Over a fell, up a mountain, into a bar

Tuesday morning I had breakfast with another fellow who said he was walking the Pennine Way.  He had started from Edale a day after I did, but was stretching some of the days for longer distances.  He told me he was staying at the Golden Dragon in Horton, so I should expect to see him there.  I never did, so I suspect he walked on further again and has pulled away by now. 

 

One thing I can say about him, he was a courteous man.  What with having been less productive than plan on Monday night, I did my GPS programming and a few other chores on Tuesday morning before breakfast.  Somehow, in the middle of doing all this, I failed to look in a mirror.  When I got back to my room, I got my first look at myself.  I had gone to breakfast with my standard straight out of bed “Fretful Porpentine” hairdo.  I hope I haven’t done that too many other mornings.

 

The walk from Malham to Horton starts with serious geological fireworks.  There’s a big feature above the village called Malham Cove.  It’s a broad, semi-circular wall of rock that shelters a steep sided little valley.  It was a prehistoric waterfall, but the water flow that remains now comes out of the bottom of the wall rather than pouring down from the top.  More evidence of all the caves and underground rivers here. 

 

After admiring the cove from the bottom, I started a long stair climb out of it.  On top, there’s another very striking feature.  Here they call it a pavement.  It’s a natural feature created when a large slab of limestone gets exposed.  Weaker spots in the stone then weather away, leaving high parts that do look like large, irregular paving stones with gaps between them like oversized expansion joints in a pavement.  The tops of the blocks are often also eroded into erratic, curvy shapes.  The whole thing is beautiful, though it makes tricky footing.  I want you to remember that general pattern of erosion digging clefts between areas that it leaves higher.  In the rest of the day, I saw examples of this at various scales and began to get an honest sense of the geology of the region by walking across it.

 

From the pavement fields, I made my way across a few stony fields.  I observed a new thing about the deep stupidity of sheep.  When I come upon sheep who are further down the same path I’m walking, the most common thing they will do to try to escape me is to walk further down the path in exactly the direction I’m walking.  Sometimes they’ll run for a little bit to open the distance between us then go back to chewing grass.  When I close on them again, they’re startled all over and have to go through the same sequence again.  On my walk after the cove, I inadvertently chased a ewe and her lamb for a solid 10 minutes on this plan.  That’s more than half a mile at my pace on fairly level ground.  They could have lost me on our first encounter if they’d just gone off at right angles.  It isn’t as if they needed the path.  The surrounding ground was perfectly sheep friendly.  Eventually, I cornered them against a gate and they finally ran off to the left and were rid of me.

 

I walked around Malham Tarn, a high mountain lake.  There’s a grand house at the head of it that the Trust now operates as an outdoors center – teaching school kids rugged outdoors skills and that sort of thing.  I saw some high school aged guys being taught surveying (Sara – I saw a bus from a prep school in Giggleswick, so I’m guessing that’s where they were from.)  Further on there was an elementary school group all wearing matching red slickers.  Some of them had long handled nets, so I’m guessing they’d been pulling in butterflies or lake creatures, but what they were really learning about was how to splash in puddles as they walked up the lane.  The only muck to hit my gaiters that day came from a little girl making a bravura skidding landing into a deep puddle.  Made one of her classmates complain to teacher which I think scores a bonus.

 

I left the sound of school kids behind and took a path that started me up the side of Fountains Fell.  It was on the way up that hill that I noticed within a large field the patterns of drainage looked a lot like a larger version of the pavements.  The field I saw as I was climbing away from it had irregular areas of high ground, mostly with straight lines for sides, then naturally occurring ditches separating the higher ground.  I had already noticed that as I walked along, I would be on dry ground for a long time, then suddenly squelching through muck with no obvious surface water to explain it, then back on the dry. 

 

I put this together with having seen the pavements and figured out that this pattern repeats at each scale up to the level of the whole dales with the valleys being the gaps between the blocks which are the hills.  It really was striking when I started looking at it.  A little rill of water carving an opening 4 feet across was a good scale model of the waterfalls that had carved massive valleys.  Patterns of vegetation even recurred with trees in the smaller features replaced with small herb plants, while the place the herb plants would have held between the trees of a big valley were filled by moss. 

 

I’m not claiming this is an original thought.  In fact, later in the day, I walked by a modest sized valley my guide book described as a scale model of Malham Cove.  But I had such an “aha moment” as it dawned on me before I ever looked at that page in the guide. 

 

Another striking set of features are what are called shake holes.  These are places where the earth has all been eaten out from under an area which is usually fairly circular then one day it collapses.  These become the drains of the hillsides.  Rainwater flows into them and falls down to join the underground rivers.  It’s interesting to peer over the side of one.  It’s a little alarming to reflect that any little bit of the landscape I’m standing on might become one at any time.

