A birthday card traditionally has a picture on the front and an emotive little poem on the inside. So here’s a greeting to England’s best loved hill district, designated national park on May 9th 1951.
Lengthy piece. Thoughtful. Had to slow down for the poetry. Granny Turnbull was a talented water colourist. I particularly enjoyed "Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe climbs Skiddaw, the last recorded person to suffer altitude sickness on 920m Skiddaw”. Too much to praise in fact. One little gripe, if such it be, is the use of metric measure when we’re in fact inhabiting the world of our forebears. Certainly my noggin stalls, and loses the thread whilst translating meters to proper feet and inches. Restarts with; now where were we…?
Suspect you're an elderly gent like me ... UK maps have been metric since the 1970s! But when it comes to altitude effects, I think in terms of the Alps, i.e in metric: acclimatisation becomes a serious issue at 4000m rather than at 920m! When my son needed his height in centimetres I got laughed at for starting well 3000ft is 914.4 metres isn't it.
I like it that we still use the English system in the United States. Back in the '70s, it made sense to switch to Metric, but with everything computerized now, conversions are automatic.
Not that keen myself. Walking up Forrester Pass, it took me about 90 mins to do the conversion in my head and so assess whether to expect altitude issues on Mt Whitney. Wasn’t carrying a computer on the John Muir Trail though I guess I could have whipped out my phone except that it was back in 2008. Then of course there’s the Mars rover that crashed … I trust you guys are still using rods, chains and furlongs though of course at slightly different sizes than 22yd, 22yd, and 220yd respectively. Gills bushels and firkins too and 144 cents to the dollar. It was handy that the ‘American gallon’ of water per day required in the Canyonlands turned out to be a slightly smaller gallon, 8lb of water rather than 10lb.
In horse racing, we still use furlongs. For human racing, it's all metric for serious, official races. For public road races, we still occasionally use miles for old times' sake.
Pictures of the Lake District remind me of the Catskill Mountains of New York, which lie 20 miles to my south. That makes sense because these regions were neighbors during the Jurassic Period.
Geologically though they are pretty different... The Catskills are Devonian sandstone, what we'd call the Old Red Sandstone if our countries were still adjacent. Lake District is Ordovician volcanics crumpled, the roots of an ancient mountain chain (Caledonian here/Acadian I think is name in US). The ORS is outwash sediment from that range. The thing Catskills and Lake District share is serious sculpting by ice that ended just 12000 years ago. With luck I may get into the Catskills some day as my son lives in NY
Lengthy piece. Thoughtful. Had to slow down for the poetry. Granny Turnbull was a talented water colourist. I particularly enjoyed "Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe climbs Skiddaw, the last recorded person to suffer altitude sickness on 920m Skiddaw”. Too much to praise in fact. One little gripe, if such it be, is the use of metric measure when we’re in fact inhabiting the world of our forebears. Certainly my noggin stalls, and loses the thread whilst translating meters to proper feet and inches. Restarts with; now where were we…?
Suspect you're an elderly gent like me ... UK maps have been metric since the 1970s! But when it comes to altitude effects, I think in terms of the Alps, i.e in metric: acclimatisation becomes a serious issue at 4000m rather than at 920m! When my son needed his height in centimetres I got laughed at for starting well 3000ft is 914.4 metres isn't it.
I like it that we still use the English system in the United States. Back in the '70s, it made sense to switch to Metric, but with everything computerized now, conversions are automatic.
Not that keen myself. Walking up Forrester Pass, it took me about 90 mins to do the conversion in my head and so assess whether to expect altitude issues on Mt Whitney. Wasn’t carrying a computer on the John Muir Trail though I guess I could have whipped out my phone except that it was back in 2008. Then of course there’s the Mars rover that crashed … I trust you guys are still using rods, chains and furlongs though of course at slightly different sizes than 22yd, 22yd, and 220yd respectively. Gills bushels and firkins too and 144 cents to the dollar. It was handy that the ‘American gallon’ of water per day required in the Canyonlands turned out to be a slightly smaller gallon, 8lb of water rather than 10lb.
In horse racing, we still use furlongs. For human racing, it's all metric for serious, official races. For public road races, we still occasionally use miles for old times' sake.
Pictures of the Lake District remind me of the Catskill Mountains of New York, which lie 20 miles to my south. That makes sense because these regions were neighbors during the Jurassic Period.
Geologically though they are pretty different... The Catskills are Devonian sandstone, what we'd call the Old Red Sandstone if our countries were still adjacent. Lake District is Ordovician volcanics crumpled, the roots of an ancient mountain chain (Caledonian here/Acadian I think is name in US). The ORS is outwash sediment from that range. The thing Catskills and Lake District share is serious sculpting by ice that ended just 12000 years ago. With luck I may get into the Catskills some day as my son lives in NY