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The Sandstone Trail

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The Sandstone Trail walks (click to go to Google Maps)

These days we frequently hear stories of heroic acts of walking: to the Poles, across the Andes, up the Amazon, often undertaken at great speed or under conditions of considerable disability.

This little post is a record of our trek down the Sandstone Trail, 34 miles close to our home in Chester. Our route, drawn from “Circular walks along the Sandstone Trail” by Carl Rogers, adds up to a total of 77 miles. These distances are the sort of things that serious trekkers would cover in less than 24 hours, probably combined with a swim and a 100 miles cycle. Our effort was rather more leisurely – it took us about 14 months. Traditionally we walk on a Sunday morning, usually finishing before lunch.

The Sandstone Trail is covered in 13 walks:

  1. Frodsham
  2. Manley Common
  3. Delamere Forest
  4. Primrosehill Wood
  5. Tarporley
  6. Beeston Castle
  7. Peckforton
  8. Burwardsley
  9. Rawhead
  10. Hampton Heath
  11. Malpas
  12. Tushingham
  13. Whitchurch

These range in length from 5 to 8 miles.  To start off, here is some of the eponymous sandstone, in this case from above Frodsham:

Sandstone

Sherwood Sandstone Group from above Frodsham

The sandstone is from the Sherwood Sandstone Group laid down in the Early Triassic, 250 million years ago.

The small town of Frodsham lies close to the Mersey Estuary and after you have climbed up onto the sandstone heights above the town you get a fine view towards Liverpool and across the industrial works at Stanlow refinery and Runcorn. I’m rather fond of these, Runcorn is a fine collection of pipes, tubes and the odd ball shaped thing whilst the Stanlow refinery looks like something out of Bladerunner; at night they are lit up with gas flaring off on some of the chimneys.

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Stanlow Oil Refinery

The walks to Primrosehill Wood are rather pleasant, at Manley Common we were inspected by enthusiastic pigs.

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Pigs!

We also saw a lot of cows:

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Cows looking towards Beeston Castle

And a llama (rather further along the Trail):

Llama

LLama

The llama was very inquisitive, perhaps overly so since there was a small diversion around its field with a note highlighting that dogs and walkers with sticks had interacted with it rather more than was strictly desirable. As we walked past its field it followed us very closely over the fence with a look of what could have been either llamaly inquisitiveness or aggression.

For me the Tarporley and Beeston Castle walks were a bit of a slog, they span the Cheshire Gap, a flat area of clay farmland. The Beeston Castle walk in particular comprises a trip out into the plain and then back again with the Castle the sole point of interest for the whole walk. The Castle is pretty impressive but you have to pay to get in, so we didn’t.

Beeston Castle Gateway

Beeston Castle Gateway

Beeston Castle

Beeston Castle

The next three walks, Peckforton, Burwardsley and Rawhead are my favourites, at this point the Sandstone Trail heads up onto a wooded ridge with lovely views in all directions. The Peckforton Estate has left some classy stonework along the route.

View from Bulkeley Hill Wood

View from Bulkeley Hill Wood

Haunted Bridge

Haunted Bridge on the Peckforton Estate

Misty view from near Rawhead

Misty view from near Rawhead

The last four walks: Hampton Heath, Malpas, Tushingham and Whitchurch take you off the  ridge for more walking across rolling farmland with a couple of stretches along the canal. We did manage to get very wet one day:

Ian

Me, wet

This was achieved by crossing a field of oil seed rape not long after heavy rain, I think this is the wettest I’ve ever been following a walk (and I’ve walked in the Lake District!). As you can see the crop reached a height of approximately five feet and held an awful lot of water.

I must admit to not being too fond of this type of walking but we could not leave walks undone. This little arch, in Jubilee Park in Whitchurch, marks the end of the Sandstone Trail.

End of the Sandstone trail

End of the Sandstone trail

You can see the GPS tracks I captured on the walk here in Google Maps.

Surprise!

Sharon (aka @happymouffetard, or my wife Mrs Hopkinson) is pregnant! Working title for the new member of the family is Beetle. Below you can see images from the dating scans, the due date is 21st February. In real life Beetle had a bit of a thrash around and demonstrated various bits of anatomy. 

