"Look at it this way"

A quick blog post on a day spent racing to meet a writing deadline , which I fear may now slip into tomorrow.... Just came across an excellent site on the Pennine landscapes ... WATERSHED LANDSCAPE  has a focus on the Pennines near Bradford, just North of the area of the Peak District that I am working on. As the site makes clear, these regions are "rarer than rainforests" .. The site also has a very useful bank of materials for teaching about LANDSCAPES  which piqued my interest. Also the WILDLIFE guides and information. I liked the ideas for using GPS and other geographical tools. Also materials for Environmental and Land Based Diploma. There are also links to some useful videos, such as this one:

An interesting feature by Will Self. There are plenty of things here that Geographers would recognise of course. One recurring theme here is that there are few places that have escaped the hand of man... Landscape as palimpsest is a recurring theme in the work that I do with colleagues.

I'm always up for new stamps, especially when they are geographical in nature. Some new Royal Mail stamps are out later this week. They are the first in a set of 26 stamps, which cover famous places from A - Z Which A-Z would you choose ?  A = Angel of the North                       B = Blackpool Tower C = Carrick-a-Rede D = Downing Street E = Edinburgh Castle F = Forth Railway Bridge G = Glastonbury Tor H = Harlech Castle I = Ironbridge J = Jodrell Bank K = Kursaal (Southend) L = Lindisfarne Priory Fits very nicely with Lesson 6 of my GA toolkit book: "Look at it this Way"

Landscapes: Volume Two from Dustin Farrell on Vimeo .

As I may have mentioned before on the blog, I did some work a few months ago for the Geography Collective on the theme of 'the local area'. This was for NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC education in the USA, and Dan from the collective went over to Portland to speak to educators from all over the USA. Now there have been some videos released from the National Council for Geographic Education for the session that Dan Raven Ellison did for the conference, and they are on the GEOGRAPHY COLLECTIVE blog. Here's the first one and the other two are on the blog... This is very fine work, and explains the origins of the Geography Collective and our recent work, ideas of geography and showcases projects that Dan and the Collective have been involved with....

Pylons are a common feature of the British landscape. They are not well liked by people, but burying the power-lines that they carry would add substantially to the cost of the infrastructure, and we all use electricity (apart from those of us who life 'off-grid') Cumbria is the latest area of landscape to be 'threatened' by a new line of pylons. There is a competition currently to identify the best new pylon design. Which of the 6 is your favourite ? I like these ICELANDIC ones personally. Don't forget to visit the PYLON APPRECIATION SOCIETY.

Thanks to Jenny from the RGS-IBG for letting me know about the imminent launch of a new site which offers a fresh look at the UK. The site is called DISCOVERING BRITAIN. "We are developing an exciting series of geographically-themed walks across the UK that aim to bring these stories alive and to inspire everyone to explore and learn about our different landscapes." Look forward to seeing the full site when it appears in just over a month's time....