Traveling across and thinking about English counties

Just finished breakfast and am still sitting at the table because it’s a good typing height.  There’s a piece of furniture in my room that’s a good height for stand up typing, which I will try to mix in.  I start with this topic, because I was thinking over my Pennine walk yesterday afternoon, and I think the way I felt at the end of the day was driven more by the posture I had to adopt while typing and route plotting than by how long or rigorous the walking was.  I’m striving to be an ergonomic crank for the rest of my time over here, and see whether that doesn’t keep the swing in my stride.

 

The trip down here was surprisingly easy.  I did have one quick change of trains in Birmingham’s downtown station.  I’m fairly heavily packed since I knew I might get either winter or summer weather.  It was an adventure hauling everything, and of course my long distance train came in at platform 12 and the local train I needed out to the airport was on platform 1.  I saw more out of service escalators on my trip yesterday than you would see on an ordinary day riding DC’s metro.

 

I picked up the car and drove down on midsized roads to get a sense of what was near by and what it would be like to drive to it.  England suddenly became very small again, after stretching out into immensity while I was on foot. 

 

The only long stop I made was in Bourton on the Water, a very famous tourist spot in the Cotswolds.  Based on my sample, I would say the Cotswolds are everything people write about them. 

 

People write that the Cotswolds are full of beauty.  Bourton was lovely.  The architecture is appealing.  I can’t describe it properly, but most of the American macmansions that aren’t trying to look like French chateaus are trying to look like giant Cotswolds cottages.  Also, in BBC costume dramas, the good deserving working folk live in Cotswolds cottages.  They really are lovely, and the way they get knocked off shouldn’t be held against them.  A nice little river runs through town and is spanned by many bridges.  On the strength of this, some people write that Bourton is the Venice of England.  (I think Venice has merely been explained to such people, and in less detail than it has been explained to me.)

 

People also write that the Cotswolds have been developed for tourism for so long and to such an extent that they seem like theme park copies of themselves even though they are in fact the things themselves.  Other places I drove by or stopped at didn’t give me this sense, but this dart was quivering in the center of the board when it came to Bourton.  There’s hardly a business there that isn’t some use to a traveler.  The number of china ornaments available would fill all the décor space in one of those macmansions I mentioned earlier, and this isn’t a large place.  Bourton was crawling with people, though I noticed when I parked that the lot wasn’t even a third full.  Most of the people there between 10 and 70 years old, self included, drifted through with puzzled expressions, as though trying to work out exactly what we were doing there.  I was glad I’d stopped, but the minimum you can feed the meter for there is two hours, and I’m guessing the average stay or someone like me motoring by is under half an hour.  I think that says something.

 

I made it the rest of the way to Ashen Copse Farm where I am now staying.  If you look at a map, I’m in Oxfordshire, but the place has a Wiltshire address.  I don’t understand the whole county system here.  Administrative districts aside, it’s a pretty farm a mile or so from the village of Coleshill and close to lots of other places that should have good walking.  I’m also quite close to the city of Swindon where I feel there must be an internet café of some sort.  This has been one real surprise to me of the trip.  I can’t remember the last time I’ve gone 3 weeks without seeing a Starbucks.  Pat Hodinott, who runs the farm and the B&B here, says she’s sure I’d find one in Oxford, which is nearly as close as Swindon, but I’m guessing Swindon will be more convenient if it can take care of me.  It’s more of a working city, less of a tourist draw.

 

Most nights, I’ll probably have dinner at the pub in Coleshill, which is a short walk away, permitting incautious quantities of ale should the mood take me.  Last night, though, they were closed.  I wound up at a pub called The Trout in the nearby town of Lechlade.  I got there before they started serving dinner, and Pat had given me a tourist map of the town, so I pieced together about a 3 mile walk around.  I found it to be a real beauty spot without the veneer of artificiality I picked up in Bourton.  I did walk by a few newer developments (housing estates in British).  Even they had artificial Cotswolds architecture, but with the models just down the block, they did a better job of it and they didn’t look out of place. 

 

Lechlade straddles Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, and Gloustershire.  Again, I’m not sure what practical effect this has, but the town makes a lot of noise about it, and it meant they had signs up at each county boundary crossing.  Along the Pennine Way, I had to look at the addresses on leaflets for places where I was to figure out where I’d gotten.  The only reason I think about this at all is that some of them make so little sense.  Small towns or villages are usually associated with and have in their address the name of some nearby city.  However, it isn’t necessarily the nearest city.  I think some of this has to do with how property was carved up in the middle ages.  That is, the noble in charge of some city 30 miles off might have won the village from the noble in charge of the closest city in some kind of card game, joust, or battle 700 years ago.  The mailing addresses in this village still have Richmond (or pick another city name) in them, even though other villages that are much closer to Richmond have some other place name. 

