Better Living Through Railways

I'm fat.

No, please; no arguments.  I'm officially fat.  (You were going to argue, weren't you?  No?  Bastard).

After months of denial I've finally decided to do something about it.  No more bread or potatoes - I'm on the Atkins, swallowing eggs for breakfast instead of a yoghurt, which feels wrong.  No tea or dairy of any kind.  No booze.  And exercise.

My exercise options are limited; I haven't done real, proper, physical exertion since that blessed day when I stopped having to do P.E. at 16.  This is because I think spandex is the cloth of the devil, and that no-one who says their hobbies include "going to the gym" is worthy of conversation.  But I love to walk, as this blog will attest.  I can walk for miles without thought or a moment's hesitation.  So I've adopted this, the David Mitchell Workout Plan, as my program of choice.  Ok, it's not exactly going to get me a body like Daniel Craig, but so long as things stop wobbling when I run, that's fine with me.

Plus, walking enables me to visit some of the places close by I've meant to cover for the blog, but haven't got round to it.  A quiet Sunday afternoon gave me an opportunity, so I walked out towards Higher Bebington and the down Lever Causeway.

It feels odd to find such a straight road in England; no bends, no deviations.  We're so used to roads twisting back on themselves and having a sudden kink in the middle because there was a rock there in 1366 and no-one could be bothered moving it.  This road was built by Lord Lever, the soap magnate, along with a couple of ones that have fallen out of use, as a way for him to get from his home at Thorton Hough to the factory in Port Sunlight as quickly as possible.  It makes me think of him as Toad, barrelling along the road in an open topped bone shaker, shouting "poop-poop!" and pushing its engine to its limits.

There's no footpath, so walkers follow the bridleways on each side on the grass.  I was feeling quite pleased with myself for walking just this far, until a man who looked like Gandalf's older brother jogged past swathed in yellow lycra.  I secretly hoped he'd get his foot caught in a hoofprint and break a hip.  That'd learn him, the healthy bugger.  For such a well made road, the Causeway doesn't really go anywhere.  The only place this road goes is close to Storeton, and even then, it bypasses it.  I decided to go through the village, which I'd never visited before.

A minute later, I'd walked right through the village and out the other side.  It's minimal to the point of insignificance - there's just a few stone houses and farmyards, no shop, no pub, not even a church.  It was pretty enough, but I couldn't see the appeal in living here.  And I certainly couldn't see why you'd build a railway station here.

The original station on what's now the Borderlands Line, opened in 1896, was called Barnston, but in 1900 it was renamed Storeton For Barnston.  I'm not sure why.  This tiny hamlet - which must have been even tinier a hundred years ago - doesn't seem to be a suitable draw for a railway company.  I wonder if they thought the low passenger numbers were due to the name, rather than its position in the very centre of rural Wirral.

I returned to the main road, which was again without footpaths, and trudged on.  I was enjoying the lazy pace, the singularity of my presence in the countryside.  It was a bright day, but I was listening to an audiobook, Charlie Connolly's Attention All Shipping, so my mind was filled with frosty days in the Faeroe Islands.  I heartily recommend an audiobook if you're out walking - far better than another load of mp3s on your iPod.  His clambering through Icelandic storms did put my five mile walk in perspective, though; it was a good effort, but I wasn't exactly Scott of the Antarctic.

The road passed over the M53, and I took a moment to gaze down at the barrelling cars, hammering their way through the centre of the peninsula.  It all seemed so fast, so unsuited for a Sunday afternoon.  Where did they need to be at 70 miles an hour?  It just didn't seem right.

A few more twists of the lane (that's how you build a road in England, Lord Lever!) and I was at the railway crossing.  It's just a bridge now.  Apart from the fact that you're on "Station Road", you'd have no clue.

There used to be two platforms here with a low station building, but it closed in 1951.  The Borderlands Line's always wheezed along, barely managing to stay alive, so it's no surprise that they culled the underused stations quite early.  There was a goods yard too, which stayed open for another decade, but which is now just some industrial units.

