Yesterday morning, I got up well before sunrise to get a load of food down before sunup as part of the Baha'i Fast. It has gone very well this year. I intended to do my usual Baha'i stall in the centre of Darlington for a couple of hours but the weather forecast was not too good for the morning so I called it off. Sometimes the weather frustrates me.

Nevertheless, it looked better for the afternoon and with the family I headed up to Upper Teesdale and dropped the lads off at Bow Lees and they were to walk up to the side of Cronkley Fell near Widdybank and then up to the car park overlooking both of those. Fiona and I drove up to the car park and headed off for the middle part of lower Cronkley Fell right next to the River Tees. On the way down to the river we saw huge flocks of Lapwings circling around about a 4 square mile area and then plonking themselves down for a while only to rise up and start circling again, several Curlews who were definitely trying to mate by gloriously following each other around the sky and then gliding so close to each other that they looked like they were going to mate in the sky, a handful of Red Shanks again making a serious amount of noise and flying around as part of mating behaviours and as we passed a small conifer plantation there was so much bird noise coming out of it I swear somebody had set up some amplifiers to broadcast these wonderful sounds across the valley. The interesting thing is we could not see any of the birds in the plantation at all and occasionally one or two would suddenly appear on the fence but it was hard to say whether they came from plantation or were going to it.

As we walked alongside the River Tees it is always interesting to look at the very thin covering of glacial till over the rocks in some places very flat which doesn't always indicate that it is thick, because it isn't, just that the underlying rock is finally shattered more like a large gravel. In other places there are metre square bumps over an acre or so reflecting the large boulders which are underneath the glacial till and on it goes an endless amount of permutations of this, always interesting, worthy of comment and because the flora changes constantly throughout the year both in terms of growth and how it looks with the light reflecting off it, an amazing sight to behold. Paradoxically, it even looks good under 10 feet of snow. Now isn't that bizarre!

On to the Pencil Phil Quarry which I walked past several times in the past not realising its geological significance. The Quarry is a slate one and the slates were used to put in pencils hence Pencil Mill! But what is very unusual is that the rock is the same type which is found in the Lake District most spectacularly on Skiddaw the huge hulking Fell looming across Keswick. The rock is Ordovician and is what is known as an inlier that is older rock surrounded by younger and the rock around it is very much younger: that is what is so unusual. Surrounding it is Carboniferous rock from 360 million years ago whereas the Ordovician slate that we were looking at is from 488 million years ago. Why this mysterious 2 metre square chunk of rock slate is peering out right up through nearly half a billion years of Earth's history and staring over the River Tees is anybody's guess. I picked up a couple of samples wistfully hoping that I would find a grapolite or what is most likely a fragment of one but I am pretty sure I didn't although I have yet to look over my samples with my loupe because all you really ever get is tiny fragments of these planktonic animals. But my quest goes on and I will have a better chance of finding some in the Howgills!

After a couple of hours we met the boys back at the car park and they had, had a nice walk but were looking forward to their tea!Fiona was in better fettle yesterday and managed to walk 4 miles fairly comfortably although she got a bit dizzy towards the end. By eight o'clock that night she was totally exhausted the poor lady. I remain in crazily robust health as usual and it is a good job that I do like the small walks that I am now doing with my beloved wife and it is hard to convey the good feeling that I have just being around her but also the whole sense of walking in and looking at the Cronkley Fell area, the action that was going on with the birds going through the serious business of choosing mates and rearing young, I know exactly how they feel! I look upon these hills, as my knowledge grows of the fauna, flora and the geology and geography, as places of immense excitement.

Oh, and I must mention this I started applying for jobs yesterday working with Learning Disabled people. Any religious folk out there please pray for my success and for the godless: beam some good thoughts my way because working with learning disabled people for me, is more or less an extension of what I have done with my own children over the last 20 years. I have always seen the development of human potential, my own and others as a major goal in life if not the goal and whether human beings have a handful of ability or a bucket load like my eldest lad does it is still the same game: get ahead mostly under your own steam as well as with the help and lack of hindrance from others. And that is exactly how I intend to do one of these jobs which I will get. When I think about it, this way of thinking underlay a lot of how I thought and acted with the men at Juniper Communities a home for learning disabled people when I was doing stuff with them in the 1980s. Good fun and in some respects whilst disappointed with not going for Mathematics teaching I am looking forward to reliving some of my past in the 1980s but without the crazy stuff! Well, a little bit of it I had too many good times walking around the hills with the men from Juniper, camping, a way out crazy boat trip to know that the random unexpected can occur more often than I now might be comfortable with!

A very good day!