Captain Cooks Monument

hello there

blimey, i have done a fair few updates today, and this one could well be the most ambitious of them all! i shall try, for your pleasure, to recount an afternoon spent going up and sort of down the hill which is home to the magnificent Captain Cooks Monument. it is a hill i have walked many, many times in my earlier years, and i was delighted that the boys could have the same experience.

it was, for the record, a Saturday, and the classy summer rains and grey skies of a none more English summer were hiding away for the most part. as good a day as any, then, to hit the North Yorkshire Moors for an invigorating walk.

after a sensational picnic lunch, it was off and up the hill. as you can see, the trail up is quite lovely in itself!

on the day out were the four of us along with Colin and Angela. Andrew was not up to it due to some ligament damage on his knee, and Christopher, as per an earlier post, was busy with all sorts of interesting things in France.

i took quite a few pics of everyone walking up, but will try not to upload too many of them here. here's another one, though, as they approach the clearing. it allows you to see for yourself the suggestion i made of the skies being a bit clearer than they were for much of our holiday!

the walk up to Captain Cooks is not just a straightforward stroll, unless you want it to be. there are all sorts of things to see and do on the path up. James and William were certainly in no rush to go, wishing to stop and have a good look at everything.

one of the more impressive things they found was a den or if you will hide that someone had gone to some effort to construct. and what a worthy effort, too, as it was ace!

it looked to me quite like the thing Seth Armstrong out of Emmerdale might have constructed whilst out poaching, although as it was rather close to the actual path i suspect the intention of it was a good deal more innocent. no matter for what reason someone constructed it, we were glad to find it, as the boys thought it was one of the most excellent things ever!

a little bit further up and James discovered the remains of a stone wall that he thought he would quite like to walk along. Colin was only too happy to help him do this!

and indeed Colin helped, as you can see, James in his wish to "just stand alone" on top of it for a little while!

William was not going to be left out of this sort of thing at all. whilst he was too small to get up the wall, he was the perfect height to stand on, and subsequently jump off, some tree stumps!

jumping and running were the order of the day for William, really. Angela had expressed a great interest in running about with William, so we kind of just left her to it so that she could discover exactly how rampant William can get when doing that!

not that it was all running and jumping for William. he has developed quite a fascination with insects, and was thrilled when Angela pointed out a ladybird on a leaf to him. he was slightly less thrilled with me taking pictures, as you may work out from the below, as he thought i might scare it off or chase it away!

onwards, then, to the monument itself. as you can see, it's rather big and impressive!

hopefully that whole scale of people thing gives you some idea of just how big it is in these pictures!

and here we are at the base of the monument. in retrospect i probably should have taken a picture of the plaque for you all. never mind, you will just have to go along and see it for yourself one day!

here's Colin admiring the view from the top. we did, it has to be said, stand and look across the land, discussing how when we were lads it was all housing developments and industrial estates. now it is all fields and farms. progress? certainly.

the next few pictures are of the views from the top of Captain Cooks Monument. i will hope and trust that they shall be of interest to some of you. with good fortune, they shall also show exactly why, no matter where i am in the world, the moment someone mentions the word "home" this is the place that i think of. despite the lack of industrial estates.

to fill the space between pictures of the views, let me have a bash at telling you of the trip down. it started in a conventional enough manner, but soon took an interesting turn when Colin and James said that they would rather go through the woods than down the perfect path laid out for us. we all agreed that this was a class idea, and seemed like good fun.

it was, in retrospect, but didn't feel like it at the time!

the trip down through the woods had no real path or trail to follow, so we just guessed our way downwards. if we were heading down then surely we could not be getting lost or going the wrong way. this proved to be correct, but boy was it work! the recent rainfall, and a stream that Colin, Angela and indeed myself had kind of forgotten existed, made the ground exceptionally soggy and muddy. this made for a very difficult trip down.

not nearly as difficult, however, as when we hit a bit of boggy marsh that had all the properties of quicksand. it was a difficult task to get us all across, and it meant that the ace boots i wore to The Stone Roses were trashed beyond repair (i believe Andrew is to hold a ceremonial burning of them soon), but we got across and down to the cars OK!

it was when we got to the cars that Colin and Angela recalled in passing that they were due to pick up Christopher from his saucy French adventure, and thus we sort of "moved it" a bit. well, when i say we one of us was not in any great rush, but more on that shortly.

in the mean time, a final view, and this is of the one that we did not climb up, but will do on our next trip. ladies and gents, the beauty of Roseberry Topping.

when the journey down eventually ended, there was much relief. almost everyone took their socks and shoes off to drain the bog water out of them and caught their breath. not William, however.

William, as you can see, just grabbed a sausage roll and a bottle of Cherry Coke, going wandering as he delved into both.

and when he was finished with them, he turned around and headed to go straight back up to the Monument once more! nice that he felt he had the stamina and energy to do so, but no one else did and Chris was probably wondering where his ride home was.

next time, William, we will go up again i promise!

there's still a fair few pictures to upload here, but there's also a fair few things i need to do around the house tonight before the return to verk tomorrow. i shall try and squeeze one more update in this evening, or failing that as soon as possible.

if reading this has left you exhausted, dear reader, you try the walk!



be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!