November novelties.

[Bierzo Baggie]

No internet access for a while so I’ve uploaded the last couple of diary entries at Mr and Mrs Scousers’ house, much to the bemusement of Mrs Scouser.

“So what’s on the CD?”
“It’s a running diary”.
“A what?”.
“A running diary. When I go for a run I sort of write about it afterwards”.
“Oh, and that’s it…”
“Well, yes, errr, and I read other people’s running diaries as well”.
“That doesn’t sound very interesting. So what do you all write? Is it like….Thursday, went for a run…me too….sounds great! Ha ha ha!”

I wanted to say it was really all part of an experimental creative writing workshop but decided I was already on a hiding to nothing. Scousers! They just can’t help taking the piss. And now they’ve got me down as some kind of sad, anorak-clad running geek.

No running at all last week. Cracking walk last Sunday though.

This time there were four of us, Mrs Scouser, Miguel the mushroom, Manolo and myself. We left the car in “Colinas del campo de Martin Moro Toledano,” which is probably the village with the longest name in the whole of Spain. Unlike a certain Welsh village of similar surplus syllables there’s no railway station, just an isolated, but very attractve village at the end of a winding mountain road, gift wrapped with the first decent snowfalls of the cold season.

The route followed a path through a narrow valley which eventually opens out into an immense natural amphitheatre which the locals call “La Campa”. Here is the birthplace of the river Boeza, a tributary of the river Sil, the meeting point being at the start of my “round the river” route back in Ponferrada. The walk is one of my favourites but I’d never done it with so much snow. At one point you pass through a small wood of wild holly trees and the accumulated snow creates a tunnel which we pass under.
There’s a small hermitage at the entrance to La Campa where the nearby villages celebrate a “romaria” each summer in homage to Santiago, “the Moor slayer”. The place was the scene of a historic battle between Moors and Christians over 1000 years ago. Today it’s a silent, unspeakably beautiful place with only us ….and a couple of bear-spotters to disturb the whiteness. Bearspotters? The border of León and Asturias and in particular the Laciana region is the last sustainable refuge of the brown bear in Western Europe. The last native female Pyrenean bear was shot dead by a hunter about a year ago. Here, in a less visited mountainous area there are an estimated 50 or so, some of them electronically tagged. One of the bear-spotters is a tall guy with a pair of binoculars and the other is a younger fellow with dreadlocks. They identify themselves as freelance ecologists, although they pass information on to “The Brown Bear Foundation,” which is the official conservation group responsible for protecting the species. “Dreads,” mentioned that they’d seen a wildcat on the way up but the bears were proving to be more elusive. We stared up at the rocky crags where the bears probably wandered, enjoying their last excursions to and fro before the winter hibernation. We stayed chatting for a while in the vast empty landscape, reminiscent of a scene from Dr Zhivargo, until the cold started to make itself felt and “dreads” and the tall guy set off again in search of a mountain refuge where they could make a fire. We headed back down to the village again.
Colinas del Campo; 980m.
La Campa; 1500m.
Total walking time; about 4 and a half hours.