Concrete is Fun and Interesting... Honest!

My   roadtrips   are getting further from home and require increasing amounts of time and planning, and sooner or later I’ll reach a point where daytrips simply aren’t viable   any more , and at that point I’ll probably stop, whether I’m on a round number or not.  But I’m not there yet.  I have plans.  There are still parts of the country within reach that I’ve not yet visited.  I have unfinished business in a few of the places that I’ve already been to.  There are pillars I want to bag to extend runs of   consecutrigs , or   fill in gaps in sequences.  I want to re-attempt a few of my failures, which I rarely talk about, having since figured out why I failed to get them.  And there’s a couple of pillars I just want to visit because they’re in some way genuinely interesting.     It would be nice to bag my 700 th   trigpoint at some stage, too.  But mostly, I want to see more of southern England, because it’s...

October, and back on the road again; this time the road in question is a quiet little country lane called the M25, which led me to Epping Forest, from where I struck out north, only to find myself bewildered and disappointed by some of the trigs I found. S4750 Monkhams Hall and S4474 Bromley Common both fall into the bewildering category, for similar reasons – both are accessible via lengthy driveways which are clearly signed as Private, and in the latter case, watched over by CCTV.  Ordinarily, I would apply Rule One here and either find an alternative route or move on to the next one…  but the same driveways were also clearly signed as PROWs just a few metres away.  Confused by the contradictions, I strode purposefully up the tracks regardless.  I was spotted at both locations, but nobody paid me any interest, so I’m assuming that the Footpath and Bridleway signs at these locations take preference – for pedestrians, at least.  The latter trig is sited beside t...

It wasn’t a particularly exciting trigpoint.  I’d tried to work out a route that would put one of the more spectacular pillars on my shortlist in third place, but ultimately the distinction of being my 600th trig fell to S6075 Wool Camp – an unassuming little roadsider perched atop a small thistly mound.  It wasn’t a particularly pleasant pillar to bag, either, with my ankles being scratched by the spiky greenery underfoot, and the constant noise of the cars tearing past made it difficult to record my now-traditional commemorative video.  Nor was it an easy trig to park near, with No Parking signs adorning the convenient wide road entrance a few metres down; and it didn’t even offer a view of any description.  But then, my 500th pillar wasn’t especially pleasant or notable either, and it’s not as if my return to beautiful Dorset, in the middle of the July 2025 heatwave, was entirely devoid of highlights… …like that pillar’s similarly-named numerical neighbour, S...

Still keen to bag Little Ouse, I plotted a return to Cambridgeshire for early May.  However, when I reviewed my longlist of baggable pillars, I struggled to find an efficient route which would take me near England’s lowest again.  Instead, a pleasant drive round the south of Cambridge appeared to be taking shape, with a couple of high-numbered pillars alongside farm driveways (10453 Monks Hall and 10671 Fowlmere) practically bookending a trip that promised an in-depth exploration of a wide variety of the county’s greenest hedges…. 11155 Littlebury Hedge is an easy roadsider, and its hedge has conveniently parted around it, seemingly to allow access to rockbothering lunatics.   On the other side of the road, a stretch of woodland offers a tempting ramble through a carpet of bluebells, so it’s a damn shame about all the Keep Out notices that encircle it.   I admired the flowers briefly from my car instead.   Sadly, S4368 Heydon demonstrates the necessity for suc...

Barbados doesn’t have any trigpoints, so our long-anticipated Christmas holiday passed without any trigpointing activity, much to my wife’s relief!  The sweltering thirty-one degrees heat had made for an unusual Christmas Day, and provided a dramatic contrast with my next trigspedition less than three weeks later, which managed to coincide with the coldest day of the chilliest January for several years.  At no point that day did the temperature gauge in my trusty little Ford Focus register a number above zero.  There are pros and cons to trigpointing in the cold.  The obvious drawback is the amount of ice which covered some of the roads, particularly the narrow twisty country lanes that featured very heavily in that afternoon’s itinerary.  The challenging driving conditions were then worsened by large patches of fog which varied in intensity from prettily hazy to dense and opaque.  On the plus side, though, slippery roads with impenetrable visibility meant ...