More moors, some elephant
More tales from the moor. Last week, I and my friend Liz decided to undertake the 22-mile Ilkley Skyline. It’s a route devised by my club that covers eight moors, and you can be competitive about it and submit your time, or you can say, nah, not start at the official start but 500m down the road, and just try to have a nice time while also properly training to do an overnight 42-mile race in less than a month.
I had cleverly suggested we run on Saturday. There was nothing clever about this because on Saturday the forecast was for HEAT and Sunday, it turned out, was cooler. At least I checked the forecast and decided we should set off running at 8am to avoid the worst. The other plan for the day was to practice running with poles. Fell runners can be snobby about poles. They belong to the ultra runner tribe along with jazzy skorts, knee socks and wrap-around sunglasses. I’d never use poles in a regular fell race because I’d be scorned. But I would definitely have used them had I done the 60-mile Fellsman in 2020; and I am definitely going to use them to get myself up and down Pendle Hill and round the Pendle Way on a midsummer’s night. So we tried to get my poles set up but couldn’t. The combined intelligence of a financial expert (retired) and journalist and author (wishes she were retired) could not figure it out, so the poles went back in the car. Fail.
I was carrying two 800ml flasks of water and thought that would be plenty. Fail. I had drunk nearly both by ten miles in, and had to be replenished by Liz’s extra bottle of water that she had sensibly thought to carry. By now we had run along Rombald’s Moor skyline, and seen the Evil Camera. But as we were both wearing club kit — coincidentally, because the summer white vest and t-shirt are light — I thought it best not to give the camera the finger.
The ground was tinder-dry. Usually we would have been able to fill bottles at a beck, with fingers crossed there wasn’t too much sheep shit in the water, but our route didn’t take us over any becks or ghylls until we reached the River Wharfe in Addingham, and I didn’t plan to drink primary treated sewage even if it did look like a river. The Skyline does include a lot of skyline but it also dips down into Wharfe valley and out again, twice. As we dropped down to cross the A65, I spotted an outdoor tap at a stables and we borrowed some water. Sorry for not asking, Swallow Stables of Addingham Moorside, and thank you for your service. From then on, I scanned every building I saw for an outside tap and never saw another.
Climbing up to Beamsley Beacon, I finally felt the heat hit me. It is dramatic, what heat does to me. It’s like my power levels drop precipitously. I can actually feel the difference, that suddenly less energy is available to me. Near the summit, a man who had been running up the hill behind us, impressively without stopping, passed us. He had no water and I immediately wanted to retract my genuine “well done”. I thought him an idiot, and then I ran out of water. But Liz provided, and we carried on. Even the extremely boggy sections were spookily runnable. We ran past Timble forest, where I had run around and around a few weeks earlier trying to get my mileage up to the right number on my training plan. We were running on what I would call a footpath, but it was barely a trod. By the way, Wikipedia, your definition of “trod” is crap. This isn’t right either, at least not according to how us Yorkshire fell runners understand trod, which definitely doesn’t include flagstones. For me, it is like a footpath but more indistinct but sometimes it’s quite distinct and sometimes it’s on an OS map and sometimes it isn’t and sometimes it can be nothing more than a path trodden into existence by lots of sheep and a few humans or a faint dark line through heather. Clear?
Anyway the path in question was definitely nothing more robust than a footpath. Then I heard Liz exclaim “god I hate these bikes”. And I looked beyond her and saw to my astonishment two motorbikes coming towards us. On a trod. On a peaceful moor.
Of course we had to stand aside to let them past, because we are nice, although as the more vulnerable footpath users, we had priority. I thought, “don’t challenge them”. It’s too hot and you don’t have the energy for a confrontation and there are about 11 miles still to run.
I challenged them.
I may have said, “you don’t have the right to be on this moor” but I’ll pretend I asked it as a question. The lead motorcyclist visibly sighed. I’m not sure how I knew this, when he had a helmet on, but there was a sagging in him and I’m going to say that was a sigh. He switched off his engine and seemed to prepare himself for a confrontation he had had before. He started strong.
“We have the right to be here.”
“No you don’t.”
“Yes, we do. This is a road.”
I was actually stunned. I looked at the footpath beneath my feet and said the only obvious thing. “No it’s not.”
