly involved in the latter which ended up being applied to Radio 4 long wave (then 200kHz, now 198kHz) for teleswitching electricity meters. The system involved phase modulating the carrier at subliminal frequencies, whilst not interfering with the long term frequency precision as this transmission is used as a frequency standard. This system was awarded the Queen's Award for Innovation in 1987 and I was kindly invited back for the ceremony as I had been part of the team which invented it.

We carried out compatibility trials which meant designing special test gear and a fun trip to Scotland driving around in a van operating it. Our work in Research Department often involved adding more features without affecting existing viewers / listeners, hence stereo had to be compatible with mono, colour TV with monochrome, and now radio data with radio.  Phase modulation is orthoganal to a.m. (amplitude modulation) so will not interfere with it in an ideal world. But the world is not ideal, especially in this "mush area" inbetween co-channel transmitters in Scotland as explained in R&D Report 1982-22.

And then I handed my notice in...

Tears, barefoot lake, and flat rainbow

Today I cried twice. When I say "cried" I mean tears came to my eyes. The first time was when I happened across this picture of my mum and dad at our wedding.

Both my parents passed away long ago. It is not so much that I miss them (although I do) but rather the reminder of how, in retrospect, I would like to have spent more time with them in their later life.  Exploring this further might be the subject of a future blog.

The second time I cried was on reading:

"Please - Mr Lion - Aslan - Sir," said Digory, "could you - may I - please, will you give me some magic fruit of this country to make Mother well?"

He had been desperately hoping that the Lion would say "Yes"; he had been horribly afraid it might say "No". But he was taken aback when it did neither.

"This is the Boy," said Aslan, looking, not at Digory, but at his councillors. "This is the Boy who did it."

"Oh dear," thought Digory, "what have I done now?"

"Son of Adam," said the Lion. "There is an evil Witch abroad in my new land of Narnia. Tell these good Beasts how she came here."

A dozen different things that he might say flashed through Digory's mind, but he had the sense to say nothing except the exact truth.

"I brought her, Aslan," he answered in a low voice.

"For what purpose?"

"I wanted to get her out of my own world back into her own. I thought I was taking her back to her own place."

"How came she to be in your world, Son of Adam?"

"By - by Magic."

The Lion said nothing and Digory knew that he had not told enough.

"It was my Uncle, Aslan," he said. "He sent us out of our own world by magic rings, at least I had to go because he sent Polly first, and then we met the Witch in a place called Charn and she just held on to us when -"

"You met the Witch?" said Asian in a low voice which had the threat of a growl in it.

"She woke up," said Digory wretchedly. And then, turning very white, "I mean, I woke her. Because I wanted to know what would happen if I struck a bell. Polly didn't want to. It wasn't her fault. I - I fought her. I know I shouldn't have. I think I was a bit enchanted by the writing under the bell."

"Do you?" asked Asian; still speaking very low and deep. .

"No," said Digory. "I see now I wasn't. I was only pretending."

There was a long pause. And Digory was thinking all the time, "I've spoiled everything. There's no chance of getting anything for Mother now."

...

"That is well," said Aslan. "And now for the Boy himself."

Digory kept his mouth very tight shut. He had been growing more and more uncomfortable. He hoped that, whatever happened, he wouldn't blub or do anything ridiculous.

"Son of Adam," said Aslan. "Are you ready to undo the wrong that you have done to my sweet country of Narnia on the very day of its birth?"

"Well, I don't see what I can do," said Digory. "You see, the Queen ran away and -"

"I asked, are you ready?" said the Lion.

"Yes," said Digory. He had had for a second some wild idea of saying "I'll try to help you if you'll promise to help my Mother," but he realized in time that the Lion was not at all the sort of person one could try to make bargains with. But when he had said "Yes," he thought of his Mother, and he thought of the great hopes he had had, and how they were all dying away, and a lump came in his throat and tears in his eyes, and he blurted out:

"But please, please - won't you - can't you give me something that will cure Mother?" Up till then he had been looking at the Lion's great feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion's eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory's own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself.

