Your Mileage May Vary

Your Mileage May Vary

 

Back in the top brink, well fed on fish and chips and nursing my second pint.  I thought the place was busy last night, but it’s overflowing now.  Regardless, the atmosphere is too conducive to my muse, and besides, it’s Saturday night, I may want another pint. 

 

While I was first walking into Mankinholes from the adjoining village of Lummbutts, I saw lots of roadside parking spaces painted in and a large parking terrace.  There wasn’t a car in sight, so I assumed they did a big tourist trade in the summer or something like that.  They may well, but this pub fills every space on a Friday or Saturday night.

 

Here in Mankinholes, I’m staying at Cross Farm, so named, I suppose, for a stone cross of debatable age standing in one of the fields.  It’s a fairly posh place.  They gave me a good breakfast this morning.  The owner asked me what else I was doing after the Pennine Way.  She really perked up when I mentioned that Sara and I planned to spend time in Snowdonia.  She started fetching me photos of her and her husband on top of all sorts of unpronounceable peaks.  She tells me we could hardly have made a better choice, but that we shouldn’t walk all the time because there are good castles to see and other sightseeing as well. 

 

I’m sneaking up on describing today’s walk in much the same way I sneaked up on setting out for it.  I wasn’t putting foot in front of foot until about 9:30.  I took a long time getting my gear organized, a long time doing the GPS thing, and a long, though better spent time, talking with my hostess about Wales.  The fact is, from the descriptions I’d read and heard from the fearless four, it didn’t seem like much of a day of walking.  Believing Donald’s description of the walk to Ponden, I was playing with ideas about whether I might not call Alan to cancel my ride back to Cross Farm (his favored accommodations in Ponden were full, so I’m staying here again tonight – not knowing that, the fact that I’m in the same pub might have made it sound like I’d chucked walking, mightn’t it?) in favor of walking back – just taking a lazier path back for the last bit of it.

 

As it turns out, this was actually the roughest day so far.  I wound up walking much further than either the walking guide or Alan had suggested.  I’m learning that some of the walking distances are more traditional than actual.  The Way has been updated and rerouted over the years, but it’s still an article of faith that it is, for example, 20 miles from Edale to Crowden, even though if you measure it, it’s closer to 17.  Alan projected my walk for today at 14 miles, and it was actually 16 and change.  Also, far from there being one long descent and one long climb as I’d heard, there were about four of each.  They were all well worth making, but the difference between my expectation and the experience was a little draining.

 

Also, it was raining off and on.  Not hard enough to be a real problem, but enough to slick up most surfaces.

 

A lot of the walk today was over virtually featureless moor tops.  The only visual variety was that some of the grass clumps were yellowier and some were greener.  Particularly in a rainy haze with visibility below 300 yards, it was a little like being stuck in a repeating loop of landscape.

 

That’s not how it started, though.  Since I’d sneaked around the back way yesterday, I decided to go up the Calderdale Way this morning.  It’s a sandstone paved ramp that goes up the hill at a nearly one for one slope for more than 200 yards.  It was a little slick with rain and slug slime, so it took some focus just to keep from sliding back down.  Not too surprisingly, I had it to myself.  It wasn’t till mid afternoon that I saw other walkers out anywhere.

 

The climb led back up to the Pennine Way which started taking me towards a monument called Stoodley Pike that hangs over the valley.  It looks like a squat Washington Monument on a plinth.  Guidebook tells me it is 125 feet high and further informs me that it was meant as a celebration of peace when Napoleon was defeated.  My European History is wobbly, but apparently, it got started the first time they thought they had him, then he escaped and got the whole Europe conquering machine going again.  They halted construction until the final defeat (that one was Waterloo, right?) when they finished it, but not very well, because it blew over in a stiff wind a few years later.  Finally, they got it right a few years later and there it still stands.  On a clear day, you can see it from a long way off, but this morning, it kept reappearing and disappearing even as I walked towards it.  I snapped a few photos, one with and one without.

 

Didn’t take as many pictures today because I had again ingeniously left the big memory stick in the computer rather than putting it back in the camera.  Fortunately, this time, I had at least been clever enough to put the small memory stick in my backpack, so I slid that in and could get a limited number of snaps.  Before I’d climbed out of the valley, that included what has to be the real money shot for a photographer in Mankinholes.  There’s a cemetery from a departed Methodist church in the village.  The biggest gravestone there is a cleverly scaled model of the Stoodley Pike.  It’s not an exact scale copy, but was made with perspective in mind so when you stand in the right place, the closer smaller monument has the big one just over its shoulder and they look similarly proportioned.  Probably the least valuable picture I shot, because any photographer who noticed it would shoot it in a heartbeat, but it’s much more artistic than I usually get with a camera, so I was pleased with myself.

