Pix Of The Day: Flower Powered B90/3* Heavy Duty
CREDITS: © Terry Smith/Interesting Trekking Scenes
MAPS: regional map; Allendale Town. Thumbnail click pops-up larger image.

This picture of a repurposed flower powered bicycle gives us an ineffable warm, fuzzy, happy feeling. We wondered if this was a universal phenomenon, or just some offbeat personal imprinting buried deep within our own psyches. At first we thought today's feature picture had been taken somewhere in the south of France. The Brooks B90/3* Heavy Duty saddle will have been instantly spotted by aficionados of vintage two wheeled HPV technology, so it has to be British.

If you were given a map of the North Pennines area (we thought the interactive version was overkill, but enjoyed the Flash dependent technology non the less), then Allendale Town lies just about where you would thumb tack it to your corkboard. In 1842 this place was calculated to be the geographical center of Great Britain, which is the island containing England, Scotland, and Wales. This was derived from taking the latitude and longitude readings on the sundial at Saint Cuthbert's Church in the Market Place. We were unable to determine who made the calculation, so the methodology must remain suspect. Why noon should be important to latitude and longtitude puzzled us: as they say in examination papers, "Discuss."

Visit Terry Smith's Interesting Trekking Scenes web site to see evidence of major industrial activity in the area's past, and to follow links to guisers with flaming tar barrels on their heads. You may think we are making some kind of impenetrable joke here, but out there on those lonely hillsides and in the remote valleys, this is what they do for entertainment. Beats TV hands down in our estimation.

The youth hostel at Ninebanks, near Hexham, has a quick photo tour that will give you a taste of the area. Mentioning tastes, we thought a nice introduction to this area would be Isaac's Tea Trail, a 36 mile circular walk commemorating local worthy Isaac Holden. If you read Isaac's story, it is worth remembering that in this part of the world coffins often had to be carried by men for many miles over rough terrain to be properly buried in consecrated ground.

The management plan for the AONB (Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty) is a hefty 2.4Mb PDF file, but one of the best of its type we have seen, and well worth the download if you are sufficiently interested, and possess the resources required. The authority for stewardship of any area (the North Pennines Partnership in this case) could look to this document as a model of presentation excellence. professional chutzpah leads us to wish they had gone the last mile and produced a fully screen configured version. If you, or your organization, need this service then please contact us for a quotation. Oops! Rampant commercialism creeping into the weblog for the first time. Hey buddy, can you spare a dime?

*We never let the truth stand in the way of a good headline: alert and knowledgeable visitors will no doubt be horrified that we have deliberately misinformed our loyal readership over the provenance of that saddle. Brooks, of course, used loop springs, not coil springs, for the front suspension of their B90/3 model. We drew the line at identifying the machine as a Pashley Courier.

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