Back on the bridge though, if you look hard enough, you can spot one sign there used to be something here. There are two bricks on the bridge wall - an older one at each end, with a newer type infilling between them.  In addition, the sandstone caps on top of the wall are replaced by utilitarian concrete in the centre.  This'll be where the building was once.

I left the old station site behind me.  There wasn't much to hang around for, let's be honest, and besides, it made me a bit sad: visiting the site of a dead station.  A bit ghoulish.

I was soon being tickled by the tendrils of Barnston village.  Again, I wondered why they called it Storeton for Barnston when the latter village is bigger, more interesting, and closer to the station.  It's got a church, a pub, a school, everything Storeton didn't.  It was as though someone renamed Lime Street Birkenhead (for Liverpool).  Just another example of railway company perverseness.

Even if the Borderlands Line is incorporated into Merseyrail, there are no plans to rebuild a station there.  This had seemed a bit strange to me - there's quite some distance to the next station, and there is a centre of population that could be served by it.  When I passed some people playing tennis on the court in their garden, I realised why.  Barnston is seriously rich.  No-one here would lower themselves to using public transport.  You could lay on the Royal Train for the residents here and they wouldn't bother using it.

I paused for a moment outside my favourite store on the Wirral, the Barnston Village Hat Shop.  I love that this small village is able to support a retailer selling the most pointless and unnecessary item of fashion this side of a handbag-sized chihuahua.  I didn't see a Post Office or a Co-op, but the villagers are sorted for all their fascinator requirements.

There was a pub just beyond it, the Fox & Hounds, and I thought I'd get myself a drink and recover from my trek.  I went through the first door into the pub.  Big mistake.

I'd wandered into the snug.  It was smaller than my bathroom, and rammed with locals, ruddy faced, bearded, cheery.  They stopped and looked at me as I entered, something I didn't think actually happened in real life.  I couldn't turn around and leave, not in a space that tiny, so I had to brazen it out.

And I was tripped up by my diet.  Normally I'd have ordered a pint of something brown and frothy, with a name like Old Dickerson's Mange, but instead I had to order this:

A mineral water.  A bloody mineral water.  I could feel the disdain from the locals.  I collapsed into a vacant chair, under the flatscreen showing the racing, and buried myself in my drink.  Even that was a mistake, as I began to realise that the table was probably empty because it was reserved for one of the regulars - Pete or Mick or Dave or something else dependable.

I'm sure the pub is lovely.  I'm sure if I'd wandered into the Lounge instead, I'd be singing the pub's praises - it looks marvellous from the website.  Instead I cowered under the Callaghan-era Carling Black Label clock and the pub trophies and wondered how long I could brazen it out before I died of shame.  As each new patron arrived, they chatted amiably with people they've probably know for decades about the upcoming Liverpool-Brighton match, and I became even more anxious.  Don't ever talk about football in close proximity to me.  I'm begging you.

Finally I faked a call on my mobile and left.  Yes, I actually did that.  I'm not proud - I'm more than a bit ashamed - but it seemed the only dignified way to leave the pub before I'd finished my drink.  Strange that after all that walking, this was the bit that made me sweat the most.  Shyness is a terrible affliction.

Testing the Limits of Friendship

Why are we here?

The question that has dogged humanity since the dawn of time.  The question that the greatest minds mankind has produced have wrestled with.  The question that has occupied Plato, Kant, Locke, Deep Thought.

I was grappling with the question myself, but at a much less lofty level.  I was stood in an abandoned car park in Staffordshire on a frosty Saturday morning.  Ahead of me, Ian and Robert were taking photos of empty railway tracks.

Why are we here?


The actual, simple reason was that Robert was doing another of his Station Master blogs, and Ian and I were along for the ride.  Yes, we were here in Norton Bridge voluntarily.  Probably the first people in a long time.

Norton Bridge is - and I'm going to use a technical term here - a shithole.  It's a barely-there hamlet of undistinguished local authority houses and miserable small holdings outside Stafford.  It has a red-brick church and a square of grass with some benches on it.  It has a pub, the Railway Inn, which serves food  weekday evenings but not at all on a Sunday.  It wasn't open, anyway.  There is no shop, no cafe, no village hall with roses curling round the door.

