Today, the home page has acquired a new menu item: Sidlaws. This links to a set of pages that I’ve rather grandly entitled a “photographic gazetteer” of the Sidlaw Hills. There’s an introductory page (packed with useful background information, though I say it myself), and then a set of pages dealing with all the Sidlaws … Continue reading A Sidlaws Gazetteer
Unnamed Point 328 (NO 360408, 328m) Unnamed Point 377 (NO 349408, 377m) Unnamed Point 315 (NO 329419, c315m) 14 kilometres 550 metres of ascent Many of the Sidlaw Hills get their names from the farms that work their slopes—with the result that some hills, surrounded by farmland, have several names attached to their various aspects, … Continue reading Sidlaws: Three Unnamed Summits
Radiation fog sounds like something that might occur during a nuclear winter, but it’s not that kind of radiation. The radiation here is heat radiation—infrared wavelengths radiated by the ground during the night, particularly when the skies are clear. Usually, the air temperature gets lower as you get higher—a rising packet of air expands and … Continue reading Radiation Fog
From the embankment of the long-abandoned Erie-Lackawanna-Pennsylvania Railroad, Chris sat silently watching the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, preparing to take off, and sucked meditatively upon the red and white clover around him. It was a first time for each of them. Chris had known since he had been a boy—he was sixteen now—that the cities … Continue reading James Blish: Cities In Flight
I introduced the Crow Craigies Climbing Party last year, when I described our trip to Bonar Bridge. This year took us to a cottage at Corrour, at the east end of Loch Ossian—a ten-mile drive down a rough track from the bridge over the Spean at Luiblea, through Strath Ossian. (There’s a locked gate halfway … Continue reading CCCP 2017: Corrour
The quotation mark has its origin in Europe in the centuries before printing, when documents were copied by hand. It started out as something called a diple. That word comes from Greek diplous, “double”, and a diple was, at its simplest, a line bent in half to form an arrowhead, like this: >. Diples were … Continue reading Quotation Marks
Laidloon Hill (NO 393420, 312m) Broom Hill (NO 383421, c290m) Gallow Hill (NO 391413, 378m) Tealing Hill (NO 407402, c260m) Ironside Hill (NO 399411, 354m) Finlarg Hill (NO 406419, 336m) Unnamed Point 315 (NO 411431, c350m) Kincaldrum Hill (NO 414436, 309m) Hayston Hill (NO 408449, c235m) 17.7 kilometres 580m of ascent It’s distinctly possible that … Continue reading Sidlaws: Tealing Hill to Hayston Hill
Back to South Harris again this year, still enchanted by its rugged landscape and hallucinatory beaches. We caught the ferry from Uig in Skye again—always nice to travel through Skye’s mad scenery, even on a hazy day. This time we were staying in a rather swish self-catering place, perched on a hillside above the beach … Continue reading Harris … and Lewis
We’ve got good tech, we’ve got a nice planet, but we’re fucking it up by way of stupid laws. I’ve written about Kim Stanley Robinson before, when I reviewed his Green Earth. I mentioned his environmentalist and anti-capitalist concerns, his lyrical descriptions of landscape, his long passages where nothing much happens except characters talking to … Continue reading Kim Stanley Robinson: New York 2140
Go to the first post in this build log I left you last time when I had applied the primer coat successfully. Next, I sprayed on the Temperate Land Scheme colours, using LifeColor paints. First, I applied Medium Sea Grey to the under surfaces, then masked that area off, applied Dark Earth to the upper … Continue reading Hasegawa 1/48 Hawker Hurricane IIC: Part 2