New roof for The Larches

March 6th, 2011

P1020106 Over the last five weeks The Larches has been surrounded by a girdle of scaffolding.   We’ve known we really needed to have the house re-roofed for over a year. Trying to hold many of the lower slates in place proved impractical. The result was leaking from the gutters especially at the back and the danger of slates falling in high winds.

A new year’s resolution got us finally to move! And when the roof was stripped the rotten soffits and some defective joists proved how right we were. 

It’s been interesting to pull back the curtain of time to get a glimpse of how the house was built over 125 years ago and to see how roofing techniques while modified, still retain much of the traditional practice. Perhaps the biggest difference comes with the weather and wind proofing. 

The old roof was sealed throughout by parging. This is a method of coating the batons and the undersides of the tiles with parget – a mortar of lime and horsehair. Nowadays this has been replaced with a much simpler and quicker method, where a breathable membrane sheet is secured under the batons and the slates are nailed to the batons.       

Fortunately the original Borrowdale slates (about 10 mm thick) were strong and of good quality, as Frank the roofer had predicted, and the majority could be resized and reused without breakage. In this way the vernacular style of a graduated roof can be retained with the largest slates being used at the bottom and the smallest (and shortest) ones covering the top rows of the roof. Replacement ones are primarily for the bottom rows.

Since modern slates are almost invariably thinner (to reduce costs), second hand Borrowdale slates, suitable for environmentally sensitive areas and similar to the ones we have, are hard to come by and now sell at a premium price of £3,000 a ton.

The photos below show the back roof ready for the slates, the roofers working up the rows from the bottom, the look of the completed roof after a chimney has been removed and finally the filled lorry after the scaffolders have spent a morning dangling acrobatically from poles as they dismantled the scaffold and boards. It’s been fascinating to walk all round the house at roof level to see the work, but now we’re glad to be back to normal.

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The road to Cancún

November 27th, 2010

Climate change forces us to recognise that we live in an indivisible world. Recycling, reuse of materials and developing green technologies all make sense because the planet’s resources are limited and diminishing and we need to reduce our carbon footprint. 

Are we doing enough though to create that inclusive world that recognises the needs of all, rich and poor alike? Recently retired UN climate negotiator Yvo de Boer thinks not. In an interview (24 November 2010) with the Guardian’s John Vidal, he argues that slow progress has been made with climate change negotiations because developing countries are suspicious that rich countries use the issue as a way of keeping them poor and are not sufficiently committed to green growth economies.

The follow-up international conference on climate change is to be held in Cancún, Mexico next week and already there’s a mood that the high hopes of last December’s Copenhagen conference have to be replaced with more modest objectives if anything is to be achieved.

In The Economist’s lead article this week “How to live with climate change”, there is the sobering conclusion that climate change ” . . . remains the craziest experiment mankind has ever conducted. Maybe in the long run it will be brought under control. For the foreseeable future, though . . . the human race must live with the problem as best it can.”  

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In praise of fell-running

October 23rd, 2010

“.. you like the free wind in your hair, life without care, flying up there where the air is rare.”

catbells_ian1 I got the seed of the idea years ago on Esk Hause when at 9.30am I’d met two fell runners coming from Grasmere. They’d already done almost twice the distance I had covered in the same time. Their secret? Travel light with trainer type shoes. The pair I bought the next week brought me blisters on the downhill runs and no ‘life without care’! But the desire for that free wind lingered on.

IMG_2353 Fast forward to 2006. I’m walking quickly, away from paths, up to Carlside below Skiddaw, when I’m overtaken slowly by a fell runner. Nearer the top I meet his partner. She explains as he tears down past us that he’s a contender for top places in national competitions. His secret? Make sure to get proper fell running shoes and touch the ground as lightly as possible on the descent. So maybe I could do it.

With a pair of new Innovate shoes (Top photo) from Keswick’s Needle Sports, I was soon testing out the fells round Thornthwaite, with the 2½ mile Barrow Round (Photo above) a favourite. Excluding the best part of two years for a prostate operation, I’ve now covered since my ‘conversion’ just under 90 miles on the fell tops

It’s not a lot and I’m not competing with anyone in races. My times are generally 40% to 65% of the walking times predicted by my Anquet mapping software. My best overall speeds are about five mph and for longer runs more like three mph. But it’s brought me a new freedom, the taste for a great sport and admiration for those, whose racing on the hills I read about in the local papers. Who needs football’s overpaid prima donnas when you have local icons like Joss Naylor and Billy Bland? These tough men and women are our real sporting heroes.

“Isn’t it dangerous and likely to do your knees in?”, Well you need to be fairly fit, have a good sense of balance and work up slowly. And go at a pace and for a distance that is OK for you. To enjoy this sport, you don’t need to do the gruelling races that Richard Askwith describes in his excellent book, Feet in the Clouds, A tale of fell-running and obsession.