"My son, my son," said Aslan. "I know. Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another. But I have to think of hundreds of years in the life of Narnia. The Witch whom you have brought into this world will come back to Narnia again. But it need not be yet. It is my wish to plant in Narnia a tree that she will not dare to approach, and that tree will protect Narnia from her for many years. So this land shall have a long, bright morning before any clouds come over the sun. You must get me the seed from which that tree is to grow."

"Yes, sir," said Digory. He didn't know how it was to be done but he felt quite sure now that he would be able to do it. The Lion drew a deep breath, stooped its head even lower and gave him a Lion's kiss. And at once Digory felt that new strength and courage had gone into him.

The point I am making is not to force some theological parallel out of Lewis' writing, but rather to question why this sort of thing can cause such an emotional response. Could it be because there is something inherent in our nature that wants there to be an ultimate, all-powerful and 'good' authority, and the reason for that in turn being because such an entity exists?


If you walk down from our house to the bridge over the lake you will find a fence post conveniently stuck in the lake-shore. In previous years I have found that if the water level is above this post it is hard to circumnavigate the "small lake" (the segment to the south of the bridge and which is the Kings River valley).  The level has been consistently high this year so that I have not been able to run this route, but today the level was only just above the post and the weather was warm so I thought I would chance it.

As it turned out the run was more of a wade and I do not think I will be repeating it unless the water level falls.  But I did make the whole course barefoot and only gained one small thorn in my left big toe which I later extricated with ease. Meg had to do a fair bit of swimming. We both swam across where Kings River joins the lake. Returning on the west shore I was amazed to see a "flat rainbow". Of course I had no camera with me but, on Googling, the nearest picture to what I saw is here, and some similar ones below.

Some sites suggest ice crystals can cause this effect.  In the case I saw, the rainbow was low down over Valleymount beneath the level of the Wicklow mountains behind and it was a warm summer's day so I hardly think there could have been ice! I do not think it was just the top of a regular rainbow (the sun could not have been high enough in the sky), but I have no idea what the mechanism could be.

Memories of the BBC Research Department

Thomas Alcock's Kingswood Warren 1837

The Research Department at Kingswood Warren 1980

Until 2010 the BBC Research Department was located in Kingswood Warren in Surrey. After graduating from Oxford in 1974 I was employed here and became a Research Engineer before leaving in April 1981. The reasons for leaving are another story.

There were four of us in the intake that year. We rented the upstairs of a rather dilapidated property 20A Thicket Road whose main claim to fame was that one evening, whilst we are all minding our own business, there was a large crash and, upon investigating, we found that the bathroom ceiling had collapsed. I would have been more interesting hard one of us been taking a bath at the time. The house was demolished some while after we moved on. It was that sort of house. But the purpose of this blog is not to honour 20A but to recall my time at Kingswood Warren.

Rear of 20A Thicket Road, Sutton, Surrey

The department was divided into groups, and the groups into sections. Each section dealt with a particular area of research and would employ a section head, about 6 engineers and about 3 technicians. Graduates rotated through various sections spending several months under a mentor in each before becoming qualified. And so it was that I started life in Baseband Section under John Chambers. I could not have had a better mentor. He led me by small degrees into a very ambitious project: to start with I was to design a "gearbox". He explained that digital TV, then in its infancy, might sample at 2fSC, 3fSC or 4fSC, where fSC was the colour subcarrier frequency for PAL. The gearbox was to take any one of these as its input, and output  fSC. In those days such things were done with discrete TTL logic chips like 7400. To satisfy timing requirements I was obliged to use some 74S chips. The Texas TTL data book was my bedtime reading.

