There is a five mile "tour" around the north and south cliffs of the Cheddar Gorge. I managed no more than half a mile this morning - initially sliding around on wet rocks on the initial climb out of Black Rock, then traversing deep sludge and mud as the path levelled out. Days of rain have leeched all the easiness and fun from the route.
I diverted to the path up Velvet Bottom instead, a 'green road' still sodden and sloppy, but flatter, wider and just easier. Pictures below.
In Peter Hamilton's third volume of the Night's Dawn trilogy, one of his characters observes that if suicides knew how terrifying it was to fall an immense distance, they would never jump off bridges and cliffs. I recall a discussion on a physics website a while ago: if you jumped from a sufficiently-tall building you would never experience the impact - your head would hit the ground, killing you, before the nerve signals of impact had time to propagate to your brain.
Still, it's the anticipation of death which is always the issue, not the state of death itself which is beyond personal experience. Nothing to fear but fear ...
I diverted to the path up Velvet Bottom instead, a 'green road' still sodden and sloppy, but flatter, wider and just easier. Pictures below.
In Peter Hamilton's third volume of the Night's Dawn trilogy, one of his characters observes that if suicides knew how terrifying it was to fall an immense distance, they would never jump off bridges and cliffs. I recall a discussion on a physics website a while ago: if you jumped from a sufficiently-tall building you would never experience the impact - your head would hit the ground, killing you, before the nerve signals of impact had time to propagate to your brain.
Still, it's the anticipation of death which is always the issue, not the state of death itself which is beyond personal experience. Nothing to fear but fear ...
The top of the Velvet Bottom path
Velvet Bottom
View SW across the Cheddar Gorge
