Bombshell

You know, I can't help but feel that people out in the country are taking ever more drastic lengths to keep walkers off their property these days. Once, the only danger a dedicated rambler would have had to face during their perambulations was a ruddy-faced simpleton with a tweed cap and double-barrelled shotgun charging at them, bellowing GEDDORF MOY LAHND. Now it seems that things are rather more explosive. "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" has been vetoed in favour of the punchier "bombs away". And God forbid that Jeremy Clarkson should get wind of this; the Isle Of Man will be littered with dismembered corpses.

Anyway...joking aside, I finally got round to climbing Clougha Pike today, and was greeted with the delightful discovery that the army used it in the past for the general purposes of blowing stuff up. There's nothing like the revelation that you may shortly be scattered liberally across the surrounding countryside to wake you up in the morning.

So, the climb up was a cautious one, and involved scanning the ground quite a lot before putting my feet down. It's a little like looking for dogshit, albeit dogshit that could blow your foot off. The Pike's a great (if incredibly windy) place to go, and the views are amazing. It's also very lonely and desolate, and unmistakably the sort of place that someone would go to dispose of a body, if they didn't have a furnace handy, or if the canal was full. Stuck on my own, I began to worry less about unexploded ordnance and more that I was going to interrupt someone in the process of digging a shallow grave on the fellside. The idea gripped me, and I was confronted with the terrifying scenario of being chased across an abandoned minefield by a deranged killer (an image which becomes oddly hilarious if you picture it to the backdrop of Khachaturian's Sabre Dance).

I'm not sure why I became so suddenly convinced that the Pike was a wretched place of evil and wrongdoing; possibly because you never hear of anything good happening on top of fells and moors. You hear of people dying on them, or getting trapped on them, or madmen who've escaped the asylum roaming free on them, but not quite so many carnivals or beer festivals happening on them. Plus, a mate of mine once wrote a short story where a couple of fell-walkers stumble across a village populated entirely by giant man-eating lobsters. Stuff like that just puts you right off.

All in all, I was glad to reach home this evening without encountering any bombs or lobsters. And there's not many a day that you can conclude your blip with that sentence.