P1010528 I hope by now you are tempted. Seven miles on the fells is a lot more strenuous than seven on the flat, but remember that no one runs uphill all the time and some rarely.

This last month I’ve had two of the best 90 minutes of running in a lifetime. First on the island of Mull, where I had a huge tract of sun-soaked, deer-roamed fells to myself with breathtaking views across Ulva island and down south to Iona. (Photo opposite)

Then last week a great five mile run over Cat Bells and up to Maiden Moor, with the Newlands Valley lit up and glowing in the late afternoon sun. (Photo below) The descent was a route I’d seen the hounds taking two years ago. It drops steeply off the path from the fell top in a NNE direction past an old sheepfold and down through bracken to the track to Little Town. Jazz pianist Chick Corea was playing on my iPod from his ‘Return to Forever’ album to the words below. Could I want for anything more?

Look around you my people
If you look then you will see
How to love, life is paradise all together
What game shall we play today?

catbells_maiden

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Technology that tells

August 31st, 2010

New technologies are fine so long as there’s something useful to be gained from the cost and effort expended in incorporating them into your life and work. There has to be sufficient incentive and it’s not always there.

The smart meter in the house for reducing energy usage may be a case in point. It can show how much electricity a kettle or a heater consumes, but it won’t stop you having tea or wanting to keep warm.

IMG_4296 I have always been a fan of GPS (Global Positioning system) devices. Sat-navs have sold so well because they save time – and fuel – in getting from Point A to an unfamiliar Point B. Now I’m looking out for a Garmin Forerunner 310XT training device. For runners, walkers, swimmers and cyclists this is really useful for plotting and detailed analysis of your course and performance with the data uploaded wirelessly via your PC to a website for storage.

P1010273 But the GPS based idea that has got me really excited these last three weeks in the US has been Seattle’s OneBusAway app, which is downloadable free onto an iPad, Blackberry or other smartphone. Feed in the bus numbers and stops you are likely to use and you’ll get a map display and a constantly updating list of bus arrival times. (See opposite).

This simple idea has been developed by University of Washington graduate student Brian Ferris, using open source software. The app accesses King County data publicly available, is being developed for other platforms and has already been downloaded for 40,000 individual iPhones. It is used weekly by 25,000 individuals.

P1010425 As Ferris says in an interview with Government Technology (7th July 2010), “People are more satisfied with public transit, spend less time waiting, take transit more frequently, feel safer at bus stops and actually reported walking more.” A safer, healthier, less congested and greener Seattle – no wonder other cities are looking to copy the idea. No smart grid city of the future, worth its salt, will be without its own OneBusAway app!

Nor is there any doubt about the incentive! Could the car virtually disappear from downtown Seattle?

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US trains to take the strain?

August 25th, 2010

P1010133 Eleven years after our first annual visit to see our family in the US, we have this month for the first time “let the train take the strain”. We caught the return Amtrak train from Seattle down the west coast to Portland in Oregon, some 170 miles away. It was a pleasant 3+ hours journey in comfy seats with bags of legroom and plenty of passengers. The two-level coach, which had more the feel of a small apartment, provided superb views over Puget Sound and the forest areas of Oregon.

Cars remain the travel method of choice for most in the US, so we train riders are not typical. The average US citizen takes only 1.3 trips by train a year compared with the 30 taken in the UK. But despite this it’s starting to look like the US is taking issues about congestion, travel modes and CO2 emissions more seriously. Several states like California are developing specific high speed rail policies.

P1010148 President Obama kicked off the issue in January with a $8 billion plan under the Recovery Act, offering support to schemes giving priority to upgrading existing rail routes. The thinking is that high speed trains mostly on the East and West coast would provide an incentive for more travellers on shorter journeys to leave their cars behind in the garage.

But trans-continental rail travel is a different ball game. It’s a journey of 2400 miles from New York on the east coast to Seattle. Opening up the west took place in three stages. First came the expeditions of Lewis and Clark in 1804-06, followed by the journeying across the plains by the settlers with their horses and wagons. The steam trains arrived in the 1850s and by 1869 the first transcontinental line had been completed. The Great Northern railway finally reached Seattle in 1893.

P1010363 The railroads created over 100 years ago are still owned by private companies, which concentrate on moving 40% of the nation’s freight slowly around the continent on huge long trains. There’s an inherent conflict here with the needs of high speed passenger trains, which need dedicated lines for a faster service and defined journey times. Providing such high speed routes in Europe and Japan has been a long term investment costing millions of dollars, which are now in the post global financial crisis not available in the US or anywhere else.

This is an area to watch over the next five years and could not only help to reduce US carbon emissions but also provide thousands of jobs for Americans to replace those lost in the motor industry, as it goes into long term decline. In the meantime we’re looking to try out the train next year from Chicago to Seattle.

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