Upper Rivington & Anglezarke Reservoirs 10/05/14

Even as a n adopted Yorkshireman, it seems a terrible and unnecessary cliche to perpetuate the theory that it always rains in Lancashire, because being on the windward side of the Pennines really should make so much difference, but the sad truth to me seems to be that I cannot coordinate a visit to my Sister and her family with an incidence of good weather. This has been a pretty decent year so far, no particularly rough weekends for weather, and mid May should manage to look decently clear, but the first rotten weekend of the year comes down to scupper my plan for a trip to Pendle Hill, and I'm already getting the feeling that this particular destination is going to prove somewhat difficult to obtain. Still, circumstances for my visit play against me, with my nieces having weekend morning activities which take them out of circulation, and they do enjoy their cycling and swimming trips, and my Sis and I aren't doing ourselves any favours when both mornings are needed to sleep off the drinks from the previous night, so the excursions plan for the weekend has to be scaled back, to fit in a stretch between the rain showers.

Upper Rivington & Anglezarke Reservoirs  7.5 miles


Anglezarke Reservoir, south

So, our Sunday Morning secondary walk turns out to be the Saturday afternoon main feature, and it'll be just my sister and myself setting out from the familiar spot at Rivington House barn at 1.05pm, and that means we will be going at a much faster clip that I usually go, and she'll be attached to her Garmin just to show up the wonders of exercise measured by GPS whilst I still favour the clock and Google maps option. We set off down the track towards the reservoirs, past the Go Ape! course which is still doing good business even on a grotty day like this, and onwards through that sort of deciduous wood which provides my favourite kind of woodland walking, wide open views among the trunks and low undergrowth, so much preferable to interactions with evergreens. Past one of this park's many carparks and onto the track by Rivington School, which has celebrated its 300th anniversary without having ever had much of a village to serve it, and then down to the road past the bowls club which has only recently discovered the economic wisdom of opening its facilities to the general public. Our path joins the edge of Upper Rivington Reservoir, constructed in the 1850s to supply water to Liverpool and Greater Manchester, just above the Horrobin embankment / road crossing that separates it from its lower partner, and we follow the road which hugs its eastern shore before turning to a rough track that ascends away from it, offering views back over Winter Hill and into the woods which have a healthy bluebell carpet. Rising to meet the looming embankment of Yarrow Reservoir, another one of the chain of eight which occupy the valleys in this corner of the West Pennines, conversations turn to Anglers and how much we dislike them, and water safety and how much respect we have for it, before our route swings left down beside the run off channel from the higher reservoir down to feed into Anglezarke Reservoir. Another one on Thomas Hawksley's grand scheme and this is certainly a good track for getting in the reservoir walking isn't it? joining just above the Knowsley embankment and following the road along the eastern shore, suddenly becoming aware of numbers of kids out in groups for the ambling, doing the DoE award perhaps, or going out on a Scouts exercise we surmise, the kind of thing that would never have appealed to us when we were 25 years younger.

Anglezarke Reservoir, north

The hard surface leads to the bottom of Moor Road, one of my Sister's least favourite cycling tracks, leading away from the water's edge and ascending steeply to the high moor on the hill above, before descending down again to the reservoir's level a mile or so further on, having offered no reason at all for the climb. I'll happily stay on the low track, observing the large embankment on the western shore, giving the odd impression of the reservoir having another bottom edge, pacing below the trees and pondering the thought that we should have taken on our active lifestyles two decades ago, indeed the advice we'd give our university vintage selves must surely be: #1 Take your course seriously; #2 Get over yourself; and #3 Join the Walking group. To fit in with our nostalgic turns, we discuss our earworm of the day which happens to be Double Trouble & the Rebel MC 'Street Tuff', proving that we still have an ear for the mostly forgotten corners of 80's cheese, I can be pretty sure that my Sister will come in very handy when I start to plan my 40th birthday disco playlist, even if it provides more entertainment in it's plotting than listening. We depart the road below the dam of High Bullough Reservoir, the oldest and smallest in the Rivington group, and we follow a path that leads beneath another glorious canopy of deciduous trees, rising high above the water's surface but offering little by way of views. Hugging the edge of the field and providing some soft going along the path, we turn to talking about the least favoured animals to encounter on our travels, and sheep are deemed dumb and careless, with geese considered the most aggressive, but in honesty it is cows that are really the worst, for they are the ones that will actually try to kill you. Descending again to a stream crossing, we swing westwards past more boy scouts to pass out of the trees and through a clutch of Gorse bushes to rise above the water again, offering a southwards perspective of the silvery ribbon beneath the increasingly slatey skies, and an increase in pace feels necessary as we move on towards the northern tip of Anglezarke reservoir. The final wood on this side is Gorsyfield wood, named to describe the preceding open spaces I'm sure, and it's another broken path downhill, with mud far deeper and slippier than you'd anticipate, and at the bottom, rejoining Moor Road we finally find the centre of operations of the Scout meeting that is sending many intrepid boys out adventuring.

