The first of Andrew’s ‘Deepest Cheshire’ walks brought a series of apologies for absence, leaving just four of us to enjoy this lovely summer’s evening in the Cheshire countryside.
The walk started with an intimidating public footpath through property owned by the wealthy founders of Boohoo.com, who see fit to place Alsatians and other vicious looking species of dog either side of the footpath, albeit behind high fences. This is wholly unacceptable and we hope that whoever has recently strimmed the pathway (I’m sure the Boohoo people would want it to be overgrown and disused) is ‘on the case’.
Anyway, we probably won’t be there again for a while, so why get worked up about nasty rich people. After negotiating a recently fallen tree we continued over Marthall Brook to field paths – at this point easy walking over compacted soil.
Jenny had chosen to stay away today. Possibly just as well, as her fear of animals may have resulted in mild panic as a field of young bullocks raced over to investigate.
Their curiosity was not matched by any form of bravery, so these tasty beasts were not really troublesome.
The ongoing path – which heads directly towards the white house on the left, was less than distinct.
After turning right past friendly dogs at Ollerton Hall, we entered a field of attentive sheep and horses. Their friendly nature indicated that they may be pets.
Shadows were lengthening as we took an indistinct but well signposted path through a field of buttercups.
After passing through Ash Farm and dodging the traffic on Seven Sisters Lane, Andrew led us through Windmill Wood, where even the current spell of dry weather had failed to eliminate the last remnants of mud, and the remains of a huge tree lay splayed across the path.
Soon we were back to a friendly welcome at the Dun Cow, where both staff and customers appreciated, and were perhaps a little envious of what we had been up to.
Here’s our route – about 8 km, with about 50 metres ascent, taking a little over 2 hours.
PS Blogger problems:
I noticed yesterday that the system that automatically notifies me by email of comments received on my postings didn’t seem to be working. Searches on the internet for this problem implied that my settings might be wrong, so I checked them out and spent some time trying to resolve the problem, without success.
Why do I continue to waste time on such exercises? It’s always Google’s fault, and so it proves in this case. This morning my searches revealed a thread that has been joined by countless users of Google’s Blogger software with exactly the same problem. It’s not of great concern to me as I don’t receive many comments, but if you have commented and haven’t received a response, or you are a user of Blogger and don’t appear to have received notification of expected comments, Google, who recently ‘retired’ an assortment of functions related to their Blogger product, say they are trying to fix the problem. In the meantime the problem can be circumvented on a posting by posting basis by making a dummy comment after posting your blog, with the ‘Follow-up comments will be sent to (email address)’ box ticked, then deleting the dummy comment.
All rather tedious, and yet another example of Google creating a problem and causing mass wastage of time instead of notifying users of that problem and their attempts to fix it. Shame on them.
(I know it’s a free product. I’d be happy to pay for it if that would result in improvements. I suspect that moving ten years of postings across to Wordpress, the obvious alternative, might give rise to more difficulties than my non-technical brain could cope with. Any offers?)
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