Search results for ""author christopher nicholson""

We've been sending one another postcards for well over a century now - usually brief messages to our friends and family telling them about the weather on our holidays or where we're visiting next on our travels. A hundred years ago we sent postcards with more serious messages - important, personal information about births, marriages and deaths, urgent requests for help, or just to keep in touch before the use of the telephone became widespread. The choice of subjects featured on postcards today is vast, but amongst the most popular has always been the lighthouse - a symbol of safety and reliability, and evidence of Man's basic instinct to warn and reassure. Over the years, almost every British lighthouse has featured on a postcard of some description, and the ones with easy access are regularly updated with different views. This new book from Christopher Nicholson, author of the highly-acclaimed Rock Lighthouses of Britain, concentrates on vintage postcards featuring the remotest lighthouses of all. Within these pages are snapshots of the past and moments in time from the very edge of Britain - granite pillars rising from sea-swept reefs or the lights on uninhabited storm-lashed islets dotted around the coasts of England, Wales and Scotland. Some of these cards are artists' impressions, some are hand-tinted, while others are real sepia or black and white photographs - but they all show how things used to look and how life used to be at the very extremes of offshore Britain. Due to their age these postcards are now valuable documents of social history - keepers posing with their families or being relieved at the end of their stint of duty - and they also illustrate the changing appearance of the lighthouses, together with the appalling weather the keepers endured. Proof, if such were needed, that there was nowhere too isolated nor weather too rough that would daunt the determined postcard photographer! It was perhaps because of the very remoteness of the lighthouses that drew people to buy the postcards and these evocative photographs will invoke an appreciation of those bygone times. With chapters on 'pillar lights', 'island lights', 'relief days', 'wild winds and white water' and 'curiosities' the author has been given unique access to the collections of private individuals and lighthouse authorities to compile a fascinating and nostalgic work. Each lighthouse featured is accompanied by interesting historical details as well as a selection of vintage postcard views with extended captions - some over a century old.

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This book provides a complete, easy-to-use handbook for nurses who see patients with heart failure. In recent years heart failure has become a high priority in health care. With more nurses caring for patients with heart failure and making decisions that are often complex, there is a clear need for those nurses to have access to good quality clinical information and guidance. This book is designed to be a practical, ‘one-stop’, handbook for the practitioner, supported by case studies and up-todate references throughout, providing all the topics the Practitioner or student may need in their work with patients with heart failure.

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As the summer draws to a close, a few snowbeds - some as big as icebergs - survive in the Scottish Highlands. Christopher Nicholson's Among the Summer Snows is both a celebration of these great, icy relics and an intensely personal meditation on their significance. A book to delight all those interested in mountains and snow, full of vivid description and anecdote, it explores the meanings of nature, beauty and mortality in the twenty-first century.

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Christopher Nicholson's first book of nature writing is a beautiful account of an unusual obsession. In 2016 he spent August searching for the remaining snows of the Scottish Highlands. His account of his solitary walk is by turns funny, fascinating and inspiring. A meditation on walking, mountains, snow and our changing climate, Nicholson also turns his curious eye on nature-lovers themselves. What are we looking for when we walk and what is it we want from nature? What is it we see and what is it we miss? What remains when we are gone and what have we lost from the landscape forever?

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The Peak District has always been a formidable barrier to transport links across it, particularly railways. The first crude horse-drawn tramways fed canals on its eastern and western flanks, but in 1830 – only five years after the Stockton & Darlington Railway opened – a standard gauge line climbed over the top of the Peak District and down the other side on fearsome inclines to connect canals at Cromford and Whaley Bridge. Sheffield and Manchester were connected in 1845 by the first line across the Pennines through the notorious Woodhead Tunnel, followed by a gradual infilling of lines connecting Peak District towns and villages. Some of them became as famous as the Settle–Carlisle route, such were the engineering difficulties of driving a route through the limestone dales. The line between Dore and Chinley was the last main line in England to be driven across the Pennines in two huge tunnels. At its height the Peak District railway system encompassed a narrow gauge light railway for tourists, cable-hauled inclines to export limestone, seven of the UK’s twenty longest railway tunnels, and Britain’s first all-electric main line. The birth of British Railways in 1948 and the subsequent Beeching axe were the death knell for many of these unique railways. Today some of the tracks can still be followed on foot, bicycle or horseback thanks to the Peak District National Park and other leisure organisations. The historic tunnels, viaducts and stations on the most famous routes have been restored and reopened as long-distance footpaths and heritage lines – a renaissance to be enjoyed by today’s tourists.

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Rock Lighthouses of Britain & Ireland is a new edition of the classic work on the subject – but with some of the most famous Irish rock lighthouses included. The text has been updated to include the modern technology being used by the lighthouse authorities, as well as all the historical advances made over the centuries at British and Irish rock lights, complemented by scores of new and many stunning photographs. Also included are historic plans and drawings, many of them highly colourful and artistic, as used by the original lighthouse builders. At the end are comprehensive and detailed tables about the rock lighthouses maintained by all three lighthouse authorities. Building on the acclaim received for the earlier editions, it brings the history of these iconic structures completely up-to-date, from the day the first granite block was laid, through their construction, automation, the disappearance of the lighthouse keeper, right up to today’s automated operation. Here are some of the world’s most famous rock lighthouses. There are stories of men battling against Nature’s most powerful forces to build a structure designed to save lives on a seemingly impossible site. Rock Lighthouses of Britain & Ireland spans the centuries between the world’s first rock lighthouse on the Eddystone reef, to the very last rock lighthouse, constructed in the traditional style, on Ireland’s Fastnet Rock and accordingly will remain the premier book about rock lighthouses.

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