A long, cold, wet run

Black Hill from Lacken

During the Sunday meeting I noted that the mountains across the lake were hidden by cloud, but only the top half. The weather forecast was reasonable and I had vaguely scoped out this particular route a week or so before and so, in my usual inimitable way, I set out armed with a cell-phone, a smart (being a smart phone that is not a phone, but gives me GPS and offline maps) and thin shorts and top. The temperature was around 9 'C and due to stay around that. The forecast chance of rain was 10% but of course there is nothing in the law of statistics that forbade me staying within that 10% for most of my run...

The road up to Sorrel Hill pass

The route was along the road to Lacken where I turned hard right up the road to the car-park at the Sorrel Hill pass.  The car-park was within cloud cover and yet, to my surprise, three vehicles were parked there. I followed the turf track up the the summit and met two families on the way - a boy looked at my feet and informed me that it got awfully rough up there - another guy, looking at my clothes and lack of footwear, said I should be locked up, and I agreed wholeheartedly with him.

The summit is marked with a post where I turned right hoping to find the "green road" - my raison d'etre. In fact there was a well worn path down to it from the summit so I hardly needed GPS.

And I hardly need add that the particular "cloud cover" I had entered was the sort that precipitates fairly heavily and so in quite a short while my clothes, such as they were, were sodden and I was getting cold. The only remedy for cold on a run is to keep going and, if possible, to increase one's pace.

The WWII memorial

The green road is quite remarkable. I must go there again in better weather. For the most part it really is green and wide enough for a quad, and in this weather it was most wonderfully slippery so I caught myself slipping or falling several times in my eagerness for speed to keep warm. Warm, I hasten to add, is a very relative term.  What the road was created for I have no idea.

Part way down I noticed this strange standing stone just off the path to the left, but I was too cold to investigate. My picture is blurry because the camera lens was wet, along with everything else. On getting back and googling I discovered it was a memorial to a WWII plane that crashed here on the night of 16th April 1941.

The green road

According to certain maps the green road terminates at the place that, from the road up to the Sorrel hill car-park, looks like the hermit's enclosure in The Horse and his Boy.  My family will know what I mean.  But whoever owns this sacred place obviously did not like hikers emerging from Black Hill so the bottom third has been re-routed to "Pound lane" - there is a big sign announcing this change.  That last third is even steeper and was even more slippery in today's conditions.

I had expected of course to break through the cloud cover and emerge in the dry. But that was not to be - the whole way back was in mist and constant rain. Not much more than drizzle by the time I reached the road but even drizzle is sufficient to keep already sodden clothing sodden and cold.

For the last quarter of my run my imagination was filled with thoughts of soaking for hours in a hot, steamy bath, Harfang style. Alas, when I got back and finally dragged myself upstairs, I found the bath full of grandchildren but, fortunately, we have just upgraded what was once the "best shower in Europe" and it is now a power shower which pretty well equals soaking in a bath.

Detail showing Black Hill and the green road

Statistics: total distance 18.6 miles (possibly my longest - which explains why I am feeling stiff!), max height 605m, average speed moving 5.34 mph.

The whole track