 

After admiring the pike, I started across the moor and was making great time.  I started a slow then a sharper descent through a pretty wood large enough that it might even have gotten a name in the US.  I’ve seen named woods here with fewer than 12 trees, but this one went on for almost a mile.  It took me all the way down to a bridge over a canal and a river.  The climb back out from there was memorable.  It was a little easier than the free climb up the Calderdale Way, but still testing.  The route description was a little hard to follow because of being out of date.  The whole area I was walking through was hit hard by industrial collapse, but it’s started to come back just the last few years.  Buildings the guide described as ruins are mostly either under construction or completely repaired.  In the end, I managed to see the ruins within the completed structures if you know what I mean.  Usually one is trying to do the opposite.

 

The rest of the day had, I’m going to say four more descents and climbs, all meaningful, though none as big as the first two.  One of the valleys had a stream running through it of unearthly beauty.  It really looked like mythical woodland creature habitat.  My photos give only the sketchiest notion of it. 

 

I called at a few more reservoirs.  A lot of them have a tiny castle that houses the spillway controls.  DC’s main reservoir has some castle bits on it as well, must have been a fashion for it.  These are usually standing 30 feet or so out in the water with a metal bridge tying them to shore with several courses of locked door on the way out and another heavylocked door at the entrance to the tiny castle.  They’re very fetching, but it seems like a lot of fuss.

 

This won’t be as exciting for you, but I had an actual lunch today.  Climbing out of one of the valleys, there was a sign for a shop that had general groceries and trail food.  One surprise to me about the trail is that while it calls on villages, it so far shuns full sized towns.  I hadn’t seen a shop since Edale.  I took advantage of the opportunity to stock up on dried apricots again – resisted buying any more Kendal Mint Cake.  I’m actually not out yet in spite of having given the Canadians one of my packets as a combination of mandatory cultural experience and going away present.  I also bought a nice steak and onion pie and a can of fizzy lemonade.  I had them on a picnic table outside the shop and set off again much refreshed.

 

At one point, I had an absolute pulse of company.  There were two cyclists, then a group of eighteen women.  I had time to count them because they were going uphill while I was stepping down, and they weren’t exactly flying up the hill.  Possibly going faster than I would have, of course.  The feature of running into them though was that there was a woman at the back whose voice and subsequently whose person I recognized from the pub the night before.  She and three of her friends had been in the pub and were just as confused by the whole order your food from a little window and tell them your table number routine as any ignorant foreign tourist.  They all clearly had English accents, so restaurant service may be changing in some parts of England.  I thought about trying to stop them to ask how we all happened to be in the same pub on Friday evening then walking different directions on a hill side Saturday afternoon, but they looked like they were using all their concentration on the mix of steaming up the hill and carrying on a loud discussion on political topics.

 

A little further on, I met another couple of cyclists resting on a wall.  I joined them for a slug of water, a little conversation, and a game of “Can Pete refold his map in a stiff wind?”  The last got so intricate that one of the cyclists offered to help me, but I told him honestly that I was enjoying the challenge.  I did eventually subdue the massive, flapping piece of paper.  I’m sure I looked ridiculous. 

 

Late in the walk, the Pennine Way joined the Bronte Way.  I had seen this on the map and had hoped that would mean easier going, but no luck.  Your English literary worshiper has to be willing to walk up and down hills and get his boots mucky.  The bit I was walking today went past a ruined farm called High Withins which is put out to be the inspiration for the house in Wuthering Heights.  A plaque at the site is quick to say that even before being ruined, the house on the site wouldn’t have looked anything like the house in the novel, but that its site accords correctly with blah blah blah.  I haven’t read that novel yet, and after the struggle I’m going through with Jane Eyre, it either grips me in a hurry or it’s history.  If I do make it through, I’ll at least be able to easily envision the backdrops. 

 

I was fairly shortly (although only after one more climb up and back down) at the corner where Alan was already waiting to give me a ride back to Cross Farm.  I thought I’d been meant to phone him when I got there, but he was waiting.  It was gratifyingly further to drive than I had walked.  The country roads here are just as narrow as they were back in the Lake District, and it was a genuine pleasure to be zipping along them without having a steering wheel under my white knuckles. 

 

Garmin facts:  16.5 miles in 6:21 walking and 1:20 resting.  2.6 mph walking average for 2.1 mph gross average.  911 meters climbed and another 12 or so to go back to the B&B for which I won’t take credit except for mentioning it here.

 

Tomorrow, Alan drops me at that corner again and I rejoin the Brontes for a walk near the house where they lived with their aunt who made them all so miserable that the ones who didn’t die of consumption had to seek the escape of writing classic novels.  The guide also says that sometime during the walk tomorrow, I’m likely to put the worst of the sloppy ground behind me.  If true, I won’t miss it.