Last weekend we had friends visiting and on Saturday Tom and I went walking in the Peak District while our ladies went off looking for bridesmaid dresses.

We drove up, which took a bit longer than expected, and after finally scraping together the change for the parking ticket we set off. We’d planned quite an extensive route, estimating that it would take us about four to five hours. At first the going was easy and the ground as we had expected wet and muddy, with the occasional bit of snow. As we slowly climbed higher there was more and more snow on the ground and it also started to snow quite heavily. We didn’t let that stop us, but it did mean that it took us roughly two hours to get to the top of the ridge, instead of about an hour as planned. At the top we were almost in the clouds and it was still snowing, so we decided to shorten our route, heading back towards the car along the ridge. The going there was quite easy, as the snow had been pressed down hard and we made good progress until it came to the descent back into the main valley. The descent took us down a small side-valley carved out by a little stream and at the top the snow was up to half a metre deep and since it was on top of longish grass it was quite slippery, but we managed to get down. In the end it took us another one and three quater hours to get back to the car, so we almost achieved the walking time we had been aiming for, although we covered barely a third of the planned distance. Still it was a good-fun adventure, definitely memorable.

I’ve uploaded a selection of photos . The photo captions have been automatically generated using software that implements the algorithms I’ve developed for my PhD thesis. As you can see not perfect yet, but not too bad either.