Northern Rambler

Last year, I was on a guided walk put on by the North Pennines AONB team, taking in three Nuttalls, including Little Fell, Tinside Rigg and Long Fell. These fells fall within the Warcop Army Training zone and access to them is not permitted, except on the annual guided walk put on by the North Pennines team. Whilst in the car park, awaiting our walk to start, I was approached by one of the other attendees, a tall thin man who looked to be in his late sixties. After some small talk, he outlined his rationale for attending the walk. "I'm a bagger!" he quipped, with a smile on his face and a glint in his eye.  There is no official definition of what a bagger is. The man I spoke to meant that he visits the summits of hills and mountains and tries to "bag" each summit within a particular classification. I'll say more about some of these classifications shortly. But you do not need to walk hills to be a bagger: you could bag other natural features, for instance, a...

In January, I started a new job working at Burnley College. Burnley is an industrial town in east Lancashire. The town is surrounded by countryside out to the pennine hills, it hosts a section of the Leeds to Liverpool canal and has several pleasant parks such as Towneley and Thompson park. From outside of the college, I can see a small hill in the distance with a monument on top. This is the Swinging Ringing Tree, a wind powered sculpture designed by Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu, completed in 2006. I have been meaning to see the sculpture close up for some time now. And with the nice weather over the weekend, I decided to go for it. There is a car park at Crown Point, which is really close to the Singing Ringing Tree (I have subsequently been informed that this car park is used for more questionable purposes, which I will leave to the reader's imagination). To make more of a walk of it, I decided to start from Towneley Hall Estate Car Park (£1.50 for the day). There are several car pa...