First Ever Visit to Creswell Crags

With a spot of time off work my plans to do something interesting and adventurous haven't really come to anything  before now due to exhaustion, and this has been frustrating.

I was going to sleep out  under the stars the last couple of nights to test some of my camping gear, but it has rained. Pity, I would love to have done a little micro adventure like that this week. Might yet still do so, cold temps or not.

The powers that be behind micro adventuring are always saying "oh just head up the nearest hill and do it" - easy enough if you are in commuter belt Surrey but not in a town like this. I don't know if I'd feel safe sleeping out alone anywhere near here.

So, today, I woke up early and headed out to Cresswell Crags, a gorge on the Notts / Derbyshire border and a ballache to get to by train despite the fact it is only 20 miles away as the crow flies; it is more like 40 by rail.

It is essentially a gorge that contains caves that contain signs of prehistoric human occupation going back to Neanderthals 60,000 years ago through various other human cultures going back to about 15,000 years ago. There are axe heads, animal skulls such as hyena and lynx (!!!) and most importantly the only cave art to be ever found in the UK, and the so called Ochre Horse, an etching of a horse on bone and the only pre-historic so called "portable" drawing of an animal ever found in Britain.

I certainly enjoyed being outside in the fresh air today, maybe there is something to the suggestion I read that being near oxygen producing trees creates a feeling of wellbeing. Although they don't when I'm trying to draw the bloody things- my sketch of the crags I did today is unpublishably bad.

It is a dramatic setting and free to visit, but to actually go in one of the caves is pretty expensive. I contented myself with making a couple of circuits of the crags, and having a cup of tea in the cafe, watched by a great tit who came to sit on the balcony edge, attracted by the rustle of free posh biscuit wrapper.

Plenty of wildflowers here, comfrey was very abundant and much enjoyed by the common carder bees present in numbers - they are always the commonest bumble on the wing late in the season.

Enjoy the dramatic rockscapes!

Si

The Harnessing of Geo-Thermal Energy

This is a subject that usually rises to the upper reaches of my mind whenever I hear climate-change sceptics (or septics, some might call them) or anti wind farm folk going off on one about renewable energy.

The generation of almost limitless power from the seething mass of magma that our continents float lazily upon.

It's the no lose renewable option. No house price depressing windmills or car melting solar panels; no worry about off shore wind farms scything migrating birds out of the sky, or tidal power generators interfering with the movement of fish. You just dig a pipe a few thousand metres into the ground, pour some water down it, and wait for it to flash off into steam and rise up some other pipes to drive a turbine. Nothing to see. Nothing to crash into. Nothing to make your "As seen on Escape to the Country" posh village home lose a few quid off its value.

Geo-Thermal energy is essentially nuclear in origin; fission reactions in Earth's core heat the molten mantle and drive things like volcanoes and hot springs. But this is a clean form of energy, water goes in, steam comes out. No carbon production or geiger clacking waste to dispose of. And the energies involved are so much higher than other renewables.

All this is for the future of course, reliable sources of shallow depth geo-thermal heat are not common. But imagine what could happen when we develop the technology to drill twenty miles down? The power is virtually without end. The science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon foresaw this as the future of the Earth in his classic "Last and First Men" where he wrote of the evolution of humanity over trillions of years.

The potential is there. As a science fiction lover, and writer myself I love wondering where it could end up. I suppose there are hazards too, relating to seismic activity and instabilities in the Earth's crust. People might fear that somewhere like Basildon will end up under ten feet of bubbling lava. But in the end, it will be worth it.

Si

The Pros and Cons