Sunday, February 8th – ‘a fill-dyke’, when we tried to make a passage of Chee Dale from Wye Dale to Millers Dale.  After scrambling over rocks and through water we reached the narrows with the river rushing wall to wall.  The river won, and we beat an arduous retreat.  Four months later, on June  7th we made the passage.

The half timbered building photograph is of Beeston Smithy. Charlie comments thus: “Beeston Smithy where we often dined. Mrs (Mother) Stockton made excellent currant cake, and the teapot was monstrous”.  This day, Sunday 10th May Charlie is getting his new bike, a Grubb, run-in by cycling round his favourite haunts in Cheshire.  Another note about his new steed.  The bike was fantastic but it took a lot of experimenting over a few months to sort out a comfortable saddle.  He went through a lot of borrowed saddles before he was assured of total comfort.

These pictures are all dated 1925 according to the page title, but the footnote places a different time and date because over the Easter Holiday in 1925, Charlie writes this:  “A brilliant Easter which I will not forget because I moped miserably at home, my old bike beyond repair, new bike on order but yet to be delivered”  I think we can all feel for him under those circumstances.

This last picture is titled “The Rolling Borderlands”  on the way up to the Cat and Fiddle pub.  The other picture is titled “Looking across to Shutlings Low”.

Winnats Pass is a well known very steep narrow little road, which is great to visit in summer but not so brilliant in winter.  The Cat and Fiddle Inn, the second highest Inn in the UK, does not look very welcoming in the winter at all.  I expect it was very draughty on windy days, which would apply most of the year round.

I think Charlie is second in on the left of this line-up.  The lower picture is of the Club section having a tea break on the return leg from the Annual Meriden cyclists service to remember those who gave their lives during the first World War.  Many who joined up as cyclists were used as messengers serving the front line.

In the picture above I feel that that the jacket worn by the last man standing on the left is sufficiently familiar to be attributed to Charlie

The first picture is of Llyn Glas, known as the ‘Blue Lake’, and Charlie’s comment at the foot of the page is:  “Cycles abandoned, we climbed the crags of Snowdonia to this little hollow, nearly 3000 ft above the sea”.