Thursday 31st March
Today was the first big test of my new found facility to navigate with my Tom Tom satnav using latitude and longitude. Settings in Memory Map can alter position formatting from OS grid to lat/long and they can then be entered into Tom Tom. In the past I used to try and find a place name nearby to the starting point for a walk, but now I can go to the exact spot. I wish that I had that ability when doing Munros Scotland.
The journeys between the three summits today have been on a very complicated network of minor roads, often single track and quite heart stopping with agonising anticipation of vehicles coming the other way, but Tom Tom triumphed and made it more of a pleasure.
Brown Clee Hill is also the county top for Shropshire. A good steep path lead to the summit in about forty minutes. There is a well fashioned cast bronze viewfinder and near its foot an OS bench mark, and a few yards further down some steps, set into the ground, an OS tri-spoke theodolite fixer as found on the top of trig points. There are masts and structures all over and a sort of twin summit which the map gives equal height with the viewfinder, and just in case I visited both.
Half an hour's hairy car ride got me to a very marginal parking spot for Caradoc Hill. That is a very steep ascent, but on immaculate turf. I have often driven down the A49 and seen this hill to the east just before Church Stretton .
More narrow lanes with steep hills and twisty bends had me down to Church Stretton then up the road to Long Mynd which rivals anything in the Alps for scary drops into the Carding Mill Valley. I walked up there last summer on my Macmillan Way and hadn't realised how close I had been to Pole Bank.
I called in at Ludlow and shopped for a good steak and onion pie from an old established butchers and that has just gone very well.
Blue sky, sunshine and puffy white clouds have made for a great day's walking with the pleasure of knowing I return to the comforts of the caravan.
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I have tried to post photos with Blogger Dashboard and with Blogpress but without wifi it doesn't seem possible. I'm doing fairly well getting this out with just a 3G signal.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
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Good weather so far Conrad, hope it continues for you.All those hills are interesting, visited many on a high Shropshire round a few years ago. Things look worse up here now - day of rest by the fireside.
ReplyDeleteBC - just got back from another three. Read your impressive 5, had shower and now a little snooze before din-dins.
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear that the lat/long navigation is going well with the TomTom. It really is a very useful function, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteBrown Clee Hill - that's the one we had to visit twice in a the space of a week, when I realised that I'd been so distracted by the obvious summit on the original outing that I'd missed the fact that there was another high point, which is the true summit, so I had to go back to rectify my ommision.
Gayle' - as far as I could tell from the map both summits have equal heights, and in any case the one away from the viewfinder looks as though it may be man made. If I had to guess I would say that one is probably slightly higher.
ReplyDeleteSee tonight's post for further enthusiasms for lat/long.