5 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS MONTH
1 Lakeland forest is fit for a king
Anyone who’s walked in Borrowdale will probably know it rains a lot in this Cumbrian valley; in fact, it’s the wettest inhabited place in England. But those drops nourish the country’s largest surviving fragments of temperate rainforest and 721 hectares have just been designated a National Nature Reserve. This fairytale world of twisted oaks and silvery birches, wrapped with moss and sprouting with ferns, is the latest in the King’s Series of NNRs and a key goal is to improve access. The rain might be good for you too. Derek Brockway, aka BBC’s Weatherman Walking, recently reported on research by Dr Niek Buurma of Cardi University into the negatively charged ions created by moving water: ‘There are quite a lot of scientific studies that suggest that inhaling these negative ions has a positive eect on
your health.’
2 e coolest candidate is…
The news is full of Sunak and Starmer, but a recent presidential poll in Iceland almost had a glacier for a candidate. Dr Angela Rawlings founded the campaign to get icy Snaefellsjökull on the ballot, to ‘amplify the voices of those most aected by the climate emergency’. The glacier arguably fulfilled the criteria to run – at least 35 years old, citizen of Iceland, no criminal record – but failed to garner the necessary 1500 signatures to support its nomination. Next time maybe!
THERE’S NO BETTER WAY TO SPEND THE DAY
It’s hard to improve on a summer walk 3 along the Cornish coast – unless you add a good pub. Coastal
Pub Walks: South Cornwall by Fiona Barltrop (who has written hundreds of gorgeous routes for
Country Walking) does just that, featuring 10 circular walks to top hostelries along the South West Coast Path, with OS maps and clear directions in a handy pocket-sized book. Out in July, £6.99, see cordee.co.uk
4 You can travel in time (Pt I)
From Stonehenge to Skara Brae, Britain’s landscape is famously rich with historic sites, but a recent project shows how much is still out there to discover. For the latest Deep Time mission by DigVentures, 1000 volunteers were trained as ‘Pastronauts’ to analyse satellite and LiDAR images in search of ancient features. They studied 200 square miles of the Peak District, Northumberland and Dorset (below) and found over 12,000 undiscovered sites including Bronze Age burial mounds, Roman roads and abandoned medieval villages. Field investigations will follow and a new project launches in August, this time training ‘Futurenauts’ to assess Earth Observation data for habitats and ecosystems. Find out more at digventures. com/projects/deep-time/
5 You can travel in time (Pt II)
Also walking you through history is a new map which lets you slide back through 6000 years to view battles, rulers, people and kingdoms around the world, and explore a series of historic maps. TimeMap.org has been developed in partnership with the David Rumsey Map Collection, which began in the 70s after Rumsey’s car broke down in Oregon’s Owyhee Canyonlands and he spent four days walking the wilderness with only a 1:250,000 mile map to help him. It now numbers over 200,000 items; you can see over 130,000 online at davidrumsey.com