Posts for Ghyll

• Tuesday, 28 Jul 2026 11:24 pm

  Night

  Out with Ghyll at night for the first time in a while. Night comes rarely at this time of year. Day was muggy and overcast, down in Leeds for an Office Day. Earlier, when I shut my overheating computer and left the building for the promise of a cold pint of lager, I was staggered, just a little, by how warm it was outside.

  Now the sun is down and there’s a bit of a breeze up and the world is quiet. There’s a smattering of light left in the sky but the ground is dark enough that I can’t make out detail, and the trees are big black splotches on the verge. Ghyll keeps turning around and looking behind us as if someone’s coming: when he was much younger this gave me the creeps, but nowadays I'm not bothered so much. I still look every time.

  We turn around at the dog bin and make our way back. No one would be able to tell I was there except for the scuffling of my old shoes on the dusty gravel. As if to make my point, I see a bright bicycle headlight coming for us in the distance so while Ghyll barks in alarm I grab my headtorch just to make myself known. I'm trying to be a good neighbour, so when he passes I say a friendly “yeaarright”.

  

  

  

  Near the cutthrough I notice for not the first time the highpressure sodium lights, two of them, in front of the row of old turn-of-the-century row houses on Moor Lane. I’m in a picture-taking mood so I stop to take a picture of them just as a woman opens her front door to call out for her cat: it sounds like he’s called Tybalt, which I think is a terrific name for a cat but which also is not very probable. I try not to look sketchy, with my black dog and my phone out, gazing Copernicanly up at a 30-year-old streetlight; but turns out after all not to be very hard as I’m a pretty distinctive guy with the mustache and the denim jacket and the black dog, and the uniform of sketchy guys in this town is total nondistinctiveness, i.e. grey joggy bottoms with a grey zipup hoodie and a balaclava or a neck gaiter, oh and an electric bike and two or three other guys dressed basically the same as you are.

  

  Walking Ghyll Night

• ---

  Saturday, 27 Jun 2026 11:00 pm

  Evening, Cumbria

  Lorton, Cumbria.

  The heat lets up with the setting of the sun, but, typically for this time of year, light lingers in the sky until late. It's my favourite time of day: light still enough to find one's path through a gate and across a field, but too dark to navigate safely among trees. The sky's a mottled grey overhead, distantly roiling with high-up wind. Rain spits and then relents. It doesn't last on the pavement.

  The hills around me are dark and looming. The feeling is at once imposing and cozy. I don't know how else to explain it. I love to huddle down in the lee of a big dark hill, in the shadow of a mossy moorside as it gets darker and dimmer until it's nothing but a hulking silhouette against the sky. A while ago, Sam and I camped out on The Calf in the Howgills, deep down by an abandoned sheepfold in a pathless gully. I reckoned that no one would ever find us there by the beckside; and then lived to regret the long climb back up out of the gully in the morning.

  

  

  

  I follow the dark road back towards the caravan park. I pass a door in a low wall, and a cemetery by a church with a spire, and a scarecrow with a white beard in a chair. I hold my phone in my hand so I can illuminate the torch if a car comes trundling past. By the gate leading back to the park, a pair of girls chatter and giggle and dive into a hedge. Ghyll barks at them.

  

  Walking Ghyll Lake District

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  Thursday, 25 Jun 2026 9:15 pm

  Hot weather

  Slow week in hot weather. When Ghyll and I go out the sun is stifling. Something blunt and bludgeoning about the sun on a hot day in northern climes: in Florida the sun has sharp canines and so nearly everywhere is airconditioned to the hilt to prevent you coming apart; but in Britain the sun grinds you between its molars whether you’re indoors or outdoors, only letting up around 9pm when it finally sets.

  

  There’s a dry, earthy, summery smell in the field. Clover mixed with dust stirred up on the hot breeze. Sun shining on clouds in the far distance, colossal in the haze. The grass on the side of the path looks a little languid.

  

  

  On the way back I pause in the shade of an ash tree. A newish fence leads off on one side, and a series of weatherworn posts tied by barbed wire on the other. I can hear the A19 but I can’t see it. From where I’m standing it could be hundreds of years ago. Except that I’m picking up Ghyll’s poo using a biodegradable baggie, and sidestepping a corroded can of John Smith’s.

  

  

  Last time.

  Walking Ghyll Summer

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  Thursday, 18 Jun 2026 10:14 pm

  Summer

  June is ripe and we've moved past the flush of summer into the golden days. By which I guess I mean that notwithstanding the muscular hogweed, all of the spring flowers have been and gone and what remains are flush green leaves and withered buds and the satanic knots of juvenile thistles like black metal band logos. I regret not taking any pictures of them.

  The ground is baked hard and the cars driving back and forth to the fishing pond kick up great clouds of dust. Fickle summer showers don't make much of a dent in the plate armour of the little trods round the field at the end of Moor Lane, but they do soak the clover and the grass and consequently my feet. Ghyll seems listless in the sunshine.

  

  

  

  I learned what a "mackerel sky" is the other day, and then Ghyll and I saw one basically right away. Apparently they're harbingers of weather change? True to the lore, when I let Ghyll out for a wee right before bed, I found the paving in the backyard wet and muggy and warm, and I was transported instantly to the Club Med in Ixtapa, Zihuatanejo, and the warm, humid room where we stayed with the dew collecting on everything for a gecko's midnight tipple.

  

  Ghyll Walking Summer Nature watching

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  Friday, 5 Jun 2026 6:45 pm

  Walking Ghyll, 5 June

  Writing these is cathartic, and also is a reason to stop and look at the trees so I can do environmentalist virtue signalling on my blog that I suspect very few people read.

  In the field, Ghyll bounds amid big heaps of clover, thick and dense and cream and pink. The bees are out, and the little gnats and flies that feed on pollen, and at one point Ghyll even chases a little brown butterfly.

  

  

  

  On our walk yesterday Sam and I spent half an hour looking up trees on Google Lens, distinguishing alder from beech from elm from cherry. Now I notice that all of the cherry trees on Moor Lane look really raggedy, with holes chewed in their leaves and brown fringes and lichen caking their spindly branches. There are two tall sycamores overhanging the path, though, and the shade they cast in the lateday sun is delightful.

  

  Walking Ghyll

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