And, of course, there was the station.  It closed in 2004 when the upgrade of the West Coast main line meant providing a service here would get in the way of proper trains.  The closure was then underlined by the removal of a rotting footbridge, which left the platforms isolated in the middle of the tracks with no means of access.

Personally I think that they removed the station in a bid to make Norton Bridge disappear off the face of the earth.  Give it a few years and they'll blow up the road into the village as well and that'll be it.

We had an hour to kill until the bus out of there.  An hour.  A wander round the local streets revealed, yep, everywhere else was as drab as the village.  Some sheep showed a mild interest in us as we passed.  A man walked his dog.  There was a closed petrol station.  I contemplated suicide.

We headed back to the rusting, graffiti'd, fag burned bus shelter to wait for the bus.  Robert had planned the trip, working out the times for our visit, so naturally Ian and I turned on him.  Things then took a creepy air when he revealed he had condoms in his handbag manbag; suddenly it all seemed a bit rapey.  Ian and I pressed ourselves up against the far end of the shelter while Robert ate his sandwich.

The bus arrived, taking us away from the Straw Dogs remake we seemed to have wandered into, and carried us back to Stafford railway station.  It was built in the Sixties, with the electrification of the line, and it's quite hideous.

I'm not against the use of concrete for buildings, but it needs to be maintained.  It's not a building material that can be abandoned to the elements, especially not in a country as wet and cold as Britain.  Municipal buildings constructed out of the stuff end up looking horrible because the authority responsible has other things to spend its money on, rather than cleaning and scrubbing the walls.  The concrete structure ends up looking grim, while cracks are just patched up rather than being addressed.

Mind you, Stafford station wasn't exactly an architectural masterpiece to begin with: this was no brutalist landmark like the National Theatre or the Barbican.  It's a series of long concrete structures threaded along the lines with draughty exposed platforms.  Wood had been used as an accent, but again, it hadn't been maintained and it had been varnished black.  Stafford is the only station I've ever been to that has a poster for the Samaritans in its cafe.

Thank goodness for Stone.  The morning had thrown up - almost literally - some grim architecture, but Stone station was a triumph.  Built by the North Staffordshire Railway and opened in 1849, it's astonishingly pretty.

It's wonderfully symmetrical (always nice for my OCD) and has ornate windows and rooftops.  It's Tudor done by the Victorians, Hampton Court on the iron way, and a real triumph.  It's also only here by the grace of God or rather, Network Rail; the station was actually closed at the same time as Norton Bridge, but was reopened in 2008.  Too late for the building though, which is no longer in use for railway purposes; you have to buy your ticket on the train.

It was closed and shuttered - the "community use" didn't seem to be happening - which is of course a tragedy.  I suspect that behind the locked doors was a waiting room with an enormous stone fireplace, haunted by Victorian ghosts.

Despite its uninspiring name, Stone itself was another delight, a pleasant middle England town.  This was real Daily Mail territory; I nervously awaited the pitchfork wielding locals to drive us out of town for lowering the tone.  The Conservative constituency office was on the High Street, for pete's sake.  I was tempted to assume a Croation accent and ask the way to the Benefits Office, just to see what happened.  We paused for coffee and a panini in the local Costa (well, Ian and I did; we didn't have our Dads make us a packed lunch unlike some other people).  There was a boy in there strumming on a small guitar - it may even have been a ukelele.  I should have stabbed him to death with a wooden coffee stirrer.  There is absolutely no excuse for playing a musical instrument in a coffee shop, unless your name is Phoebe Buffay.

There must have been some vodka in the coffee, or something, because between Costa and the bus stop I managed to fall over completely.  My foot just stumbled on the kerb, pitching me sideways and onto the pavement, grazing my arm.  Fortunately there was hardly anyone around to witness my humiliation, just Ian and Robert, which was bad enough.  And now, I suppose, you readers.  In fact just ignore this whole paragraph.