This done, John gently moved me into the rest of the project and when that was done I found I had designed and built an entirely digital PAL colour bar generator comprising several cards jammed full of TTL chips all hand wired (i.e. peices of insulated wire soldered to connect between the pins of the DIL TTL packages). The less technical of my reader may be getting lost so here is a helpful picture.

These components are all from my own collection, kept safely, for memories sake, through many decades of house and country moves. The first two predate my BBC days so must have come from my childhood. From left to right we have:

• OC71  a small signal germanium transistor made by Mullard
• OC81  a higher power version of same (200mA maximum)
• BF195 a high frequency (200MHz) transistor I used in the CARFAX receiver q.v.
• ASY24 another germanium transistor
• LM310 an analog integrated circuit - a voltage follower
• A real live BBC Research Department issue 2% tolerance 330K resistor
• BC109 a very popular audio transistor at that time - this time silicon
• 74LS163 similar to the sort of TTL logic chip used in the colour bar generator

Today a colour bar generator might be one small part of the capabilities of a single silicon chip. And PAL is almost legend.  Back then the Research Department had built a digital frame store - it could store a whole TV frame (25 of these per second), an essential ingredient to being able to convert between different TV standards such as American NTSC and English PAL. This frame store occupied a 19" wide rack of equipment some 5 feet high and consumed vast amounts of power at 5V. Today a single chip can store many frames and cosume a few milliamps.  Such is progress.

"Home office" was the practice of making one's own electronics projects during lunch time or after hours. This was encouraged, indeed until shortly before I joined, the BBC actually provided component parts free of charge - but this was stopped after it was found that certain individuals were making a business of it. During working hours it made no economic sense to re-use resistors and other small parts from discarded circuits, so they went in the bin. During lunch time it made very good economic sense to retrieve those parts out of the bin. The 330K resistor in the picture is one such. I have long had a love affair with colour coded resistors - a 5% 56K resistor is particularly beautiful (green, blue, orange, gold) and its existence could be responsible for my choice of career.  Really.

From Baseband... well I regret I cannot be sure of the section names, but here are some of the projects I worked on, some of which spawned Research Department Reports.

Digital tape recording was in its infancy, and the goal was to maximise the number of bits per inch. So I did some research into codebook modulation (as opposed to delay modulation, bi-phase) see R&D Report 1977-33 : New block-codes for digital tape recording.  Despite all this hard work, hard disks today (which are effectively tape recorders) still use the simpler bi-phase or delay modulation.

Each engineer had an office, and each laboratory was presided over by a technician, but graduates had no place to rest their head, so in this instance I occupied a corner in Eric Grantham's laboratory. Eric lived a strange and lonely existence by himself in a mobile home but when at work would sing all sorts of silly songs for example this very apt instruction to would be engineers:

Mend it, mend it, do not bend it,

 Do not bend this wireless set...

to the tune of Beethoven's Ode de Joy.  He wasn't a bad sort - and, I think, was the only person from work who attended our wedding - here he is, sneaking into one of our official album photographs: he's the one holding the camera behind the happy couple.  Sadly I have no other photographs of people from BBC days.

Talking of technicians... one was either born to be a technician or an engineer and never the twain could meet. Engineers had to be graduates, usually of a high class. Technicians might I suppose be City and Guilds. The difference between an engineer and a technician was apty summed up by "a technician washes his hands before going to the loo, an engineer washed his hands afterwards". The technician's job was to oversee the laboratory and do assembly work or testing under the direction of the engineers, and many were happy in this role. Some, however, aspired to doing the work of an engineer and frankly some were as good as the engineers. But it could not happen. The BBC was too staid. We had a rigid caste system. Another example of this was that section heads and above could not eat with the rest of us - they ate in what we called the "golden trough". Talking of the staff canteen, I have to say that all BBC food I have tasted has been above average, and in those days it was also usefully subsidised. A bowl of BBC fruit crumble and custard, or a BBC cheese scone, cost very little and could keep one fuelled for many an hour.  Occasionally I would shell out and treat myself to cheese omelette and chips.

