Wild camping

The laws on walking in Scotland and England are radically different; they mirror the differing land uses and histories of both countries. England tends to be much more heavily populated with heavier land use.


One of the things I hate is having to divert off a trail to head to official campsites or B&Bs, especially if I am carrying all my camping gear. Worse, some campsites charge £20 or more for a single person with a tent and no car. This is wildly extortionate.


Therefore it is often tempting to wild camp instead; to find somewhere out of the way and put my tent up as near to the trail as possible. And so I do. The problem is, though, that I rarely get a good night's sleep whilst wild camping. I go to sleep worried about someone coming along and turfing me off the land or worse (having an active imagination can have downsides), and wake up early, wanting to get away before a farmer comes along with his shotgun.


Despite these fears, I have never had a problem, and have never once been told to 'get orf me land'.  Indeed, once a Yorkshire farmer actually invited me in for a lovely (and massive) cooked breakfast. There are several reasons for this: I always try to camp in as hidden a place as possible (despite having a bright yellow tent); I never leave anything scattered around and put all my belongings in my tent, and I never, ever, camp where this is livestock. As you can imagine, it sometimes takes me a while to find a good camping spot, especially in lowland areas.


For these reasons, I would love for wild camping to become legal in England and Wales. Of course, there would have to be caveats and restrictions that gave landowners some security. Scotland has recently clarified the laws on wild camping. The new rules are (reproduced from the Mountaineering Council of Scotland):

Camping lightweight, in small numbers, for only 2 or 3 nights in any one place on any land where access rights apply is also a right. But to help limit problems for local people and land managers, use common sense and avoid enclosed fields of crops and animals, keep away from buildings and roads. If there's no alternative seek the owner's approval. Wherever you camp, Leave No Trace.

Which all seems reasonable, and would be applicable to England and Wales as well. Gardens would have to be added as a restriction, and I would also add 'out of reasonable view of houses' and 'no camp fires'. Risk of pollution by human waste would also have to be addressed.


A downside would be the effect on the local economy. Many B&Bs in rural areas rely on the outdoor trade, and this would necessarily reduce the numbers. However, I would guess that the number of people willing to wild camp would be dwarfed by the number of ramblers who book into B&B's each weekend. Additionally, even wild campers need to find somewhere to wash and shower occasionally.


Perhaps (and I am loathe to say this), we could even have a licence to wild camp. To get this, you would have to complete a course about how to camp responsibly. Only then can you take advantage of the wilds. This is probably a non-starter, and could well be unnecessary.


I know that, however responsible I personally may be, that others will not. Someone will always abuse laws, and this is why camping has been banned on some areas of the West Highland Way. So, could a wild camping law in England and Wales work?

Three heroes

What do the locomotive cow-catcher, Lord Byron's daughter, and the standardised screw thread all have in common?

Answer, the first computer.

And all three involved heroes of mine.

Firstly, the easy connection. The locomotive cow-catcher was one of the less well-known inventions of a certain Charles Babbage. Anyone who knows about the history of computing (or has been to London's Science Museum) will recognise the name. Charles Babbage designed the first computer, the mechanical Analytical Engine.

The connection with Lord Byron's daughter? Her name was Ada Lovelace, and she wrote a mathematical description of the Analytical Engine, in the process becoming the first ever computer programmer. Her fame is entrenched in the fact that Ada, a computer language used by the military and others, was named after her.

Then the third connection? What does the standardised screw thread have to do with Babbage and Ada Lovelace? At first sight, nothing. The standardised screw thread is something that we take for granted nowadays; we expect a nut and bolt to fit together well enough. Yet nothing was further from the truth in the early nineteenth century. You could go to a local blacksmith and get a 1/2" nut and bolt, but the pitch and depth of the thread could be very different from those made in the next town. This was of little relevance until the start of the nineteenth century, when the industrial revolution required precise engineering.

One man, Joseph Whitworth, saw this problem, and in 1841 came up with a very simple idea: a standardised screw thread, which became known as the 'Whitworth' standard. He not only had the idea, but also designed and manufactured machines capable of making them and other high-tolerance parts. In the process he made a personal fortune and started an engineering colossus - the Whitworth company.

The Whitworth standard was later replaced by metric threads, but you can still find Whitworth nuts and bolts in the strangest places - for instance the thread that attaches a camera to a tripod.

So what is the connection with Babbage and Lovelace? Whitworth spent some time working for engineer Joseph Clement. While at Clement's workshop he helped with the abortive manufacture of the Difference Engine. The parts of the Difference Engine required unheard-of tolerances, and the failure to mass-produce the parts was one reason it failed. It is utterly conceivable that Whitworth's work was a response to all that he had learnt working for Clement.

Two replica Difference Engines have been made; one is visible in the Science Museum. John Graham-Cummings has launched Plan 28, a project to actually build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. It is an ambitious, some say impossible project; but I have pledged my £10.

If you want to see Babbage and Lovelace in cartoon form, then the Sydney Padua's excellent 2D Goggles is a muse-see. I am just waiting for her to include Whitworth in cartoon form.

Affordable unmanned aerial drones

It may have been noted that I have a deep love of both engineering and technology. For this reason, I would like to bring some attention to the Parrot AR Drone. This is an unmanned helicopter comprising four rotating blades in a square that is suitable for both indoors and outdoors use.

There is some really cool stuff in the specifications. It has two cameras, one downward-facing and the other forward-facing; it can use the downward-facing camera to automatically maintain a position, even in breezes. It can be driven from an iPhone, iPad or IPod Touch. You can even dogfight multiple numbers of them.

Finally, the code is open source, allowing you to alter it as you see fit.

It is an amazing device. Just watch the videos on the website to see some of the things that it can do.

