Willances leap just outside Richmond North Yorkshire was the place for the family walk today . The lads went on the low to high path and Fo and I did the low to middle path . Not a bird in sight and the cloud was low and foreboding but no rain fell. What was interesting was seeing Himalayan balsam in huge swathes all over the place , around the base of oak trees and a lot on the edge of the forest underneath Willances Leap . It wasn't there last year and has just arrived and is definitely crowding out the native plants . Its gonna be a problem folks! Anyone know how to cook it ! Miles and Clifford doing the high path were wading through a nice native species problem of the path being overgrown with thistles and nettles . Fo and I walked up there about three years ago and found the path getting pretty overgrown but now its virtually impassable . The path is on land between the mile long cliff edge and the pastoral fields so I don't know who is going to clear it . We bumped into the lads coming off the high path which was nice although we had been spying on them through the binoculars . Sneaky parents . Well back home to a crash out with Fiona to listen to Miles Davis " A kind of Blue" and then meatballs and tomato sauce with spag followed by "the Lord of the Rings " directors cut which is absolutely brilliant . Books are good too . A nice day with my lovely family . Did a maths session this morning and listened to the sound track from the film "Koyaanisqatsi" and that was amazing . Our lads have watched the film loads of times since Miles was 5 and I recommend it to any parents with young children because its easy to understand , musics great and it visually , there are no words, indicates that life needs to change Koyaanisqatsi a Hopi Indian word meaning "crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living". Amen !

Well with the family I had a gorgeous walk around the riverside path in Durham last night . The River Wear was high and a deep chocolate brown color showing a lot of deep brown peat washed down from Upper Weardale because the rain up there over the past few days was of the deluge type and that just eats into the peat bogs and erodes them . It is a process similar to what the lead miners used to do when they, in order to clear the topsoil because they thought there was a lead vein underneath, built up a huge dam at the top of the side of a valley and then let the water out to scour the soil off and then dig out the lead ore. Swaledale and Wear Dale were major centers for lead mining and both bear the scars to this day in fact one reason the moors in lead mining areas do not absorb as much rain as they did before lead mining is that the lead miners smelted the ore in the hills and used millions of tons of peat from peat bogs to fuel the smelt mills. Peat bogs aren't just great carbon sinks they are great soakers up of rain as well. Just as we got to Prebend bridge in Durham the river shallows because it is silting up and we could see the peat in the water tumbling over and over in quickly moving silt clouds . Brilliant! It got better : as we waited for the Inshanghai Restaurant to open we looked over the weirs at Framwellgate Bridge and there was a loud pop and then a splash because Atlantic Salmon were leaping the weirs to get to their spawning rivers , well they are small gills actually , high up in the Pennines , quite often above the 1500 feet contour line . Totally brilliant and some Salmon were nearly a meter in length although the highest leap , around 5 feet went to a pint sized one that seemed to have something to prove . Super , super, good particularly in a river that was dead 30 years ago. The re wilding of Durham and the UK continues apace and it remains true that if you clean it up they will come ! Food at the restaurant was super and we had a window seat and I was happily munching away , to much , whilst looking out at the Cathedral and the River Wear which I've come to know and love . York or Durham when Fiona retires : it could be a tough call!

Yesterday with the family I had a nice 2 hour walk around the Howgills focusing on Pickering Beck to find some graptolites, roughly half billion year old plankton fossils. Very tricky because I wasn't sure what I was looking at . Pickering Gill was beautiful and the Howgills look very different when you get off the main paths . Good to see Fiona getting her boots stuck into slippy gradients and there were lots of plants for her to see! I think I saw some graptolites in some shale but I'm not sure . The lads went over Cautley Spout up to the Calf the highest point of the Howgills and we met them at Sedbergh. Fo and I also looked for graptolites along the Adam Sedgewick Geological Trail but the river was to high to get to the shale banks where the guide book says they are . Nice walk out though . I did a spectacular fall over sticking by foot into a hole and I've noticed over the years that the amount of holes on the hills is increasing possibly due to the drying out of the soil cover which over most of the Pennines is very thin. The soil covers post glacial boulder fields so there could be more falls to come . It doesn't help with my tendency to get back to my old habits of wandering off paths . Its all to interesting . We went to see Veronica , Fiona's Mum who was in good fettle and Becky, Fionas sister turned up which was nice . Being involved with family is a total privilege.

