The forecast said cloud base 600 metres and it was not lying. We left Edale in bright, unhelpful sunshine and walked into grey about twenty minutes above Upper Booth.
\nJacob's Ladder is a staircase argument you have with yourself. It is not long. It is not technical. It simply keeps going, and the view that normally repays it was, today, the inside of a cloud.
\nOn the plateau the thing nobody tells you is how quickly the ground stops helping. Kinder is a maze of peat groughs — channels cut two or three metres deep, all of them looking identical, none of them running where you'd like. In clear weather you navigate off the edge and the tors. In cloud you navigate off a bearing and a count of your own paces, and you discover exactly how much you trust both.
\nWe got it right for about a kilometre and then wrong by a hundred metres, which on Kinder means climbing out of a grough you didn't mean to enter and re-taking the bearing while trying not to sound rattled.
\nThe Downfall announced itself by sound before sight. Not much water, but enough, and the updraught doing its trick of throwing the whole fall back over the lip in a fine drift. Two other walkers appeared out of the murk going the other way, said the single syllable that passes for conversation up there, and vanished again.
\nDown by Grindslow Knoll the cloud broke for about ninety seconds and the whole valley opened underneath us — fields, the railway line, a train going somewhere — and then closed again like someone had shut a door.
\nSeven hours, twenty-one kilometres, one wrong grough. Boots still drying.
", "date_published" : "2026-08-13T23:00:00Z", "id" : "https://selfpubli.sh/examples/field-notes/posts/kinder-scout-in-low-cloud.html", "summary" : "The forecast said cloud base 600 metres and it was not lying. We left Edale in bright, unhelpful sunshine and walked into grey about twenty minutes above Upper Booth.", "title" : "Kinder Scout in low cloud", "url" : "https://selfpubli.sh/examples/field-notes/posts/kinder-scout-in-low-cloud.html" }, { "content_html" : "An unpopular position, stated plainly: the hills are better in bad weather.
\nNot dangerous weather. There is nothing romantic about being blown off a ridge, and anyone who tells you otherwise has been lucky rather than skilled. I mean the ordinary bad — the low grey days, drizzle that never becomes rain, wind that makes you walk at a slight angle for six hours.
\nThree reasons.
\nThe first is that you get the place to yourself. On a blue Saturday in August, Mam Tor has a queue. In horizontal drizzle it has you, a trig point, and a crow that looks personally insulted.
\nThe second is that bad weather makes a landscape legible. Sun flattens everything into a postcard. Cloud moves, and as it moves it reveals things in sequence — a wall, then the field the wall belongs to, then the shape of the valley that explains why the wall is there at all. You learn the bones of a place faster in poor visibility than in good.
\nThe third is harder to defend but truer than the other two: it changes what you're doing. A clear day is sightseeing. A grim one is just walking, and walking without a view is when the thinking happens. Every useful idea I have had in the last three years arrived somewhere between hour two and hour four of a day I would not have chosen.
\nThe counter-argument is obvious and I accept it. Sometimes you want the view. Sometimes you have driven ninety minutes and would like to see a hill rather than infer one.
\nBut if you only go out when it's fine, you'll go out about eleven times a year in this country, and you'll never learn what your waterproof is actually like.
", "date_published" : "2026-08-01T23:00:00Z", "id" : "https://selfpubli.sh/examples/field-notes/posts/the-case-for-the-worst-weather.html", "summary" : "An unpopular position, stated plainly: the hills are better in bad weather.", "title" : "The case for the worst weather", "url" : "https://selfpubli.sh/examples/field-notes/posts/the-case-for-the-worst-weather.html" }, { "content_html" : "They are Italian, they were expensive in 2017, and they have been resoled three times.
\nThe first resole was at four years, which felt premature and wasn't — I had worn the heel block down at an angle from walking too much road between hills. The second was at six. The third was in March, and the cobbler in Levenshulme held them up to the window, turned them over, and said the uppers would outlast me if I kept the leather fed, which I have decided to take as a compliment about the boots.
\nThe arithmetic is dull and completely convincing. Boots, once: a lot. Three resoles: rather less than one replacement pair. Nine years of walking, and the only part that has ever failed is the part designed to.
\nWhat surprised me is not the durability. It's that they got better. A boot that has been on your foot for nine years is not a boot any more, it's a cast of your foot with a Vibram sole attached. I have never had a blister in them. I have had blisters in three pairs of trainers bought since.
\nThe modern alternative is a shoe that weighs a third as much, dries in an hour, grips better on wet rock, and is landfill in two seasons because it's bonded rather than stitched and cannot be resoled by anyone at any price.
\nI am not going to pretend that's a straightforward trade. The light ones really are better on a fast summer day, and I own a pair.
\nBut there's something worth noticing about a thing you can maintain. You end up in a relationship with it. You feed the leather in October. You notice the heel going. You take them to a man in Levenshulme who has opinions. None of that is available to you with a bonded shoe, and I don't think the difference is only sentimental.
", "date_published" : "2026-07-18T23:00:00Z", "id" : "https://selfpubli.sh/examples/field-notes/posts/nine-years-of-the-same-boots.html", "summary" : "They are Italian, they were expensive in 2017, and they have been resoled three times.", "title" : "Nine years of the same boots", "url" : "https://selfpubli.sh/examples/field-notes/posts/nine-years-of-the-same-boots.html" }, { "content_html" : "Not every walk needs a summit. This one is flat, it is eight kilometres there and back, and the whole thing runs beside a canal.