We were heading for another rail replacement bus, and we were the only boarders.  It swung through Staffordshire's country lanes, occasionally scraping a kerb with an audible grinding sound, before we were dropped off in the village of Barlaston.  This was a vast improvement on Norton Bridge - it didn't just have a shop, it had a row of shops, plus a Londis and a garage.

The station here was closed in 2003, though of course, in the world of British railways, it's not that simple.  The station is technically open.  If you want to close a station you have to go through a palaver of getting Government permission; it's a lot easier for the rail company to just lay on a bus and pretend the station's still there.

In the meantime, they've blocked off the platforms and the station buildings.  Spiked planks have been laid down at the ramps from the level crossing, while the gates have been nailed shut.  Even the waiting shelters have been boarded over, just to stop the local scallies from hanging out there and causing a ruckus.

From there we headed down to the frozen canal.  It was a simple matter on the map - a wander along to the next closed station on the line, Wedgwood.  The problem was we'd forgotten how cold it would be.  Robert and I had come from a Liverpool that was, while chilly, completely snow free, while Ian was here from a London that was sitting under several inches of white.  Staffordshire had combined the two into a lethal combination: ice.  What little snow there had been was now shiny, glassy ice, right across the path.

We tramped onto the verge, where the ice hadn't taken hold, and found a new hazard - dog shit.  The residents of Barlaston should be ashamed of themselves.  No-one seemed to believe in picking up after their animals, leaving wet piles of abandoned faeces to be skipped over.  Our ankles moaned under the effort of the trudge, and our trainers skidded on the occasional hidden patch of ice.

"If I fall in, please save my iPhone," said Robert.

"Did I mention I can't swim?" I replied.

Wedgwood is actually inside the factory estate, and was built mainly to carry employees to work.  The acres of car parks around us showed why its "closure" hadn't been missed.

The station's got the same treatment as Barlaston - locked gates, scuppered platforms.  There's no platform structures to be closed, as the old station building was turned into a residential home a long time ago.  The house had a level crossing gate at its entrance, which was a nice touch, and an NSR crest embedded in a gable.

There's no station sign at Wedgwood so I pressed myself up against a poster with the name on it.  It was the best I could manage, and I posed for Ian to take the photo.  I'd forgotten that this pose would make my gut glaringly obvious.  Please only pay attention to me from the neck up.

You can see why they removed the stations from the services; it's an incredibly busy route.  The level crossing closed three times while we were there, letting Pendolinos, Voyagers and Desiros burn through at top speed.  Think of those trapped behind a quiet stopping train.  It makes a nice resting place for trainspotters though.

It was time for another bus out of town.  I missed the trains.  It's not the same, visiting stations without a train inbetween.  I know technically it was a rail-replacement bus, so technically it was as close to a train I was going to get.  It just wasn't as fun.  I don't like buses, never will, and having their drivers treat country lanes like the Nemesis ride at Alton Towers will never endear them to me (or my stomach).

Heading home meant our fifth station of the day, this one being Stoke on Trent, and very much open.  It's another beauty.  The North Staffordshire Railway company constructed their station around a brand new civic square, with a hotel on the other side and a statue of Josiah Wedgwood in the centre.  It's a grand, dark red building with imposing stone details.

Virgin have also spent a nice sum modernising it.  The heritage features have been cleaned and enhanced.  Glass doors provide a classy way into the bright ticket hall, with automated ticket machines and a cafe.

And the roof... I love the roof.  The zig-zag glass that crosses the track makes the station feel open and elegant.  It's bright and attractive, and it's different from the glass arch the Victorians usually go with.  The only arch inside is one constructed as a memorial to those lost in the First World War, from the station building onto the platform.

The only thing the station's missing is a sign.  There isn't a single one outside.  How ridiculous.  How obscene.  I'm tempted to write a snotty letter to Virgin demanding they install one.  I had to settle for a picture with a platform sign.

Ian boarded his train to London, and Robert and I headed for platform 2 so we could go North.  I was tired, exhausted from the long day, but happy.  I'd had fun.  I'd enjoyed the talks and the laughs.  I thought back to that question earlier.  Why are we here?  The answer was, to have good times like these.  To laugh and chat and smile and enjoy your day with your friends.  That's a good enough reason.