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Scan2

Scan3

Technically @happymouffetard is described as “Geriatric Primigravida”

University is not the universe

Today is A-level results day in England and Wales – A-levels are your passport to university and seem to be seen as the be all and end all of the school education system. Today we are provided with the annual entertainment of noting that this story is usually illustrated in the press with attractive young ladies (often jumping), and the rather shocking news that this is driven as much by certain schools* as it is by journalists. Tomorrow we can expect stories on how A levels are getting easier.

This does detract from the key point of the day: which is to mark the achievement of academically inclined students who have been working industriously for the last couple of years whilst they battle with the horrors of being a teenager. Well done to you all!

Over the past 20 years or so it seems our entire focus has been on getting people to university to do degrees and build the knowledge economy. But are we right to place so much emphasis on attending university? Is this a piece of cargo-cult science whereby we have observed in the past that people who go to university are often more “successful” than those that don’t and assume that the “going to university” bit is the key to success – therefore if we can get more people to go to university they, and the country, will be more successful?

Amongst the great battle over tuition fees, those that do not attend university, who missed out on this often middle-class rite of passage were entirely ignored. We don’t celebrate people who go off to learn how to be plumbers, electricians, carpenters and so forth. We don’t celebrate the people who I work with, who joined the company out of school and have done university degrees part-time. We don’t celebrate the now increasing numbers going off to do apprenticeships. These are all people, equally valuable to society, whose jobs simply don’t require a degree to do their jobs.

*article by Chris Cook at the FT, available by free registration

 

Book Review: “Erasmus Darwin: A life of Unequalled Achievement” by Desmond King-Hele

Portrait_of_Erasmus_Darwin_by_Joseph_Wright_of_Derby_(1792)My next book review is on “Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement” by Desmond King-Hele which I reached via my former colleague, Athene Donald, you can read her review here.

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) will always be best known as the grandfather of Charles Darwin. However he was a substantial figure in his own right. He was a doctor in and around Lichfield and Derby for his entire working life. By all accounts he was a good doctor, at a time when the medic’s tool kit was rather bare. Until quite late in his life he preferred not to attach his name to his work outside medicine, for fear of damaging his medical reputation.

In his later years he wrote a translation of Linnaeus’ work on plant classification, a serious academic work – from which many English words describing the anatomy of plants are descended. This was followed by a series of books (The Botanic Garden, Zoonomia, Phytologia and The Temple of Nature) part poetry and part essay on nature and medicine. His poetry directly influenced Coleridge and Wordsworth; his fame, and regard, as a poet lasted into the later part of the 19th century but ultimately his style of poetry fell out of favour and, to a degree he sank into obscurity. I must admit I’m unable to determine the nature of the science / poetry link for Erasmus, poetry has always been something of a closed book to me. I don’t know whether poetry was more pervasive as a communication mechanism at the end of the 18th century or, at the time, poetry was a useful way to communicate science. Or whether simply by chance, both science and poetry fell upon Erasmus as they have done in the case of the author of this biography.

Alongside his work as a doctor Erasmus was at the heart of the Lunar Society, a group of friends and industrialists including James Watt (steam engine inventor), Matthew Boulton (factory owner), Josiah Wedgewood (factory owner) and Joseph Priestley (chemist, preacher and radical). These men were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. He was also friend, and doctor to, Joseph Wright of Derby – famous for his paintings of industrial and scientific scenes, King-Hele argues that several of the figures in “The Air Pump” are modelled on Erasmus and his family.

Erasmus developed a number of mechanical invention during his life, including the modern scheme for steering in a car (although developed at the time for horse-drawn carriages), a mechanical duplication machine for writing and a windmill with a vertical axis and, towards the end his life, agricultural machinery. There are even intriguing glimpses in his Commonplace Book of what looks like a gas turbine. Although many of these inventions appeared to function they did not catch on at the time, in part it seems because Erasmus was not passionate about their implementation (fearing for his medical reputation). It’s probably worth being a little cautious here: no doubt some of Erasmus’ inventions made it into real life but there is a big difference between a rough sketch in a notebook to a real, commercially viable device.

It’s quite staggering the number of miles travelling Erasmus put in: 10,000 miles a year or nearly 30 miles a day, at a time before motor vehicles and even reasonable roads. Miles travelled in support of his business as a doctor and in communication with his friends in the Lunar Society. This is where his ideas about carriage steering and suspension would have come from – he seems to have used a combination of light carriage and horse to get about.