There is one problem, however: because it is currently driven by Apple devices, you cannot record the video that the drone transmits. You can watch, but not record, which really reduces the usefulness of the device. This is apparently due to Apple not having authorised this function. I hope that this problem will be resolved when the controlling application gets ported to non-Apple platforms.

Of course, this is little more than a toy, especially with the short battery life. Yet the technology is suitably impressive, and can only improve.

Pushing the limits of the possible

Rolls-Royce powered Airbus A380's have been in the news over the last week after a suspected fire caused an uncontained engine failure during a Quantas flight.

However, Boeing have also suffered a significant setback. On Tuesday, one of their flight-test 787s had to make an emergency landing when smoke entered the main cabin. The fire caused the primary flight instruments and auto-throttle to fail. Emergency chutes were deployed after landing to allow the 42 engineers on board to evacuate. Fortunately, no-one was injured during the incident.

This can only be seen as a significant setback to Boeing. Rumours had already been circulating about a further delay to the 787 entering service, and a fire that causes the primary flight instruments to fail can only add pressure to the schedule. Whilst this plane was probably highly instrumented, and therefore non-standard, any fire will have to be thoroughly investigated before flight tests can continue.

Both Rolls Royce and Boeing are pushing the limits of the possible with their products. The reliability of a modern jet engine is amazing given the conditions under which they have to perform. When failures happen (as they do very infrequently), most of the time they do not put the aircraft at risk.

Boeing are facing equivalent technological challenges with the 787. The 787 is a fairly aggressive design, using new materials and techniques to create a passenger plane that is a generational jump from any other flying. This has been the cause of most of the nearly three-year delay that they have already faced.

I wish both Rolls Royce and Boeing the best of luck in finding - and fixing - the problems they are facing.

The Dowland Landslips

A Jurassic wilderness

Sencan and I did a walk from Charmouth to Seaton on Saturday, following the South West Coast Path westwards across the border from Dorset into Devon, along part of the Jurassic Coast.

It was a superb walk, and one that is well worth doing. The traditional images of coastal walks are of endless, white sands, or of soaring cliffs. Yet less salubrious images also spring to my mind: endless Essex mudflats and burnt-out cars next to boarded-up houses.

One image that does not spring to mind, especially in respect to coasts, is woodland. Trees block views and can, after a while, feel endless and oppressive. The second part of Saturday's walk between Lyme Regis and Seaton passed through an area called the Dowland Landslips, an amazing and possibly unique stretch of the British coastline.

Sencan and yet another climb

It is hard to find anywhere on the south coast that is unspoilt, yet the Dowlands Landslips offer six miles of walking that most matches that description. You cannot go down to the sea, or up the cliffs inland, meaning that your only way out lies ahead, or back the way you came.

The area was formed by a series of landslips down to the sea. On Christmas Day, 1839 an estimated 800 million tons of rock fell in one such slip.

The resultant landscape is stunning; large chunks of rock stick jaggedly out of the ground, and in places waves of undulating rock lead down towards the sea. There are also obvious signs of more recent, smaller slips. This geological instability has stopped any development of the area, and wildlife has taken over. The path can be hard to walk, and is constantly climbing and falling, if only be a few feet at a time. The clay was slippery on Saturday, a fact made worse by the carpet of brown and orange leaves underfoot.

Aview out to sea from the landslips

Despite this, it was a superb stretch of path. The sea bursts into view unexpectedly, offering tantalising glimpses of deep blue water. At other times the only indication of the sea is the distant sound of crashing waves. This wonderful area sometimes seems like something out of Jurassic Park - you would not be surprised to come face-to-face with a dinosaur. It is a surprisingly hard but ultimately rewarding walk.

St Pancras station

I recently found myself in St Pancras station, the first time I have been there for over ten years.

I spent hours at this station whilst I was at university, waiting for trains back to my native Derby. Back then the station exemplified faded grandeur: the glass in the magnificent roof was dirty and jaded, and the brickwork was covered in a patina of grime. Yet it was a magical place, much more suitable for the boundary between reality and fantasy in Harry Potter than the adjacent King's Cross. In some ways the dirt and grime suited the structure: the Victorian dream brought down to a firm twentieth-century base.

The change was startling.

It has been radically altered to become the London terminus of the Channel Tunnel rail link; the undercroft has been opened out and the roof cleaned and painted a magnificent eggshell blue. I wandered around, utterly captivated.

When the plans for the new international terminal were announced I was dismayed - the magnificent arched overall roof was being extended with a flat roof to cater for the longer Eurostar trains. I was keen for the extension to be in a similar style to the existing roof instead of the more industrial looks of the extension.

I am pleased to say that I was wrong; the different styles actually complement each other. The changes within the train shed - including the opening out of the undercroft - have improved the facilities massively. George Gilbert Scott's stunning High Victorian Gothic hotel is also being extended and reopened as a hotel and flats.

British Rail wanted to demolish St Pancras in the 1960s; a campaign led by John Betjemen eventually prevented that fate. Thank God this architectural gem survived to be reused.

Another coastal walker

Military helicopter pilot Matthew Brown is currently walking 10,500 miles around the coastline of Britain and Ireland to raise money for Help For Heroes. Details can be found on the bmycharity website, and he has an active twitter feed. Apparently he has already raised over £500,000.

He is planning to finish late next year, and walking up to 35 miles a day. He set off from Hull on the 28th June and is currently in Cornwall. An article about him can be found on the Colchester Daily Gazette website.

It will be an amazing feat. If he is walking every day without taking days off, then it is possible that he could break John Westley's record for the longest continuous walk in Britain - 9,500 miles.

This has been a bumper year for coastal walkers, with at least five people having done all or parts of England, Scotland and Wales, and another three people having started sectional walks. I thought it was a busy year in 2003, when three of us were doing it!