Waterman's Cottage &
Anglezarke Moor

Our attention turns to the mechanics of water supply, as we cross the Goit channel that links the reservoirs at Roddlesworth, passing the Waterman's Cottage and wondering how many employees the reservoirs would have needed living on site back in the day, before crossing the Heapey Embankment at the very top end, meaning that this reservoir was a much more complicated construction job than simply flooding the valley of the River Yarrow. Move away from another clustering of boy scouts and start our return trek southward, finding that paths exist on both sides of the enclosure wall, without offering a hint of which side that the Right of way lies, so we select the one closer to the water's edge, as that's offering a fresh perspective. This path keeps getting vague and slightly rough in places, ideal when mere feet from a body of water, and just as you think that it might peter out entirely, it renews a decent surface and keeps on securely, it also offers some good views over to Anglezarke Moor, looming high over the eastern shore, and also of old quarry workings, none of which were obvious when we were on that side. We've gone a solid half mile once I've become convinced that we have missed the route of the footpath, but the path surface continues along, and I'm sure that we can find a route over to the bridleway once we get beyond Grey Heights wood, but of course no route exists over the fields so we stay at the water's edge pressing on along this path of uncertain point and provenance, I'm sure United Utilities won't object to us having a minor trespass. This is a good cue for the rain to come on at a stiff drizzle, not enough to break the spirits but enough to make the surroundings disappear in a grey mist, with Winter Hill disappearing behind a damp shroud, and our walk turns to that feeling of pacing along with wanting to talk as you go. This persists right until we are upon the Charnock Embankment, at over half a mile long, the largest of the three enclosing dams on the reservoir, which would off a clear perspective off the west if it wasn't so wet, and we plod on through the long grass until we find the path back down onto the official circuit, feeling some relief as the rain eases off and the high moors reappear into the landscape.

Upper Rivington Reservoir

Returning to paths high above the water makes perspective interesting again, and my Sister starts to feel the burn that comes with walking, as her muscles are much more attuned to cycling and running these days, and she also complains of blistering, as she seems to have had rotten luck with her choices of boots in recent years, compared to my one episode of painful blistering in my 1,000 mile odyssey (and even that didn't rub through or last more than a single day. Passing the Knowsley Embankment's western end, we join the access road that goes down the western side of Upper Rivington Reservoir, which offers some very nice houses for our residential fantasies, clearly the sort of place that would be amazing to live for two thirds of the year and utterly ghastly for the remainder, as for all our love of the countryside we wouldn't want to live in it. The track continues on, passing over the Yarrow embankment, enclosing the western edge of this reservoir, and the run off channel also goes of this way, so as not to inundate Lower Rivington reservoir in times of excess rain, and thence through the trees to the Horrobin embankment, and we follow the road back to the eastern bank as Lower Rivington reservoir has no path along its western edge, which seems like a mistake in these times of renewed outdoor exercise. Note the boundary stone half way across the dam, separating the parish claims on the waters, and then it's back to our outward track by the bowls club, and the kind of spot where crossing the road really is dicing with death, and even when hitting a path that we have already done today, we aren't immediately sure if the forks we take are the right one. They are, because we surely can't get lost in Rivington Park, and the path comes to its natural end at House Barn, at 3.35pm, just in time for tea and cake, and happy that we beat the worst of the weather by about half an hour (that comes on hard when we are in Tesco at Horwich). Altogether a decent social stretch, but a little undersized for a trip to Lancashire, so I'll have to find a free Summer weekend for doing Pendle Hill as that really does have to go down this year, and my 1,000 miles in The North won't be coming on this weekend either, but it will come on my Spring Jollies, and in the most geographically appropriate spot possible too.

 

Next on the Slate: Spring Jollies finally come around, I'm and travelling far away from my comfort zone, to three days along Hadrian's Wall!

1,000 Miles Cumulative Total: 1078.1 miles
(2014 total: 164.9 miles)

(Up Country Total: 998.7 miles)
(Solo Total: 879.7 miles)
(Declared Total: 869.9 miles)