Beyond The Ice

Blurry eyed, unshaven, disoriented.  The injection of coffee was having no effect; I was still half-asleep.  My cold hands gripped the cup for warmth.  I did not miss early trains.

For the first time in years, I was on a morning London Midland service from Lime Street.  And I didn't like it.  In a fair and just world I would have been curled up in a warm bed, perhaps with a cup of tea, a book propped up on my lap.

In the real world however, I had to get to Acton Bridge.  It's a station that's only grudgingly served, with half a dozen trains stopping there a day.  If I didn't get the early train it would be another two hours before I could get another one, which would have thrown out my plans for the day even further.  So a barely conscious outing it was.

I was the only person to get off at Acton Bridge.  I wasn't the only person on the platform though; right down the end, a man lingered by the passenger shelter, not bothering to board the train.  I suspect he was a trainspotter, but had hidden his notebook in case I poured scorn on him.  I felt like wrestling it out of his pocket and shouting "Gricer pride!".

The station building's a block on top of the bridge and is unstaffed.  It's got all the facilities in place - they're just not used.  The ticket hall smelt of disinfectant.  I suppose I should be glad it was being cleaned, but all it made me think was that it had recently been used as a toilet.  Was the undercurrent of urine in my imagination or was it in the air?

I stopped outside for the obligatory sign pic.  It amused me that I got it bang on first time.  I've been doing this blog for so long I know exactly where to position myself.

Now all I had to do was walk to the next station which wasn't, as you may have imagined from the Merseyrail map, Hartford.  I did Hartford last summer, completely by accident, which created a problem - I still had to do the stations either side, Acton Bridge and Winsford.  So my choice was to walk between them - a distance of about 10 miles - or go to Hartford, get the train to Winsford, then get the next train back again.

Since it was such an unbearably cold day, I was leaning towards the latter plan.  I had good intentions to walk all the way to Winsford, but it was the coldest day of the year - colder than Siberia, the newspapers said - and I wasn't sure I could last that long.  I was only five minutes out of Acton Bridge and my testicles had already retreated so far I could feel them under my armpits.

It was a good clear road though, and the pavement wasn't icy, so it wasn't a problem to walk.  A garden centre was prominently advertising bags of rock salt in a hastily written sign.  I passed a rural industrial estate, which seemed to have only two occupiers:

I'd love to know if there's an overlap between their clients.  "Well, we've got that frozen embryo - shall we get a nice teak box for it to go in?"

I was soon in Weaverham, whose village sign declared it was the Best Kept Village 1987.  No word on its entries over the last twenty-five years though.  In fact, the sign just made me wonder if it had gone downhill since then - if they'd won the prize in '87 and thought "mission accomplished" and started chucking their rubbish out on their front lawn.

I'd have hesitated to refer to Weaverham as a traditional village anyway.  At first it seemed to fit the bill, with lots of pretty historic timber buildings with blue plaques on them.  Keep going though and you come across a shopping precinct with a Co-Op, and a high school, and a sports centre.  The road was soon passing overspill housing and paved over front yards, making it feel more like a regular suburban estate than a scene from pastoral England.  And it seemed to go on forever, a long tedious road through boring buildings.

A brief bit of countryside - barely a shoelace - and then I was entering Hartford.  I crossed the town's other railway, the Mid-Cheshire Line, and paused at a crossroads.  There was a pretty silver hart commemorating the town, along with a dry water fountain - "The Gift of Agnes Bertha Platt - 1890".  It was decision time.  If I turned right, I'd soon be at Hartford station, for a nice comfy train.  If I carried on, I had a trek across countryside to Winsford, with no chance of turning back.

Of course I carried on.  I'm nothing if not stupid.  Besides, the walk had warmed me up: I was afraid that if I stopped now something would freeze and fall off.  So I plunged on.

It was a very attractive small town.  With its busy high street and good rail links, I imagined it would be a great place to live.  It seemed the Government thought the same, and had marked out Hartford for another 650 homes - which had not gone down well with the residents.  Now they were in the town, they were pulling up the ladder, and sticking up posters to that effect in their driveways and hedges.

