News and Updates

Dawn on December 21st is at 8.23am in West Yorkshire, late enough to allow even those out the night before to join in the winter solstice celebrations. I have been invited to join a large group of Calder Valley fellrunners “aiming to see if Chris Goddard is right about the sun rising out of the Miller’s Grave on the Winter Solstice”. There is not a little pressure here, but I feel confident enough that I won’t be lynched if it turns out to be an erroneous claim.

The West Yorkshire Woods had been out all of a week when my friend Mark looked at it and remarked ‘I see you haven’t found the cross in Tinker Bank Wood.’ I thought I had, but it turns out I was wrong. A few days later I explored the overgrown corner of the wood he’d specified and, sure enough, I found an obvious cross base covered in moss. I felt like saying, ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me earlier?’ – after all we’d been out exploring Tom Bell’s Cave together not long before – but of course there are hundreds of sites I still don’t know about in the woods and moors I claim to have mapped to the point of exhaustion.