He said, yes it was. I said no it wasn’t. Liz was waiting patiently. Finally the man said, “I can show you an email from the North Yorkshire county council rights of way officer if you like,” and at that point I knew I had lost. Not because of any email. No way was that trod classed as a road on a map. But because I was tired and hot and I had no evidence to back me up. I wish at that point I had said, OK, but where is your moral right to come and pollute the moorland where people come for fresh air, and to churn up the trods and the tracks, for your fun?
I didn’t. They switched their engines on again, the second rider said with apparent genuine goodwill, “have a good day!” and we went our separate ways. Liz and I fumed out about it on and off for the next stretch. This usually consisted of me or her looking at the footpath or trod or field we were running along and saying “this is a ROAD!”
We carried on, I filled my water bottles from a showhome portakabin, we got back to the Wharfe and found it crowded with posh-voiced students in tiny shorts who were paying no attention to the sign on the other side of the river from Burley in Wharfedale council, that there was so much faecal bacteria in the water, the risk of getting ill was extremely high. We didn’t care either. We dipped our caps in faecal bacteria and it felt wonderful. Our training plans both had us doing 20 miles, and 20 miles happened to get us to the doors of the Co-operative, where they sell cold Coke and it was the most delicious thing I had ever had. Really.
Afterwards both Liz and I did some digging. She sent me this:
See that word “path”? Not “road”?
I went to the relevant pages on North Yorkshire County Council. First, a legend.
Then, to the council’s efficient interactive map. Efficient, except the legend on it doesn’t match:
So the only type of way that a motorcyclist would be allowed on is a BOAT. (Byways Open To All Traffic) (Actually that’s BOTAT.) Now let’s look at the map and the path — High Badger Gate — that the motorcyclists were on.
So it’s not a public right of way but nor is it a road.
I am still waiting to hear from the council. And even when I do, what will I do about it? Nothing, but I’ll have evidence — if I’m right — for the next time. All I know is that motorized vehicles should stay off the moor. It’s for pedestrians with two or four legs.
Then again maybe the two-legged pedestrians should also stay away. Read this by Paul Besley, who is a mountain rescuer and volunteer warden in the Peak District and South Yorkshire.
Strewth.
AI
I have not used ChatGPT. I’m a little scared of it and of AI in general. That said, two of the most useful tools I have use AI. Devonthink, a super-organizing database that is indispensable, and which uses AI to find connections between documents that you wouldn’t. Also Transcribe by Wreally studios, which I use to transcribe manually but also, occasionally, when I think the language is clear enough, to do an automatic transcription. I knew they were not done by humans because they’re not great. I stopped paying for them because it was taking me almost as long to go through the transcript and correct it as it would to do the transcription. I would prefer to employ human transcribers, and for my last book had a brilliant transcriber in Jane Duffus. But I’m peering hard at the scrag-end of my funding, and I can’t afford human rates for all my untranscribed interviews. Anyway half of them are in Senegalese French. Yesterday I thought I would try Rev.ai. It gives you 300 minutes free. I did a comparison, sending the same audio to Transcribe and Rev. Neither is perfect — it’s “fish”, Rev, not “phish” — but Rev’s grasp is pretty astonishing. Damn. I may have to like AI.
Animal Hero of the Week: Ning Nong
In 2004, Amber Owen was on holiday in Thailand with her family. They were staying on the beach, and the eight-year-old Amber liked to ride the beach elephants. She grew to prefer Ning Nong, a four-year-old female. On Boxing Day, she was riding Ning Nong on the beach, but Ning Nong kept trying to pull away from the shore. People were on the beach gathering fish that had mysteriously been dumped on the sand. Then the tsunami arrived, and Amber was still on Ning Nong’s back. She watched people be drowned by the wave. Ning Nong kept pushing through the water, slowly. Hotel rooms were being swept away, everything was terror and chaos, but Ning Nong pushed forward. Finally she reached a wall and wedged herself against it so that Amber could climb onto the wall. Her mother Samantha caught sight of her, and they made it to their first-floor room just as part of the ground floor was swept away.
Amber now lives in Milton Keynes and still sends money to support Phuket’s working elephants. She didn’t know what happened to Ning Nong, except that she became a book and a play by Michael Morpugo called Running Wild. Then in 2016, she was identified — how? — in an elephant camp — what’s that? — in Kanchanburi, where she had been renamed Bai Tong. Given that I’m getting that from a source called “Coconuts Bangkok” be sceptical.
That’s definitely the same elephant. Right?