Saddleworth Moor TV Transmittor, 1/9/20

On the apex of the Ripponden Old Road A627, just before the sign for entering West Yorkshire from Lancashire, stands the old Saddleworth Moor TV transmittor.  It is shorn now of its satellite dishes and defunct but remains the central beacon from which wide, maintained stone pathways for walkers surprise you by radiating out across the moorland, where the heather is in bloom and the M62 only a distant vision, all traffic, like the tv signals, maintaining radio silence up there.  Dark striations filter down the sunbeams from the clouds over Rochdale, for even on a day like this, there is a bleak strangeness to the place, so high and so remote above the treeline.