{"id":766,"date":"2009-12-21T21:29:49","date_gmt":"2009-12-21T21:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/?p=766"},"modified":"2022-04-11T21:49:02","modified_gmt":"2022-04-11T20:49:02","slug":"sandstone-trail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/sandstone-trail\/","title":{"rendered":"Sandstone Trail"},"content":{"rendered":"

We were on Christmas duty at the weekend visiting my family near Chester, so I took the oppportunity to stretch my legs along a seven mile section of the Sandstone Trail<\/a> on Saturday morning. I got a reasonably early start and set off from Peckforton Castle as the car thermometer read -4 oC. I didn’t know the first part of the route, but I soon popped out of a field next to “The Gap” and the rest of Bulkeley Hill. This was the scene of many adventurous days on a mountain bike during my mis-sent youth, so I knew the next couple of miles very well.<\/p>\n

\"Raw

Raw Head, the high point of the Sandstone Trail (227m!). Copyright Haydn Williams 2009<\/p><\/div>\n

Seeing as I’m getting on in years, the next few minutes whizzed by in a haze of rose-tinted memories as I passed the scene of James’ near death on the gap jump, “The Snake Run” (controlled freefall down a steep muddy slope) and the old downhill run (don’t forget to duck under the fallen tree halfway down). The path around Rawhead soon brought me back to the present day – big icicles on the shady side of the ridge (a good metre long) and spectacular views out towards the Clwydian Range.<\/p>\n

\"Looking

Looking towards Clwydian limestone. Copyright Haydn Williams 2009<\/p><\/div>\n

As I passed Nick’s house (you know, Nick. His parents live in the house on the left. He had a monkey called Spank.) and slogged over to Brown Knowl, the snow clouds started rolling in, and I finished just as the last of the sun disappeared. It was a good morning generally, and showed that you often have fantastic scenery very close to (your parents’) home if you just take a second to actually look for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We were on Christmas duty at the weekend visiting my...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[441,440,438,439,396,437],"class_list":["post-766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-outdoors","tag-brown-knowl","tag-bulkeley-hill","tag-peckforton","tag-rawhead","tag-running","tag-sandstone-trail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}