Pootler

  Link to GPX File of the Route This ride visits the Commons and woodlands that border the higher ground around the valleys of two tributaries of the Thames; the Pangbourne and Kennet Rivers. These Commons have been the staging ground of battles, riots and demonstrations for 400 years. Starting from Theale, it heads up to the Pang Valley which it follows on the south side before descending to meet the river at the pretty village of Bucklebury. It then heads south to Bucklebury Common. Descending again, you cross the River Kennet at Thatcham and head up towards Greenham Common, infamously used as a nuclear guest-house by US air base during the cold war. You then return to the Kennet via Newbury Racecourse, and follow its towpath for 12 miles back towards Theale. Highlights are: The sites of the 1980’s anti-nuclear protests at Greenham Common, now renewed and green again but not hiding the old bomb proof bunkers and control tower. Newbury Racecourse. A na...

This is an introduction to my 'Deep Past' Series.  The task I have set myself is to produce a jargon-free summary of the origin and nature of the features of the landscape of this area, in a brief enough form to be readable on a mobile phone.  This involves many compromises. I don't wish to try your patience dear reader and that, together with a lack of screen space, means that this will be thin gruel.  I cannot pose as an expert so y ou will just have to trust that I have done some homework, mainly relying on brevity trying and sticking to mainstream explanations. If you can tell me how to improve this stuff without lengthening it, please do.  The general idea is that this series will cover the general features of the area. I will leave all finer detail to locally specific posts, most often the suggested cycling routes. The problem was always where to start.  The fact is that nearly everything we can see is the result of relatively chapters in Earth's eventful ...

In previous posts I covered the rock foundations of our hills and valleys, so now I will torture the analogy and look at the floor coverings. T his 4th post in the series starts from around 2.5 million years ago  which, in geological terms, is a distance from the present day no greater than the gaps in a country  bus timetable.  Effectively this is the  ice ages and their legacy.  It has always been the case that the constant and radical changes to the landscape and the climate over millions of years, made it hard to for a simple punter like me. to sift out simple cause and effect relationships. Now, as get closer to the present, the increasing amount of fine grained detail available makes it  even harder to simplify the story. So i f any professional paleogeologists are reading this, for the sake of your mental health, stop now.    At the point when when we left the last post, what is now South East England was still connected to Europe.  T...

Let's drag our bloodstained carcass out of the apocalyptic hole left by the second life-eradicating asteroid impact into the 'Tertiary' Period. The planet is very slowly becoming more recognisable, mercifully shorn of giant reptiles and with mammals, birds and leafy trees.  Apparently this isn't geo-politically woke terminology now and I should be giving the period the correct geo-pronoun which is (I think) the Danian Age in the Paleocene epoch in the Paleogene Period in the Cenozoic Epoch of the Phanerozoic Eon. (Point being, I am merrily skipping through around 5 of these Epochs and  20 Ages in this post and I want you to know just how much grit and gyp I am sparing you!) No quack remedy was going to cure the Planet's hangover from the Asteroid impact and the d ramatic fluctuations that had afflicted it so far, will continue. T he climate periodically morphing from icehouse to greenhouse.   T ectonic plates and the continents atop them continued to tootle  around ...

On  the seventh day, God rested. H e p ut his feet up, had a beer and took his eye of the ball. C haos ensued.  Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes really, pressure and time. (Red: The Shawshank Redemption)  Nothing of early Earth that can readily be seen in South East but I thought that I ought to acknowledge the canvas before asking you to admire the painting. There are two big things that you need to be aware of. Everything else is detail: As I am sure you know, it all started with the Big Bang some 14bn years ago which, initially at least, wasn't big and wasn't a bang. If you want an explanation try this short video:  Link : Big Bang .  In any event, i t wasn't until 4bn years later that the game kicked-off on Proto Earth. This would have been a hellish time to visit. Early Earth lacked a magnetic shield to protect it from the nasties that the sun was spewing out and l and any atmosphere to shield it from meteorites. It rotated eve...