Hard at Hawarden

This is a hard 'un!

Gosh that was hard! Good place for a trail race though - the Hawarden (pronounced 'hard un') Estate near Chester is not normally open for walkers and runners but, with special dispensation, 5K and 10K trail races now feature there twice a year - this was the winter version and, not being 100% fit, I downgraded from the 10K to the 5K. Little did I know that we would be running a good bit more than 5K thanks to several folk ahead of me who'd gone wrong toward the end - and what do we all have in common with sheep? We follow the leaders in front of us, that's what we do and complete 5.7K of running, not only that we then encounter the the sting in the tail - an uphill finish "Ooof!" (see the photo.) The one real positive of the day was that, in the absence of any serious competition, I won the over 60 category award - hooray. Vicky, following behind with Skip in the fiercely competitive canicross race, found the right route and they both thoroughly enjoyed themselves poking fun at those who'd done the extra 0.7K.

It was empty!

A trip up to Scotland for the shortest day of the year and we're not provided with much daylight for sightseeing. We were staying at Kilmartin in Argyllshire and were astonished to find that in the vicinity is one of the largest concentrations of Neolithic monuments in Europe - there are more than 800 of them within 6 miles of the village. In the gathering gloaming we explored a small selection of cairns and stone circles. There were probably many more but over the years stones have been quarried out of the cairns for walling and building, until in the 19th century the significance of them was discovered. The photo isn't mine - it was too dark for that but it shows at the entrance to an underground chamber at Nether Largie South Cairn - Vicky climbed in one end and out of the other much to Skip's puzzlement. Unlike at Stonehenge you can actually climb into and onto these ancient remains - there are no restrictions and there's no entry fee. Why would there be when there's no one up here to look? That's probably why they've remained here all these thousands of years.

Victoria Park, Glasgow - thank goodness they don't start till 9:30 am up here!

There then followed, in rapid succession, our final three parkruns of 2018. On our return from the wet wastelands up north we checked into the Victoria parkrun in Glasgow to see some nice park gates. On Christmas Day we nipped over to the Northwich parkrun to see another nice pair of park gates at Carey Park. And on the final Saturday of the year we found that Halifax parkrun was one of the hilliest in the country, the wonderfully named Shroggs Park contains just two hills but the parkrun manages to climb one of them four times and the other one three.

Merry Christmas from Northwich!