Wednesday May 5 Later

Out of time sequence, culinary aside:  Spotted Dick turns out to be a middle weight vanilla cake (heavier than angel food, lighter than a regular Betty Crocker boxed) studded with raisins and served warm in a thin custard.  It’s one of those English food names that everyone likes to make fun of, so when it popped up on the sweets list, I just had to try.  Tasty.  Almost indistinguishable in flavor or mouth feel from a spice free bread pudding with raisins.  This capped a meal I’ve been eating at intervals from writing this that started with a mushroom risotto and orbited around a pasta with pesto and marvelous vegetables.  Considering I’d just walked almost 17 miles with a few dried apricots and a fun sized candy bar since breakfast, it all went down well.  Service spectacular.  I am a happy man.

 

As bad as I am at describing most things, terrain gets away from me utterly.  I’m going to try to overcome that by sort of decomposing the landscapes I’ve seen into their component parts. 

 

1. There are rocky parts, with monumental boulders of various sorts jutting up out of the landscape.  Some are rounded.  Most are obviously sedimentary and have weathered most along their less dense layers, so they look like piles of giant, irregular building blocks.
2. There are wooded parts, mostly conifers that have been planted because they grow quickly, but some little stands of mixed hardwoods.
3. There are grassy parts, almost universally scattered with sheep.
4. There are mucky parts with mud of various colors and degrees of stickiness and sloppiness and slipperiness.  Most of the mud is based on peat.  There’s a useful article about peat in my guidebook, which I will not bother to enlarge upon here – ask to borrow the guide sometime after I get home if you’re curious.  What really matters to a walker about peat is that it can and usually does hold a lot of water, but it has just enough structural integrity that some mosses, shrubs, and grasses can grow on it and the remnant roots of this vegetation can help it grow up into hillocks and banks.  Even peat or peat based mud so wet it is practically a liquid can support a very solid looking cover of grass.  Step on that, my guidebook assures me, and you’re in to your waist if you’re lucky.  With less luck, you go below the surface with a little sucking sound, and all that remains of you is an oddly shaped interruption in the vegetation.  Contrary to American notions of these bogs, which often happen on a kind of terrain called a Moor, peat is an upland phenomenon, so peat bogs, unlike swamps, are a hill top and hill side hazard.
5. The resulting tremendous danger of walking around on the moors has led to a special kind of artificial terrain component, flagstone paths.  These wonderful, sidewalks in the sky are the only reason I’m likely to survive the next two weeks.
6. Water.  There’s a lot of water up here.  Most of it is sogged into the peat and drips or gushes out depending on prevailing conditions.  Where it chooses to gush, it digs away peat and other soil and makes steep ravines called cloughs in this part of England.

 

These different components are essentially the tinker toy parts out of which the Pennine Way is built.  The only combination I haven’t seen yet is monumental rock rising out of visible standing water, but I’m sure I’ll find that.

 

The first really messy bog land I crossed was the appropriately named (I even remember it without reference to the map) Bleak Low.  Alan had let me know when we’d spoken on the phone that the waymarking on Bleak Low was a bit confusing.  I took his advice to heart, and when I programmed that part of the walk for my GPS, I included more detail than anywhere else.  By the time I was closing in on it, I was very glad I’d taken the trouble.  Waymarking on the whole Way is well below the standards of trails in the Blue Ridge.  Nominally, the Way is marked with white acorn blazes, like all other national trails.  At intersections with roads, there are usually arrow signs on posts lettered Pennine Way and pointing reasonably clearly.  Those signs aside, I had seen perhaps two white acorns all day.  I have developed a theory that either the white acorn paint is extremely expensive or the rescuers I saw in the morning had long ago requisitioned the only can of it and had taken their time about using and returning it.  The notion that I was walking into a bog laced moor with bleak in its very name with even worse waymarking was frightening. 

 

It turns out that the problem on Bleak Low was not too little waymarking.  There were little stone rectangular prisms with acorns on them in many places.  It was just impossible to figure out where they were trying to indicate the trail was.  Without my GPS program, I would have had no choice but to cautiously inch away in some kind of search pattern from the first marker I found looking for another, then walk cautiously towards it, probing every step to make sure it would hold my weight.  The guide recommended that if I lost track of the waymarks, I should just look for footprints, but there were footprints in every direction since dozens of other people had gotten lost up there in recent weeks, and the more nearly solid incarnations of peat can hold a print for a long time. 

 

Fortunately, I had a good enough program that I could inch pretty much in the right direction to find the next marker first time every time.  While I was making my way through this, I ran across a group of walkers I took to be four Canadians.  I’d met them briefly the evening before.  They’d pulled up in a minibus while I was walking back to the Rambler and asked me for directions to a campground.  The fellow I’d spoken with was definitely Canadian, and I assumed the rest.  Up on Bleak Low, three of them were dour and silent, while the fellow who had asked for directions the night before was fairly chipper.  I believe that like me, he has the sort of cheerful nature at all hours that caused my dorm mates to throw toast at me on exam mornings.  He had a map around his neck in a clever water proof carrier, and to that fashion horror I attributed the silence of his companions.  He and I of course bonded as fellow walking nerds.

 

We wound up collaborating our way across the low with my GPS giving us the general direction and one of the four of them usually seeing the next marker first.  My brother in geekery would sing out and point if he saw one.  His companions would point silently with their walking poles. 

 

Reasonably quickly, we made our way to the summit.  I took some photos.  The chatty one paused to take my picture with my camera for me.  His companions launched off on an obvious looking track, but the map showed a very different direction.  From here, we were back to no way marking rather than inscrutable marking which was a sort of improvement.  Eventually, I found what I thought of as the four Canadians following me cautiously.  They knew I was better equipped, but already doubted my common sense.

