News 'Widget'

The sharp-eyed among you may notice a new 'widget' in the sidebar of the blog. This comes courtesy of History teacher Russell Tarr who has developed a great new free tool called classpress.net . It involves a generator which does an hourly run through web services looking for topic keywords associated with different subject areas. This creates an up-to-date summary of key news articles for a number of subjects, including Geography. You can link directly to the articles by clicking on them in the widget.

3 Days in the Dales

Here, as promised, are some pics taken last weekend in the Dales..... starting with Thornton Force waterfall. Strangely I don't remember the sunshine. It must have been all that driving rain at the Norber erratics on Saturday which eclipsed it in my memory!

We did some fieldsketching at close quarters...

..and posed for a team photo...

Then it was on to Chapel Le Dale with its barns and walls scenery ...overlooked by the summit of Ingleborough Saturday morning saw us at Malham Cove before climbing the 417 steps to the limestone pavement on top.
...and our first sight of those clints and grykes!

...and here they are at at closer quarters ahead of team photo 2......
The sun came out briefly in Watlowes dry valley.... ..very briefly. It was gone by the time we got to the top and took in the view!From there it was on down to Gordale Scar... where the depths of the gorge inspired Tolkein's vision of Helm's Deep
and after all that walking, there was more mental exercise in the evening! and more limestone pavement on Sunday... Grikey... it's a long way down!

And here's the shot of the Ribblehead viaduct that delayed me getting back to the bus....... my picture of the weekend. It's a bit of an optical illusion - the 'sky' in the distance is actually sunshine on a distant hillside and the whole shot is foreshortened with a zoom lens.

And finally, despite lucrative offers of work from the BBC... Mr Foulds and I have decided to stick to our day jobs!!

White Scar Cave

I have just discovered that White Scar Cave which we will be visiting this week when the second Higher group are in the Yorkshire Dales, now has a new website....Click on the image above to link directly to it.