A Map of Grin Woods paths
Sculptor Lorraine Botterill has produced a series of carved finger posts to help guide walkers along the green route in Grin Woods. The finger posts represent some of the things that you might get to see on a woodland walk.
BCA director and secretary, Martin Wragg, will be reminiscing about climbing with legendary mountaineers Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker whose disappearance whilst attempting the first ascent of the north-east ridge of Everest led to the creation of the internationally renowned Boardman Tasker Award for mountain literature.
'The water supply to the lion's mouth at St Anne's Well has been turned on again today (Wednesday 9 August).
The closures this summer are due to work to assess what needs to be done to reconnect the water to the refurbished Pump Room as part of the project to regenerate the Crescent and celebrate Buxton's heritage and its close association with the thermal spring waters.
We are confident that, once we have determined the best way to provide the new outlet, the supply to the St Anne's Well will be disrupted much less frequently.
We understand the frustration felt by people at the frequency of the closures this summer and we are working to minimise this and to make sure we are keeping people informed.
In the meantime, we'd like to thank you for your continued patience and understanding.'
The RAF site at Harpur Hill
Dr Alan Roberts will be giving a public lecture at the University of Derby, Buxton campus on Sunday 10th September at 3.00pm on the RAF Bomb Store at Harpur Hill.
The official name of the bomb store was RAF Maintenance Unit 28, which operated from December 1939 to November 1960. MU 28 was of high strategic importance throughout the war. The major storage area was a reinforced concrete structure of novel design, covered with quarry waste to conceal and protect it, supplied from a railway siding. A large area of surrounding land housed many additional, smaller scale, facilities.
Dr Alan Roberts talk will cover the design of the structure, construction difficulties and problems arising during its operation, together with the Unit's involvement in the early days of Mountain Rescue and its legacy in terms of housing, buildings later used to house the College of Further Education and even a Mushroom Farm!
Details of the event will be posted on the Heritage Open Day website - see link below
Buxton Advertiser article from 2014
Last years Heritage guided walk
Dr Alan Robert's BCA Director and Chair of the Places and Spaces Group will be leading a walk to trace the history and development of the Buxton Coalfields. The walk will be on Thursday 7th September and more details can be found on the link below.
Information and Booking details for BCA Coalfields Heritage Walk
Mike Monaghan in conversation with Mark Cocker
Nine o’clock on a Saturday morning can be a challenging time to attend a talk, but this was very well attended and is a testament to the popularity of the natural world and the power of Mark Cockers writing.
In the beautiful and calming setting of St Johns Church and taking the now familiar conversational format, Mike Monaghan Chair of Buxton Civic Association, who were sponsoring the event, discussed with Mark Cocker some of the topics that Mark had covered in his many books, from the damage that colonial Britain has done to indigenous populations, to the devastating effects of man on the environment and the oceans, and of course the joy and pleasure gained from the natural environment.
Mark has written about Birds on a continental scale right down to the local, and the micro habitats of Lightwood where his love of the natural world was first kindled.
His passion and a thirst for knowledge about the environment began with the observation of some brown birds at the end of the road where he was brought up, Lightwood road, in Buxton.
Curious about them, he overcame his fear of being labelled a bird watching nerd and borrowing his brother's binoculars rushed out to see what these unremarkable dull looking birds were all about.
Of course, they were far from unremarkable and dull, and close observation of them revealed that they were all slightly different, they were all individuals.
This fostered a love and respect for the commonplace, and his most successful book ‘Crow Country’ celebrates the everyday birds that we take for granted, the rook, revealing them to be a fascinating, intelligent, gregarious and much-misunderstood bird.
As are Corvids generally.
Shot in their thousands as a perceived threat to game estates, they are, we are discovering, among the most intelligent animals on the planet.
But of course, not everything we do is bad for the landscape. The RSPB reserves provide sanctuaries and protection for some of our most threatened species and gardeners everywhere play host to a range of species both common and rare.
The problem though is that the bad things we do greatly outweigh the good.
There is also a fundamental disconnect between the expectation of continuous economic growth and the finite nature of the planet and its resources. Our oceans and the animals that rely on it and live in and around it are choking under mountains of plastics, and essential habitats, woodlands, forests, savannah are being destroyed as we seek to feed an ever-increasing population. Animals that we once could take for granted, Lions, Elephants, Giraffes are everywhere under threat.
Perhaps it is not too late. But we need to take a long view. It has taken 150 years to seek equality between the sexes and still, as the latest BBC pay revelations reveal we are not there yet, and it will take a similar timescale to make the environment and its protection second nature.
But perhaps we do not have 150 years?
Mark is still writing and his next book due out next April is titled ‘Our Place’. It is a personal history of the environmental movement, focusing on six landscapes in the United Kingdom. Let’s hope that he can be persuaded to come back to the BIF 2018 to tell us about it.