Took the family to see the latest Harry Potter film at Teeside Showcase Cinemas but didn't fancy it myself so it was a two and a half hour treat of birdwatching for me at Saltholme RSPB Reserve. Lunch came first and whilst munching away on the open veranda a Sandwich Tern just drifted by so I don't have to travel all the way up to the Farne Islands , get on a boat , then jump onto an island just to see this bird . Life is so easy sometimes . There were a lot of Arctic and Common Terns about and I'm always struck how aggressive they are . At Paddies Hide a plodding Herring Gull many times bigger than a Tern came just to close to their breeding island and up shot a Tern and as soon as the Gull saw it it desperately tried to move away but to late the Tern just went right into the side of it and made sure it never came back . Mega drama . At the same place it was good to see a pair of Little Grebes with what must be a second brood all paddling across the water but diving simultaneous well the fledglings were just behind the parents . I also saw a Little Egret fly over for the first time , I've seen them walking and hunting but never flying and at first I thought it was a White Heron , but the RSPB Warden guy put me right . The grasses , rushes reeds and flowers were at their peak and overwhelming with their sweet smell and the sound of the reeds swooshing in the wind was enchanting . A lot of kids were there with their parents and some of them had RSPB supplied long nets to capture insects and investigate . Just in a small part of the Reserve but it was good to see . A nice afternoon out so nice that I'm taking Fiona there as soon as possible !

With the family I had a gorgeous walk in the Lake District going up to Sprinkling Tarn via Seathwaite and then down to Styhead Tarn and a great clamber down Taylor Gill Force which was really wet and slippy . The cloud cover was at 1000 feet so most of the walk was done in visibility of less than 50 meters although the clouds opened up occasionally . The lads went off on their hell bent on doing Sca Fell the highest hill in England so they went up to Styhead Tarn past Sprinkling Tarn and with less than 20 metres visibility Miles navigated them over Great End , called that no doubt because if you fall off it in low visibility conditions it will be a Great End, onto Broad Crag and then Sca Fell . He got lost at one point attempting to find the Corridor Route but only went half a kilometer confirming he was on the wrong path . He always knew the way back to Sca Fell and I was really proud of him navigating his way around some lethal cliffs and confusing slopes! . We met up with an old Asian couple who asked us the way , they had no map , it was poor visibility but they wanted to " Get to the top " so I gave them my map and pointed them in the right direction for the Corridor Route which is the easiest to follow but has some tricky scrambles . I just love Northern Hill fanatics! They've got to do it ! The lads never saw them coming down and I think they gave up because the scrambles are tricky . A Little Grebe was the only bird worthy of note yesterday feeding all on its own on Sty Head tarn . It didn't rain but the low cloud was so wet we got soaked anyway ! Absolutely brilliant and my lovely wife has muscles of iron in those legs of hers although were mutterings of " I'm never doing this again " when she was bum sliding down bits of a waterfall. Cracking day , proud of Miles navigating around new territory in low visibility and a good meal was had at The Loose Box in Keswick which has now after several years has got used to our large hiking order of food ! Oh and Fo and I saw an amazing boulder of lapilli tuff a volcanic gravel with pieces of pumice in it all rough and dynamic because when this loose flying gravel was hurling around at hundreds of miles an hour 420 million years ago out in the open air and got laid down as part of a whole mound of volcanic ash around 300 meters thick it was very hot . A really nice find , well not a find really because I'd walked by the thing several times over the past 30 years but only just realized what it was!

