To my eternal shame, I had never heard of the Roaches in Staffordshire, on the edge of the Peak District. Although it was a wee drive to get there, it was definitely worth the effort. The Roaches is part of a ridge system which connects Hen Cloud with Lud's Church, which I would like to do altogether as a 10 miler at some point in the future. The map below is of somebody else's anticlockwise walk, but we did the same walk clockwise (circa 8 miles).
In my A level years, I wrote out a classification tree for all living things on the back of a roll of old wallpaper. It was no easy task. Once you drill into just how and why one species or family is different from another, it demands some quite fearsome knowledge of comparative anatomy. If you are doing that for all living things (bacteria, protoctists, fungi, plants and animals), I am sure you can appreciate just what you are getting into. And at such a tender age too. I am glad it was a roll of wallpaper, because the thing just kept growing and growing until it was an unwieldy morass of scribblings.
In later years, I trained to be a Biology teacher, and as part of a self-directed project, I decided to turn a visit to Manchester Museum into a differentiated learning resource for kids of all ages and stages of the curriculum. It was a bit like a seek-and-find quiz which required some inside knowledge of the main taxonomic groups and their biology. Kids would get a laminated set of quiz questions, and follow the clues until they found the exhibit at the end of the trail. Bloody brilliant resource, but I quickly found that whichever school I worked at, a visit to the museum was always out of the question on account of budgetary constraints, too few staff, not having enough curriculum time, etc. Whatever it was, there was some excuse not to go. Perhaps I was destined for the plenteous life of well-funded public school teacher.
Anyway, I got to reminisce my student days during a recent visit to Manchester Museum, which has got much more funky with apps and multi-media walk-throughs for Generation Z kids (so I can shred my clunky laminated fossil quizzes). We have moved on from rolls of wallpaper!
