Heaven and Hell

A 10 minute drive out of Sheffield brings you to the Derwent Valley. The area around this side of Sheffield is covered with beautiful dams that are used for supplying drinking water to most of the midlands. On Saturday it was a perfect day for the long (13 mile) walk around the top 2 lakes in the valley - the Derwent and Hewden dams. Can you believe that this lies between Sheffield and Manchester - 2 of this county's most industrialised city's?

As you walk around, there are lots of tell tale signs of the town that was built to house the navvies who built the dams and their families. Apparantly, navvies could be very difficult to control, and letting them bring their family to live here had a big calming influence on them - except when they had been drinking. If you enlarge the picture below, you can read what happened to 2 of the landlords of the "canteen"!!

The dams were used by Barnes Wallace to help him develop the bouncing bomb in World War 2. You can get helicopter rides which fly you over the dams (playing the Dambusters Theme tune!!) from a nearby hotel. Whilst we were there, an old Dehavilland Dakota (I was reliably informed by my live in WW2 expert) came over the moors and flew down the valley - it looked brilliant and it made my day! We also got a fly-by by the Red Arrows - I just love it when the Red Arrows show up out of the blue!!

The scenery all around the dams is truly spectacular - and will look more so in a couple of weeks time when all the leaves turn golden.

The water is faily low. I know some of you have had a lot of rain this year, but we seem to have missed it thankfully (after the deluge and floods of 2007 and 2008)

We had a great picnic spot, and stopped to paddle in one of the rivers that feeds the dams.

The sky was clear blue and the temperature was perfect for such a long spectacular walk. I couldn't think of any where I would rather be on such a great day. It felt like heaven.

On Sunday we travelled north west to Preston to visit the University open day as it has a course that is of interest to the dancing queen. She fancy's doing Media Production so that she can work making TV programs - ideally for MTV. The Uni wasn't bad, and the course looked ok. The druggies and drunks that hung about between the halls of residence and the main campus were of great concern to me, as was the lecturer who gave us the talk and tour. He was head of the department and hubby said it looked and sounded like he had spent Saturday night on the real ale and smoking waccy baccy . He had nothing prepared and couldn't even work his PC or TV. Ah well, I hope that Salford inspires me more next week.

We finished at the Uni at 1.30pm, and as we were only 15 miles from Blackpool, I thought it might be a great idea to go and have a stroll along the prom prom prom, and then stay for the famous "Illuminations" which get switched on at 7.30pm.

Now I have some really lovely memories of Blackpool. When I was a little girl, we holiday'd there every year. I remember having great fun in the Pleasure Beach - seeing Cilla Black and Jimmy Clitheroe (so showing my age here!!!) at the end of the North Pier (every year that we went!!!), watching the ballroom dancing at the Tower Ballroom etc etc. I know that it went down hill rapidly when families decided to go to Spain instead in the early 1980's. I last went to Blackpool 20 years ago when hubby and I first got together, and whilst we did have a nice day then, it was turning into just a "Party Town" and not very appealing. Well, I can report that it has gotten much much worse. Its dire and dirty and crumbling and I couldn't find even one thing that I thought was remotely ok about the place. The young man thought we would have a problem killing time before the lights came on and he was right. We walked from the South Pier, up to the North Pier and back again and promptly got back in the car and went home. The young man said that you can tell how bad a place is when McDonalds looks like the best restaurant in town. The place is like hell.

We did laugh at the amount of Hotels, Self Catering Flats etc that had the word "Luxury" in the description of their establishments when they clearly were anything but!