This afternoon with the family , hooray the lads were with us, I had a lovely 2 hour walk around the Durham Woods and into the City Center . The weather was slow , low and sultry and in the River Wear fronds of lilies and rushes were growing sometimes in the middle of the river which shows the time the river is very low is increasing so much that aquatic plant seeds have time to settle and germinate and are rooted enough for the following flood which is a long time off to not sweep them away . The climatic times are a changing ! Interesting to observe as the years roll by . At the weir next to Framwellgate Bridge was the amazing sight of two Common Terns a long way inland stood on the weir and fending off mallards and seagulls trying to mob them neither of which were a match for these two toughies and those long sharp beaks that are useful for stabbing fish when they do there huge 30 meter plunges into the sea to get fish in any and all weathers. We noticed that one of the Terns was a fledgling . Biscuit break was on the newly refurbished Durham market Square and the Council has done a good job . Saw some Morris dancers today which was nice and even the lads were interested . Back home listening to Buffy St Marie in the car , then crash out with the wonder wife I have and listen to John Wuilliams and Juliam Bream . I a lucky man !

Yesterday with Fiona but not the lads because they were both ill with bad colds I went to visit Fiona's mother at Dalton but before then had a trip to the Dales. Going over the old tank road To Wensleydale I saw a huge flock of 20 to 30 curlews feeding away in a field and I knew we were going to have a good day from that point on. Wensleydale is a gorgeous Dale and as we approached Barningham a rabbit shot out in front of the car running in a absolutely straight line which was because there was a stoat pursuing it which shot out immediately after. As soon as I got alongside the animal it popped right back into the hedgerow! Always worth getting out early. Pulling in at Barningham we went to see the water powered Archimedes screw driving a small turbine to generate electricity for the village. Very interesting not least because the thing was not running because there was not enough water in the river. It is the river Bain that provides the power which I hope does not signify that the lack of water which can occur for over half of the year in Wensleydale is not a bane on the whole project .Food for thought for those making claims about so called renewable energy. Buy lots of candles folks! Next we went on to the National Nature Reserve on the plain beneath Ingleborough Hill near Ingleton. There are acres of limestone pavements all conveniently laid out by the last glaciation and before that by warm shallow seas 360 million years ago and from a distance they look very regular but when you actually walk on them they are very irregular eroded all over the place and the grikes the gaps between the clints have whole mini ecosytems of ferns, flowering plants and spiders . There are 12 varieties of fern living in these mini worlds which are very sheltered because of the depth of them . Today we never saw sheep skulls which is what I saw a lot of the last time I was near here in the '70s because the sheep fall into the grikes and can't get out , no one can see them and they starve to death. Always reminded of that Betjeman poem "Late flowering Lust" "The mouth that I kiss has no tongue inside" neither does a sheep's skull wedged in a grike. Ingleborough Hill loomed over us constantly and I was very tempted to go piling up its flanks to tread those Millstone Grit capped peaks but Fiona said a very and I mean very firm " No". We saw loads of Wheatears as well, mostly fledglings so the breeding season has gone well and they'll be off back to Africa soon. Also spotted the tiniest and cutest frog I've ever seen it was so small that it grabbed a thin piece of grass and just held on for dear life trying to blend in and not get eaten . Lucky I wasn't a heron! Onward to visit Fiona's Mun at Dalton and she was in good fettle and we took several family 'photo albums and she really enjoyed them particularly seeing herself over 20 years ago . It really got her thinking and talking . A beautiful experience not least because she is in a steadily declining phase at the moment but she is plucky , tries hard , gets the jokes and points things out . Its difficult for us sometimes but the enjoyment she gets from seeing us far outweighs any hassle . A road many of us will have to tread because its the price of living longer . I've told the lads I'm going over Whitby cliffs if I get fed up when I'm a lot older! They actually took that seriously when I first said it! Good! Coming back over the A66 I'm always struck by the geological diversity of our amazing UK. Driving over Carboniferous rocks under the road I get to look at the Jurassic under the North York Moors with the Silurian under the Howgills to the right . What was best about our Ingleborough walk in Chapel le Dale was standing next to a huge cairn with Carboniferous limestone all around us for miles and walking off after lunch only to find a small blackish boulder about the size of a football which was was so rough that you had to be careful you didn't graze your self stroking it and it was a Borrowdale volcanic rock a piece of tuff , flying ash from a volcano spewing it out around 400 million years ago when Scotland joined England in a final act of union. This rock had been dragged all the way to Ingleborough from the Lake District by a glacier 14000 years ago and deposited . It is truly amazing what you find and just as amazing looking at this process from the past still affecting my understanding and wonderment of the earth now . Get out there folks there is a lot to see and understand and its great fun .