 

I was so taken with the landscape I didn’t even really notice that I’d made it up to the ridge of the fell.  I crossed a wall at the top and had a seat on a stile step torest for a little.  In addition to the shake holes, right around me at the top of Fountains there are also abandoned mine shafts, so I was staying close to the path.  From the brow of Fountains, I could see across the Pen-y-ghent, the big hill that sits over Horton.  The route had me climbing it.  It actually didn’t look too daunting from the distance, I was already standing at the level of its first shoulder.  Then I realized the only way I could possibly get to it would be to go down into the valley and come back up.  I started half hoping bad mist would move in and make the whole climb pointless. 

 

Minutes after I got back underway, I heard a loud boom then a clattering as though Ganymede had dropped the Olympians lunch dishes on his way back to the kitchen (see, this hill walking is making me poetical).  On the horizon, I saw a rising cloud of smoke or dust.  It took me a moment to figure out it must have been blasting at the quarry above Horton. 

 

I did indeed have to walk all the way to the valley floor, where I made a big circuit around by road.  Along the way, I saw some peculiar birds.  They were grey brown birds with white flashes on neck, breast, and lower sides of wings.  The males had mad scientist eyebrow crests.  They flew very acrobatically, and had a call like sound effects from an early videogame.  On the strength of that description, I’ve been assured they are lapwings, and they make a great sideshow on the trail.

 

As I was trying to photograph one, I saw another walker coming up the road.  He turned out to be Justin, another Canadian.  We walked the rest of the way around the valley, up P-y-G, and into Horton together.  We then met up with the older group of Canadians had drinks and dinner together, then wandered around the churchyard across the street admiring grave monuments.  All that will come later, but in the course of it, I learned most of the details I’ll give now.

 

Justin came from Toronto but lives now in Halifax, Nova Scotia where he owns and runs a Mailboxes Etc.  He arrived in the UK on Sunday, stayed in Settle that night, walked to Malham and on to Kettlewell on Monday, and had walked to where we met by way of a few villages on Tuesday.  Early this morning, he caught the Settle to Carlisle railway with a plan to make that the first in a series of scenic railway trips eventually getting him to Stanstead airport where he had a flight to Malta to visit with family.  Essentially, he was doing a few days of Dales walking as part of an extended layover in the UK.  Pretty plucky, I thought.

 

He hadn’t seen a human since lunch, and was eager for some conversation.  We talked about why we were each in the dales walking, what we liked and didn’t like in vacations, how steep the hill looked, all kinds of stuff.  In the course of the conversation, with breaks for heavy breathing and soft under breath profanity on my part, we walked a long, medium steep approach to P-y-G, then tackled the rough stair climb of two big stages and a stealthy steep ramp on top of the second stage to the summit.  The views were nice, though because of a bit of haze not really spectacular. 

 

It was a good sense of accomplishment climb.  In one way I was 9 years late on my appointment to climb this particular hill.  It had been on the agenda for the one day of Sara and my hike that we wore out and called a taxi.  It was a brilliant decision, as we certainly wouldn’t have enjoyed the climb then while I had a lovely time with it yesterday.  Incidentally, that taxi took us to Hawes where I am now.  That whole things recurring on different scales idea is starting to have cosmic significance.  I may have been writing for too long. 

 

I can’t leave out though, that on the way down, Justin spotted a huge pot hole just off the path.  We went over and had a look.  I shot a few photos and a little video.  Pot holes are grown up versions of shake holes, and this one looked as though it had no bottom at all.  It had been there long enough to have a well established waterfall running down it that had carved on side into a proper craggy scar.  I think it’s possible if I’d let Justin know I had 50 feet of line in my pack, he might have wanted to go down for a look.  I didn’t see anything good to tie the rope to, and I didn’t relish trying to hold it, so I just kept silent.  It was spectacular just get a look and a listen at it.

 

We did meet up with the older Canadians.  They pressed a huge can of Stella Artois on me.  This is essentially the Schlitz of Belgium.  I tried to beg off, claiming a vow to drink nothing but UK brews while on this holiday, but apparently Stella is contract brewed in the UK, so it would have been churlish to refuse.  I bought the first round with dinner, then they insisted on another round.  In the end, I didn’t get any writing done again.  Fortunately, I had no morning after regrets from all this beer the last two nights, but just the same, I think I’m switching to lemonade or at the most shandy for tonight.  I saw an Indian restaurant on my wander around looking for Ebor House.  I may give them my business tonight.

 

Garmin Facts:  15.6 miles 6:00 walking, 1:13 resting.  Walking average 2.6 mph.  Overall 2.2 mph.  834 meters climbed.