Almscliff Crag in North Yorkshire, England, is an outcrop or tor of gritstone, visible for many miles around. It is a site of special scientific interest – a protected site under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 and a venue for climbers who boulder on it and walkers who want to look around the area from a high vantage point.

Bouldering is a branch of climbing concentrating on difficult technical problems, often just a few feet off the ground. Gritstone is a hard rock and, not surprisingly, feels very gritty and rough to the touch, and provides very good friction for climbing.

For the climbers who come to do some bouldering, Almscliff is within easy reach of Harrogate, and quite near the road, so dragging a crash mat up from the car is not hard. A crash mat is a kind of portable mattress onto which a climber can jump to avoid landing on hard ground.

Yorkshire gritstone is also called millstone grit because it was used for making millstones for grinding wheat. Whilst millstone grit is a hard rock, the grit must surely have rubbed off and become mixed with the wheat. Certainly, from time to time a stone would have to be dressed, which involved cutting fresh furrows in the stone where they had worn down rubbing against the opposing stone.

Walking around the base of the outcrop on a bright October day, I could see cow pats dotted around on the grass, and it occurred to me it must be a strange site to see cows wandering around the base of the rocks high above the surrounding countryside.

Walking around Paris, you come across inscriptions cut into the stonework of various buildings. This inscription is at about lower chest height and testifies to the flood that Paris suffered in January 1910. The sign reads cru de la Seine, which indicates the level the waters of the river Seine reached on January 25, 1910 when the river burst its banks.

The flood or inondation raised the waters of the river Seine over 25 feet (over 8 metres) above their normal level, and not only flooded the streets but also the then newly constructed Metro – the underground railway system that now covers most of Paris.

As a side note, the metro is built very close to ground level compared to the systems in other cities. Anyone who has travelled down the subway or underground escalators in Washington D.C. or London or Moscow or Lyon knows how long they are and how far down into the earth they travel.

Not so with the Paris metro, where the stations are often just a hop down down a couple of short flights of stairs.
 

The Common or English bluebell grows in woods throughout England. It has flowers on one side of the stem only, which causes the stems to lean under the weight of the flowers, in contrast to the Spanish bluebell, which has flowers all around the stem and therefore stands more erect.