Again I thought of all that empty space in Birkenhead - all those potential new homes that could be built cheaply, easily, in a place with good transport links and opportunities.  If the people of Hartford don't want them, well, zip up the M6 and build them somewhere else.  I bet no-one in the North End would complain.

I zipped across the Hartford by-pass, up some steps, and into a field.  The ground was rutted with the imprint of horse hooves, but the cold weather had frozen the soil, fossilizing them.  I cut across the grass, through a kissing gate, and down a slope.  I walked gingerly, staggering my footsteps so that I didn't plummet down and into the stream at the foot of the slope, and not caring that I looked a complete idiot.  Safety first, etc.

These were Vale Royal woods, a green reminder of the old Council, but it wasn't quite rural enough for me.  There were people walking their dogs, and cycling; I never felt like I was in the middle of nowhere.  Especially when a beautiful vista of the railway viaduct soaring overhead was ruined by braying Cheshire wives, changing out of running gear behind their cars and loudly boasting of their athletic endeavours.  They regarded me with ill-disguised suspicion, as though I'd come to this spot with the specific intention of catching a glimpse of their sports bras.  I hurried on, down to the canal.

It's funny how, in pursuing the pointless aims of this railway-based blog, I've spent a fair amount of time hanging around canal towpaths.  The two means of transport often parallel one another, taking advantage of geographical gaps for easy passage.  Sometimes the railways followed the canal in an "in for a penny, in for a pound" sort of way - the landowners figured their estate was already ruined by the waterways, so another line through wouldn't make it any worse.  Whatever the reason, the River Weaver is navigable here, taking a more twisting route south to Winsford than the railway line that accompanies it.

A pretty footbridge took me over the frozen side channel to an island, and then to the Dutton Locks.  I was surprised to see that the main body of the canal route was still flowing, having assumed the whole thing would be iced up, but of course this is a Navigation route, a natural fast flowing river that has been adapted for canal use.  Only the man-made pools and moorings were impassable.

I crossed to the other bank and trudged along the towpath behind two men and a dog.  They were walking a lot faster than me, which was humiliating since they were old enough to be at least my Dad.  Neither spoke, but they stamped their feet furiously as they walked, exorcising the frost from their toes.

I was busting for a pee; that latte at Lime Street seemed like an increasingly bad idea.  I was going to have to break it out in the countryside, as there wasn't a convenient pub, so I paused in some bushes and dropped my flies.  I let go onto the icy pool beside me.  If I'm honest, I'd hoped that my stream of hot urine would slice through the ice like the laser in Goldfinger; but either I was too cold or the ice was too thick, and instead it just puddled on the top.

Feeling refreshed I continued on my way.  The sky was astonishingly lovely, like a wet grey canvas with a single glowing bulb at its centre.   You only get skies like this in the darkest excesses of winter, like an apology from nature.  "It may be cold," it seemed to say, "but it's beautiful".

I couldn't quite work out if the path was frosted, or snowy.  It crunched underfoot but with a resisting crack, not the comforting noise of deep snow.  It was reassuringly solid though - I had no worries about pitching into the canal.

Harsh signs warned me that I was in the territory of the Winsford Angling Society, and that only they could fish here.  I didn't think there would be any anglers out anyway but then two passed me, wheeling a trolley of equipment so large it wouldn't have looked out of place at Terminal 5.  I decided that only about 2% of it was a rod and line; the rest was their thermoses of soup, comfy seats and portable storage heaters.

The anglers weren't the most insane people I saw that day - that prize goes to the canoeists, paddling furiously on the canal.  Why on earth would you practice a sport that could see you dunk in below zero waters?  Don't you people have things to do at home?  Wouldn't you be happier in front of Homes Under the Hammer with a mug of Ovaltine?  Still, people on pointless railway excursions can't really throw stones.

The landscape took a sudden swerve now.  Country became town; rural became industrial.  The beep of reversing trucks drowned out the birdsong, and the trees were gone in favour of iron and brick.

