Walking on the Moors and another childhood memory floods back in. Walking above the wonderfully named village, Chop Gate. In the distance the huge Bilsdale Transmitter. Before Satellite and Cable, that mast sent out the TV signal across North Yorkshire and Teesside and when I was a kid, to our little black and white family TV. Every Lightning strike here (and there was many) and we lost our 3 TV channels (Hawklad thinks I’m joking when I say only THREE channels). It was radio or nowt for days, sometimes weeks,until some poor soul, climbed this monolith and fixed it. It’s over 300 metres to the top. No internet back then to keep you constantly informed of service restoration, Dad just would keep the TV on, static relentlessly flickering across the screen, waiting patiently. I remember Dad setting off to the Working Men’s Club and leaving me on TV watch, with instructions to come and fetch him if it came back on. He didn’t want to miss the Horse Racing and Wrestling. I wanted it back on as well, they scrolled the latest football scores across the bottom of the screen while the likes of Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks lumbered across the ring. I lived with the faint hope that my so called football team would manage to actually win a match. Bilsdale got hit by lightning more times than that happened…..

Chop Gate, pronounced here as, ‘Chop Yat’ is a proper Moors Village. If we had been a day later, Hawklad could have seen his first Brass Band concert in the Village Hall.

A few minutes steep climb and you are in the wilderness.

We walked for 3 hours and only encountered sheep. Even walking through the village, we never saw another soul. It’s wonderful that we still have places like this in our crazy, mad world.

We so need places like this. Trump Free Zones……Quiet, Peaceful, Unspoiled.