Alongside medical publications in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Erasmus also presented papers on atmospheric physics, and on the operation of artesian wells (he was friends with the geologist, John Hutton) and as commented above, his poetry was published with lengthy scientific essays. Ultimately Erasmus Darwin’s science has not made it down through the years to us, this is largely because he put some fine thinking into a wide range of scientific areas, and in many cases was shown to be right, but he didn’t follow up those ideas with experiments and a more complete theory. Personal scientific renown is a fickle thing, it’s based on a desire to pull out “great figures” from history, rather than recognising the more collaborative, incremental nature of science. 

The Darwin family form a scientific dynasty: Erasmus, his son Robert (Charles Darwin’s father), three of Charles’ sons and his grandson Charles Galton Darwin were all Fellows of the Royal Society – a total of five generations. This highlights the advantages of birth as much as anything. Erasmus’ father Robert was a lawyer which was no doubt how Erasmus could afford to go to Cambridge and Edinburgh for his medical education. And so to the next generation where Robert (Erasmus’ son) gained entrance to the Royal Society on the basis of a thesis possibly written by his father; next up Charles Darwin who was able to devote his life to science through the wealth generated by his father and marriage into the wealthy Wedgewood family. This is not to reduce their achievements but to highlight that they had both ability and environment on their side.

Politically Erasmus was a bit of a radical: anti-slavery, pro-(French) Revolutionary and supportive of an independent United States of America. He appears also to have been pretty close to being an atheist. King-Hele argues this caused him trouble in his later years when the government-led backlash to pro-revolutionaries struck, reducing his reputation as a poet. His, more radical, friend Priestley’s house was attacked by a mob in and he ultimately fled to the US to avoid persecution.

Charles Darwin took an enormous length of time before publishing “On the Origin of Species”, this wasn’t time wasted but spent in making many detailed experiments. Looking at his family we can perhaps see why he took so long about it: his grandfather, Erasmus suffered considerably opprobrium for his atheism and evolutionary ideas, Robert, Charles’ father, no doubt shared these ideas but kept quiet about them.

In contrast to many of the scientific figures I have read about, Erasmus Darwin sounds like an excellent friend and stimulating dinner guest. King-Hele’s biography is perhaps a little effusive about its topic but its very readable and well-sourced.

Still love the NHS?

In todays news: reports that some NHS trusts were setting “minimum waiting times” which were “too long” for elective surgery. The reason being that if you wait long enough people will drop off your waiting list, either by going private or dying. That there even exist minimum waiting times set by the trusts should be a cause for concern, let alone how long they are.

For me this is personal: last year I had minor elective surgery – I started off in the NHS but then decided to use my private medical insurance. I wasn’t going to die of my condition, the worst-case was an emergency circumcision; however I was in discomfort, a bit of worry and occasional pain, and as time progressed things were getting worse.

So the idea that the NHS was waiting for me to drop off their waiting list pisses me off somewhat. If they’d said at the earliest possible instance “please piss off”, I would have done so immediately. Of course they didn’t tell me to piss off because had it become public they would have suffered from some opprobrium.

My private medical insurer had me treated within a month from first presentation, the only reason it wasn’t quicker was that my surgeon was going on holiday for two weeks and I decided not to make the time before he went – it could have been under two weeks. The NHS would have taken 4 months – I know this because through an administrative error I received an appointment for my operation on the NHS as I returned to work.

The behaviour of the trusts in this instance is entirely rational, as is that of my private hospital. The trusts have been paid already, if I don’t have an operation then they’re “quids in”. My private hospital, on the other hand, wants me to have an operation, because they won’t get paid until I have it. This is actually the problem with fully private medical systems: for people that can afford treatment it is in the interests of the provider to provide as much medical treatment as the patient can pay for.

The problem with the NHS is that it is a highly cost effective system directed at providing universal second-rate care. It will remain so because anyone proposing a change radical enough to make it better will be assailed by people who “Love the NHS” and want to “Save the NHS”. Notice here they don’t care about your treatment, they care about the service provider.

Don’t love the NHS, it is a public corporate entity, it can’t love you back. Only people can love you.