Northwich and Winsford owed their existence and their wealth to the vast salt deposits that lie underneath the ground.  They've been mined for centuries, the ancient remains of inland seas, and they still provide the area with much of its industrial base.  It's strange to think of gentrified, elegant Cheshire having this coarse backbone of working-class mining running through it.  It's like finding out the Queen wears George at Asda underwear.  

The plant was surrounded by a bend in the river, allowing me to take in the full extent of the workings. Trucks motored in and out with clockwork regularity.  No doubt this is their busiest time of the year, the salt industry's version of Christmas, shipping out orders like an Amazon warehouse on December 24th.  Of course, in one of those ironies of landscape, at this point my path on the opposite bank was completely iced over, forcing me to walk on the grass.  Is it impossible for them to chuck some product across the river?

A swan drifted over to me, thick with its dirty grey winter plumage, hopeful that I had a loaf of Hovis tucked under my arm.  I found myself apologising to him for getting his hopes up.  Up ahead, a crane stopped rooting around in a pond and took flight.  It was strange how my side of the river was still an episode of CountryFile, while on the opposite bank it was more like Blade Runner.

Not for long.  The path was rising up now, pulling away from the bank, until I reached a junction.  The path was signposted to continue over the hill, and my OS map agreed, but there was a side path downwards.  It seemed that the industry and the countryside crossed over at this point, and I'd have to pass round a different salt mine.  Upwards was the quicker route, but I wasn't keen to let go of the river, so I took the right-hand fork and followed it into the copse.

This was not a good idea.

The path went to sea-level a lot quicker than I'd anticipated via a series of flat wide steps.  Obviously, I made it all the way down to the last step before I fell, my legs rising about twelve feet above my head, my hands smacking into the hard ice.  I thudded downwards on my backside.

This wasn't just a fall; this was a humiliation.  I'd been sniggering at the BF all week after he managed to fall down the steps to our flat, bouncing down at least three of them and ending up bruised and battered.  He'd been whining all week, and I'd been less than sympathetic, laughing behind my hands and prodding the angry purple welt on his elbow to make him yelp whenever I got the chance.  Karma is a bitch.

Fortunately it seemed my damages were a lot less significant; I came away with red palms and a slight "just got off his horse" swagger, but nothing more severe.  Even better, no-one in the salt mine saw me.

Winsford is shaped like a bow tie.  On the western side is Over, with the main civic buildings and the shopping centre.  On the eastern side is Wharton, which is traditionally residential but is also home to the railway station.  The Weaver passes between the two districts with bridges over the river forming a gyratory at the bow tie's "knot".  I emerged right in the centre of the gyratory, and headed east.

The salt mines and their attendant industries had all formed along the Weaver, and the homes along Station Road reflected their Victorian origins.  It was like walking along a history of the town - tiny narrow houses close to the centre, to house the workers, with slightly larger brick villas further along for the managers.  Then the railway must have come, and the road became desirable for a different reason, for people working in the other direction, because the small terraces and corner pubs sprung up.

It was simple, inelegant, reliable working class stock.  But it was in an undeniably attractive position, with the lakes known as the Flashes shining in the distance.  It was probably less pleasant a hundred years ago when the salt mines and factories belched out filthy smoke but right now it seemed ok.  A man at a bus stop said hello to me as I passed - I suspect he was probably at least eight parts mad, but it was nice anyway.  One of the houses was a model shop, Loyns, with scale railways in the window; I would have nipped in if it hadn't been so decidedly closed.

Finally I saw the Winsford railway sign, across a roundabout.  I took the required shot and headed down into the hollow where the station was.

I'd remembered the building being miserable, but not this bad.  It was a long neglected Portakabin of a structure, with peeling paint and broken wood.  There was no charm to it.  Functional, impersonal, ugly.  London Midland hadn't even bothered painting it in their corporate colours, as if they knew it was throwing good money after bad.

I decided not to bother with the cold, ugly waiting room and instead leaned up against a bridge support to eat my M&S chicken and sweetcorn sarnie.  My legs were aching from the walk, and my nose felt like it was crafted out of solid ice.  But I felt energised and happy to have done it.  It was a good way to enjoy the February chill.