Three wooden crates left the Northcroft Instruments workshop in Edgeminster on Wednesday afternoon, bound for Bobington by rail freight. They contain, between them, the principal instruments of what will become the first permanent scientific monitoring station on the Greymoor ridge since the meteorological outpost was abandoned in the 1950s.
Gerald Northcroft, managing director, confirmed the shipment: three broadband seismometers for continuous recording to fifteen-metre depth, two atmospheric gas sampling units calibrated for sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, and carbon dioxide at parts-per-million sensitivity, and the steel mounting frames for a meteorological mast. A second consignment — the photometric array for continuous glow measurement and the battery banks — follows next week.
“We are ahead of schedule,” Mr Northcroft said. “The instruments have been tested and calibrated. What remains is to put them in the ground.”
Putting them in the ground, however, requires a road. And the road requires a vote.
Dallow and Penn
The Works Committee meets on Thursday 9 April to decide on Dr Bernard Coates’s proposal for a 2.3-kilometre graded road from the Dunvale road to the monitoring station site. The estimated cost is 45,000 florins. The estimated construction time is six weeks.
Gareth Penn, whose Highfield Farm sits three miles south of the central emission zone, supports the road. “You cannot carry seismometers up a pack track on a mule,” he said on Thursday. “If we want to understand what is happening under the ridge, we need proper access.”
Isobel Dallow, whose Ridgetop Farm borders the proposed route, remains opposed. Mrs Dallow, 61, has farmed sheep on the Greymoor uplands since 1989 and views the road as the beginning of something larger than a scientific station.
“It starts with a road for instruments,” she said. “Then it is a road for scientists. Then tourists. Then coaches. I have seen what happens when the highlands become convenient.”
The Committee is divided. Chairman Alderman Fowkes has not indicated how he will vote. Dr Coates presented his proposal at the 26 March meeting; the Committee deferred for two weeks to allow for further consultation. Both Penn and Dallow have submitted written statements.
An 1897 Precedent
Meanwhile, the phenomenon itself continues. Dr Odette Collis observed the fifty-second consecutive night of the Greymoor glow on Wednesday evening. Brightness has increased approximately thirty-two per cent since her first observation on 3 February, with no night of reversal. Her forty-seventh field notebook is nearly full.
Professor Aldous Nettleford of Caldwell University’s Department of Earth Sciences has written to Professor Elara Whitstone at the Royal Institute requesting access to the photometric data collected by Collis and Dr Maren Ilkley. His letter, a copy of which this newspaper has seen, draws a detailed comparison between the Greymoor phenomenon and the Blackmoor Vents episode of 1897 in the Edgeminster uplands.
The Blackmoor vents — a series of geothermal gas emissions along a twelve-kilometre ridge near Edgeminster — were first observed in the spring of 1897 and persisted for approximately fourteen months before subsiding. The spectral signatures recorded at the time, using the instruments then available, show similarities to the ionised nitrogen and sulphur dioxide profile of the Greymoor glow.
“The parallel is suggestive but not conclusive,” Nettleford wrote. “The Blackmoor episode was associated with minor seismicity, localised thermal anomalies, and — most significantly — a subsurface fracture system that was not fully understood until the 1920s geological survey. I would urge that the Greymoor data be evaluated in this context.”
Nettleford has accepted an invitation to deliver the second of the Polytechnic’s spring lectures, on 15 April, on the subject of geothermal systems in highland geology. He is expected to visit the Greymoor ridge with Collis and Ilkley before the lecture.
The glow, as it has every night since 3 February, will be there to greet them.