Yesterday was a good walking day. I got up really early for the Baha'i fast and again did not feel like doing any maths in the morning so I went down to York for a good 8 mile walk which is what I did last week. This time I got to York at quarter past seven and parked up at Clifton Green and it was sunny! I didn't shoot around as quick as last week because I knew that I would be going walking in Upper Teesdale with the family in the afternoon. A mega-highlight of the walk was seeing three Great Crested Grebes on the lake at York University. Two of them were a breeding pair and they were bobbing up and down in front of each other and weaving their heads around as part of their courtship ritual. Unfortunately there was no weed nearby because they also hand it to each other or should I say beak each other bits of weed. It made me feel as Fiona and I feel towards each other even after 22 years of marriage. There was a third Grebe nearby which I am pretty sure was one of the young from last year and very strangely when I was walking alongside the lake it started to approach me. At first I thought it may have taken some food from some people but Great Crested Grebes are strict fish eaters and as far as I know they will not eat bread. What I found unusual with a breeding pair was that the male had not yet developed its crest so it looked like two females from a distance! Also, because the sun was fairly low it was 8 a.m. the brown patch on the neck of the Grebe was a lovely dark rusty colour.

When I got back home I went out with the family into Upper Teesdale walking from Bowlees to a couple of miles before Falcon Clints just underneath the Cow Green Reservoir. It was a wonderful walk in the afternoon slightly cloudy opaque light. We saw a lot of nesting Lapwings and the last time I saw them was at Saltholme RSPB reservation in the Tees estuary where there were flocks of several thousands of them periodically all of them rising up into the air as a peregrine falcon swooped near them. Yesterday they were having a more sedate time the only problem being getting food. Fiona asked me me what they eat up there and one of them sort of told us when it pulled out a 15 cm worm from the ground and just woofed it very quickly. We were walking alongside the River Tees and for most of the walk we were looking at the Whin sill a dolerite rock intrusion which started out somewhere near Edinburgh 295 million years ago and then rose vertically but stopped rising and pushed out horizontally right between layers of rock. This thing was about 50 m wide (it may have been a lot bigger in places) and it just forced open the Carboniferous rock melting it on either side. Hadrian's Wall is built on the Whin Sill and the reason that it is at so many different heights is because in the last 295 million years Britain has risen up and down a few times as well as faults have developed and all of the waterfalls on the walk yesterday were caused because of the faults. When we got about 2 miles away from Falcon Clints we had already walked over 4 miles I realised it would be too far to go. It looked like only a couple of miles further but it was pretty up and down through gullies. Of course, when I suggested that it might be worth turning back now because we may not be back home until much later than teatime Miles as always just piped up "come on lets do it I want to do it!" Good lad. Clifford, being more of a consensus builder was more interested in what everybody thought! The trouble was the country had got a lot rougher and we had slowed down and I reckon it would have taken about an hour to have walked those couple of miles if they were a couple of miles because it is hard to estimate when the country was so up and down and I wanted to spend some time when I was there to look at rocks so we decided to turn back! For a lad who has been quite ill this week with a bad cold Miles had a remarkable amount of energy yesterday! Then again so did I because in total I walked over 16 miles and never ate or drank anything between sunrise and sunset. I think one of the reasons I'm having trouble losing weight at the moment is I have just got to fit and I do not burn that many calories up when I am walking around! Anyway that's my excuse but I need to lose about three stone and get Mr Trim back not only to increase my long-term good health chances but Fiona might close the bedroom door! Aren't men driven by simple motivations? This one is anyway! A great day and we are going back up there again next week to get to Falcon Clints from the Cow Green Reservoir end!