\nThe Huddersfield Narrow climbs out of Marsden through a staircase of locks and then stops climbing, because at Standedge it goes into a hole in the Pennines and stays there for three miles. The tunnel is the longest, deepest and highest canal tunnel in the country, and it was dug by men lying on their backs in the dark with candles.
\nYou can walk to the portal in under an hour. There's a visitor centre, a café doing a decent job of a flapjack, and a boat that takes people in on certain days. I have never been in. I go to stand at the mouth of it, which is free and, I'd argue, better.
\nWhat gets me every time is the temperature. On a warm day the tunnel breathes cold air out at you — a steady, slightly damp draught that has been underground for three miles and is in no hurry. You stand in a Yorkshire summer and put your hand into a different season.
\nThe walk back is the same towpath in reverse, which sounds like a failure of imagination and isn't. Canals read differently in each direction. Going up you watch the locks and the mechanism of the thing. Coming down you watch the valley, and the moor above it, and the railway on the far side going into its own tunnel a hundred metres from the canal's.
\nTwo tunnels, one hill, a hundred and fifty years apart. You can see both portals from one spot on the towpath, which is the sort of thing this country does constantly and rarely mentions.
\nFlat, short, no view to speak of. I'd do it again next week.
", "date_published" : "2026-06-27T23:00:00Z", "id" : "https://selfpubli.sh/examples/field-notes/posts/marsden-to-standedge-out-and-back.html", "summary" : "Not every walk needs a summit. This one is flat, it is eight kilometres there and back, and the whole thing runs beside a canal.", "title" : "Marsden to Standedge, out and back", "url" : "https://selfpubli.sh/examples/field-notes/posts/marsden-to-standedge-out-and-back.html" }, { "content_html" : "I use the phone. Let's start there, because this is not an argument that technology has ruined navigation.
\nThe phone is better than paper at three things, and they matter. It knows where you are, instantly and without doubt, which in poor visibility is worth a great deal. It weighs nothing extra because you were carrying it anyway. And it does not turn into papier-mâché in rain.
\nHere is what it does not do.
\nIt does not show you the whole day at once. A 1:25,000 sheet opened on a rock shows you where you've been, where you are, where you're going, and — crucially — the three places you could bail out to if the weather turns, all in one glance. A phone shows you a window roughly the size of a playing card. You can zoom out, but then you lose the detail, and you cannot have both at the same time. On paper you always have both.
\nIt does not survive being dropped on limestone, and it does not last a winter day at four degrees with the screen on.
\nAnd it does not make you look. This is the real one. Following a blue dot along a line is not navigating, it's being escorted. You arrive at the end of the day having seen the ground but not read it. Do it with a map and a compass and you are constantly checking the land against the paper — that re-entrant, that wall junction, that change of slope — and you finish the day actually knowing where you went.
\nSo: both. The map lives in the lid of the pack and comes out at every decision. The phone lives in a pocket and settles arguments.
\nThe day the phone dies, nothing changes. That is the entire point of carrying the map, and it is worth the 200 grams even on the days you never unfold it.
", "date_published" : "2026-06-08T23:00:00Z", "id" : "https://selfpubli.sh/examples/field-notes/posts/what-a-map-does-that-a-phone-doesnt.html", "summary" : "I use the phone. Let's start there, because this is not an argument that technology has ruined navigation.", "title" : "What a map does that a phone doesn't", "url" : "https://selfpubli.sh/examples/field-notes/posts/what-a-map-does-that-a-phone-doesnt.html" }, { "content_html" : "I have kept walk notes for about eleven years. Paper notebooks first, then a notes app, then — briefly and regrettably — a social platform.
\nThe platform was the mistake. Not because anyone was unpleasant; they weren't. Because four years of notes and photographs lived somewhere I did not control, in a format I could not export properly, arranged by an algorithm that had opinions about which walk mattered. When I tried to get it all back I got a zip file of images with numeric filenames and none of the text.
\nSo: a website. Plain HTML on a server I rent for a few pounds a month. Nothing clever. No comments, no newsletter, no analytics — I genuinely do not want to know how many people read this, because the moment I know, I will start writing for the number.
\nThe posts are generated on my phone and uploaded over SFTP. If the app I use to do that disappears tomorrow, the site keeps working, because it is only files. That was the requirement.
\nWhat goes here: walks, mostly in the Peak and the South Pennines because that's what's an hour away. Weather, because it is the actual subject of walking in England. Occasional kit, only when a thing has been used long enough to have an opinion about.
\nWhat doesn't: routes as GPX, because there are better places for that, and I'd rather you looked at a map.
\nThere's an RSS feed if you want it. That's the whole of the audience strategy.
", "date_published" : "2026-05-29T23:00:00Z", "id" : "https://selfpubli.sh/examples/field-notes/posts/starting-this.html", "summary" : "I have kept walk notes for about eleven years. Paper notebooks first, then a notes app, then — briefly and regrettably — a social platform.", "title" : "Starting this", "url" : "https://selfpubli.sh/examples/field-notes/posts/starting-this.html" } ], "title" : "Field Notes", "version" : "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1" }