In the audio section (in those days they actually designed studio speakers) I designed and made a digital reverberation meter. It used a novel method by Dr Susans q.v. for obtaining the logarithm to base two.

In the radio frequency section I designed and built a digital correlation meter to analyse the outputs of two radio receivers for testing diversity reception. This thing was effectively a computer, but made out of discrete TTL chips. It had an arithmetic control unit and a primitive instruction set for summing the various ingredints required for correlation (sum of X, X squared, Y, Y squared and XY), but used the inners of a calculator for doing the more complicated (but slower) calculations at the end (divisions and square root) to display the correlation coefficient.

Housed at Kingswood Warren but arguable not a part of the Research Department was the spectrum planning section whose job it was to figure out what transmitter frequencies and powers could be used and where. It used to be said that their motto was "if a job is worth doing it is only just worth doing". Such was the discrimination between them and the rest of us.

And then I became a fully fledged Research Engineer - but this blog has already exceeded the length normally accepted by civilised bloggers so I will break for another time...

Click here for part 2

Why are my feet so soft?

One would think after running barefoot three times a week that one's feet would continue to harden - but it seems that I have reached a plateau. For the last couple of months the difficult areas on my regular forest run remain as difficult, and the stones on our drive remain as sharp to the feel. Do I need to run more often or for longer... taken to its limit I would end up running from dawn to dusk...

Oxford 3 - The Boyfriend

I had a very sheltered upbringing: no TV until late in secondary school, no bicycle until I was 13, no pop music, no alcohol, five meetings every Sunday, very infrequent trips to the cinema or theatre, and I have always hated parties. I did not suffer, on the contrary I honour my parents because I think my upbringing kept me from excesses later in life. But not surprisingly my student days were "liberating". I discovered cider, saw films that my parents probably would not have approved of, and found that there were Christians outside of my parents' choice of denomination. I had already discovered (at school) that friendship did not have to concur with choice of faith.

One film I remember in particular was Ken Russell's rendition of "The Boyfriend" staring Twiggy. The reason I remember it in particular was that, afterwards, Neil Mapley said how wonderful Sandy Wilson's music was, which set me thinking "why?" only to discover that the music was indeed worth repeating. For a brief synopsis "Rather than film the musical The Boy Friend, Russell made the film about the making of the musical. When the star of a show breaks a leg, the newcomer, Twiggy, has to take her place. A major film director comes to look at the show as a possible new film."

The track that made the most impression was "All I want is a room in Bloomsbury". The clip starts with the song being sung "straight" on the stage. I guess what I like is the surreal jump into a fantasy portrayal of the "room in Bloomsbury"

and then the jump through the window into a deeper level of fantasy...

where they find themselves in a sort of fairy land. It is all so delightfully cheesy (intentionally, as the plot is about an amateur production).

A life of wealth does not appeal to me at all 

Do you agree at all? 

I do 

The mere idea of living in a palace is 

So full of fallacies 

That's true 

I've got a very different sort of scheme in mind 

It's just a dream designed 

For two 

Would you care to hear about it, dear? 

Would I care to? Can you doubt it, dear? 

All I want is a room 

In Bloomsbury 

Just a room that will do 

For you and me 

One room's enough for us 

Though is on the top floor 

Life may be rough for us 

But its troubles we'll ignore 

On a Wintery night 

I'll light a fire 

Everything I shall do 

As you desire 

You'll be sitting 

And you'll be knitting 

And so contented we'll be 

In our dear little room in Bloomsbury 

All I want is a room 

In Bloomsbury 

Just a room that will do 

For you and me 

I'll sew the covers for 

Two old cosy armchairs 

Neighbours will love us for 

We shall laugh at all our cares 

While I'm reading a book 

I'll cook a stew 

Then I'll bake a plum duff 

Enough for two 

In our attic 

We'll be ecstatic 

As lovebirds up in a tree 

All we want is a room in Bloomsbury