 

What I learned was that the GPS was mostly not useful for keeping me from losing the track.  Every time I lost the track (never for long and never far, by the way) I was sure I was on the track, so I didn’t even look down to confirm.  It has been very useful for getting me back to the track after I drift off.  The most dramatic off track I did was when I wound up on the wrong bank of one of the cloughs.  Finally, I was high enough that I could see the paved track on the other bank.  I got to clamber down, ford the stream, and climb back up.  I still think the map showed the path on the side I was on originally, but it’s hard to argue with tons of paving somebody hoiked up the mountain. 

 

A word about provisions.  I had bought in the shop a bag of dried, Turkish apricots and a few bars of Kendal Mint Cake.  The latter is the recommended power bar equivalent for English hill walking.  I went ahead and bought them even though I’d already seen a recipe for it on a post card – sugar, milk, and peppermint oil, cooked up as for candy.  This venerable English backpackers energy food (endorsed, so my packets assure me, by Sir Edmund Hillary) are rough cut rectangles of after dinner mints.  Well, I like after dinner mints, and at the end of the day, calories are calories.  My lunch on Wednesday consisted of a half dozen dried apricots around noon and six large after dinner mints spread over the afternoon.

 

There are animals out on the moor, although not in huge numbers.  I finally saw a squirrel.  Mom and I had noticed that we didn’t see any in the lake district, in spite of them showing up in Beatrix Potter’s books.  I saw a number of birds, mostly grouse – fat birds that make a lot of noise when they take flight.  A hare or rabbit crossed my path at one point.  I got a good few minutes’ entertainment out of some mid-sized bird of prey trying and failing to bring down a smaller bird.  At least once he got close enough to knock off a few feathers that slowly drifted down.

 

Much earlier than I was afraid I would do it, I started the long descent into a valley where I was to call the owner of White House Farm to come pick me up.  I was awfully muddy from the knees down, so I dawdled a little - reorganizing things and drying - before I called her.  She was there within minutes.  It was about quarter past 5, almost exactly 8 hours after I’d left.  It turned out the distance was actually a deal less than the 20 miles forecasted, closer to the 16 miles listed in the guide plus a fraction for going in a few circles and taking that side trip to the cross.

 

In minutes, I was sipping a cup of tea on a picnic table.  My bags still hadn’t arrived, so I figured there was no point going inside, as I had no dry clothes.  I scrubbed at my gaiters and boots with a broom under a water tap to get off the worst of the grime.  My hostess brought me out a cup of tea, which was wonderfully warming.  Around 6:30, she came back out and said I might as well come in and have a shower anyway.  While I was in washing up, the only outcome of that threatening low pressure system finally showed up in a short but heavy shower of rain.  Otherwise, the day had been full of brooding overcast, but nothing falling.

 

Alan still hadn’t shown up when I finished washing, so I put on my fleece vest and wrapped a towel around my waist and sat down to read.  He eventually rolled in at something like 7:30.  He was full of apologies.  I reassured him I was too happy with when I’d arrived to be upset with him for when he arrived.  I did say that I’d had my doubts about how my fleece vest and terry kilt would go over down at the pub, but in an obviously joking manner.  We talked about the practicalities of which of my bags needed to go into storage and which would move day by day.  He had a few other pointers to give me.  He gave my hostess the address of my Thursday night destination.  I left them talking when I went upstairs to pull out some real clothes.  I was very hungry, and wanted to get to the pub.

 

The pub turned out to be called the Peels Arms.  The sign had a picture of a fellow in Edwardian dress standing in the foreground with a police station with a constable out front in the background.  I asked a few people, but no one could tell me who Peel was or what was so special about his arms.

 

I had a couple of pints of good beer and a satisfactory dinner of what they called pork parmigiana.  It involved some nice roast pork, a sauce with cheese in it, a good baked potato, and some cauliflower that needn’t have been boiled for so long.  Before I knew all this and was still waiting for my meal to be delivered, I read over the walking plan for the next day.  About the time my meal arrived, a meeting started taking place at the neighboring table.  My hostess (has it become clear yet that I failed to get her name?) had told me she had a meeting to go to in the pub. 

 

I was about to have a gallery seat to Village democracy in action.  It exceeded my wildest dreams, as it was the first meeting of the planning committee for the September Plum Festival.  I learned later that everyone involved had done this together before, but from what I could see and overhear, there were some strong feelings about the wisdom or folly of various elements of past festivals.  Seeing as I’ve been involved in a certain amount of event based fundraising and Sara’s done even more, I was in a position to say that these folks basically knew what they were talking about.  Run away the best dinner theater I ever saw.  Village treats of this sort figure as frequent settings in the works of P.G. Wodehouse, and it did my heart good to know that they still go on.

 

I nursed my second pint in the hope of walking my landlady home and hearing more about her perspective on the meeting, but they had more wind than I had ale.  I walked back to the house and programmed today’s walking into the GPS, then to bed.

 

I haven’t even gotten to today yet, but it’s getting late.  There’s a phone connection in the room.  I’m going to try dialing up to AOL.  No pictures added yet for this installment.  I’ll try to slip some in the next time I get a high speed connection.  Sara has pointed out to me that among other limitations of the journal system I’m using, only AOL members can post comments.  If you have opinions or reactions you’d like to share, please feel free to email them to me directly – petemill@aol.com

 

Garmin Facts:  16.6 miles walked (agrees with official guide book, my arranger claimed it would be 20) in 6:35 walking with 1:28 resting 2.6 mph on the move seems to be my average for 2.1 mph total.  854 Meters climbed.