Navigation practice - Black Hill

Out yesterday up on Black Hill and surrounding area to do a bit of nav practice, familiarise myself with the area and enjoy the sunshine. Decided to travel light - INOV8 Roclites and just a bumbag with essentials inside.

From Holme Moss mast we headed over to Wrigleys Cabin - small detour to check out a lonesome tree to the north of the path, then onwards to the ruined cabin - there's some shelter on the moor at this location, enough to get you out of the wind perhaps, depending on the direction. Issue Clough, which it overlooks, has the Pennine Way marching up it's western flank - and there were a few hikers out, heading up to Black Hill. A short time was spent looking at the map, locating features etc, then planning the route to a Sabre wreck (091051) - easy plod over to the East for about 10 minutes and we found the wreck.

Sabre wreck

From here we took a bearing to the next wreck, a Swordfish (085046). Just a short step from it Tim suddenly called a halt and silence - he was staring into the orange eyes of a short eared owl sitting on the ground....they stared for a moment then the owl took flight - absolutely amazing. Moments like that you wish you had a camera at the ready, but hey, we admired it as it flew off to the north east and will remember that sight for a long time. The Swordfish wreck just appears as a pile of metal - will have to check but it looks like it's been deliberately piled in its resting place.

Swordfish

Another bearing and heather bashing section found us at Black Hill trig - more map/feature consolidation before heading south east, first to the 576 spot height, then 559 spot height, then 521 spot height - and a lot of scattered wreckage of 2 Meteor planes on Sliddens Moss, above Meadow Clough. The GR is given as 069029 but the bits of scattered metalwork is spread over quite an area.

Keeping Crowden Little Brook below us we headed over to a nameless cluster of rocks at 076032 - not much to shelter in except a few larger boulders which would act as fairly decent wind breaks. Handy to know, and the sort of feature we had been keeping note of on this walk. From here we continued east to a waterfalls in a nameless clough - bearing noth off the top of Crowden Little Brook. Not much water around to make any of the brook look like a decent waterfall - I'm sure it looks totally transformed when it's been wet for a good period. Up and over the next ridge past 541 spot height and Tooleyshaw Moor - spotting the a grouse butt (which was also a reasonable spot of shelter) we dropped down to Heyden Brook on a really decent trod with well worn steps, jumped over the brook and up the steep bank and back to the car.

Along the route we took time to locate various features, and importantly keep working out distances and estimate timings for sections of the route. Given we were travelling light and it was perfect visibility our timings were over by a bit, but would have been pretty spot on for heavy load carrying. All good practice.