 

I only go on about this, because it has gotten me completely confused about where I actually was.  While doing the Pennine walking, I had fabulous maps of the local area, but never had a good idea of where I was in relation to the rest of the country. 

 

At any event, I had a nice walk around Lechlade then had a pizza for supper by the Thames in a beautiful evening.  I was again surrounded by boat people of the English variety.  Lechlade is the highest navigable water on the Thames.  Vacationers with narrowboats tie up here much the way I saw them tied up off the canal in East Marton.  Then they walk up to the pub and get in line in front of me. 

 

Part of my walk last night used a bit of the Thames path which looked like it would be a very congenial stroll all the way to London.  Looking at the pace of the current flow, I think the water I watched go by at dinner last night will be rolling under Tower Bridge sometime tomorrow afternoon.  I don’t think I actually will walk back to London in the end – I’m just fed up with the different lodging every night game – but I probably will walk it to Oxford one day. 

 

Oh, I need to crow to someone about this.  As I was walking along, I picked up a candy wrapper, because it seemed a pity to have litter in such a nice spot.  Before long I came upon an abandoned shopping bag and proceeded to fill it with litter during the rest of my walk.  I felt I was giving a little something back.

 

Garmin facts:  The fact is, I didn’t even bring it along when I was walking, but I was going a good clip over easy, level ground.  Couldn’t have averaged less than 3 miles an hour and walked for just over an hour, so let’s say 3 miles.  Also, a mile poking around Bourton, but that was so slow, I don’t even think it counts.

 

Pat has been back through.  She’s loaned me a road atlas of Swindon and looked up for me where there are a couple of internet cafes.  One of them is right next to a theater, so I’ll also look into whether there are any shows to see.  I think since I’m already headed in that direction that I’ll probably carry on to a place called Pewsey and walk along the Kennet and Avon Canal.  I’m curious to see just how far I can get on the flat.

Last but not least, in fact, most

Still on the train, having just passed through Lancaster.

 

Got up Sunday morning and plotted in the walk for my last day on the Pennine Way.  The route promised to be right around 20 miles.  For whatever reason, I had a crisis of organization and took longer getting everything packed out than I’d taken any other day.  Donald and I had decided to walk together.  His wife in Canada had my mobile number and would call if she got word from John.  It wound up doing us little good, since most of the day we were in the dark so far as Vodafone was concerned.

 

The early part of the walk ran along the Tees through just plain gorgeous countryside.  We touched at a couple of nice waterfalls.  The weather was warm and fair.  Even at home, we would have called it scattered clouds.  The word had gotten out, too.  During this day, I saw three times the number of other walkers I saw in the whole of the previous 11 days.  It really felt like the last day of the long walk would be a very soft snip. 

 

Of course, there had to be a few surprises.  Early in the afternoon, we were still along the river bank, but there were patches of heavy rock fall to scramble over.  Later, we climbed up 30 meters or so of tumbled rock to cross the head of the Tees and walk into Cumbria.  It was basically like doing all the bits of Old Rag where you need to climb all in one go.  There was a long stretch across pastures then some fairly blank moor, much of it a military firing range.  Late in the day, though, we got a big treat.  The trail walks right up to and then hugs the edge of a massive gorge.  The views were spectacular. 

 

After that, it was just a long downhill into the village of Dufton.  This ought to have meant it was just an easy stroll, but I’d finally developed a few aches, just in the muscles above my knees.  They made walking down any kind of slope somewhat painful and twingey.  Manifestly, I think my body had figured out this was slated to be the last day of walking, and it wanted to make sure I didn’t change my mind. 

 

I wasn’t too distracted to enjoy the trip, though.  This next bit will mean more to Mom than anyone else.  As I was walking down, I suddenly got a strong whiff of what smelled like coconut oil.  Through a low spot in the wall to the left, I saw a big field thick with gorse.  Mom and I had been told in Keswick that a big patch of gorse would smell of coconut, but we’d never noticed it.  On a warm sunny day it turned out to be entirelytrue. 

 

I bid farewell to the Pennine Way at the Stag Inn in Dufton.  I called my host at Millbeck House in Moreton.  He said I’d be wisest to have dinner at the Stag and then he’d pick me up around 8:30.  I had a nice bit of roast beef and a few pints.  I shared a table with Donald and some of the rest of his party.  His son John was there in Dufton waiting for him.  I also properly met Paul, the fellow who was walking the whole way with whom I’d overlapped in Malham and Tan Hill.  He hadn’t been able to get the North volume of the guide, so I passed him mine as well as a little jar of tiger balm. 

 

Garmin Facts:  21 miles in 7:59 walking 1:22 resting.  Moving average 2.6 mph.  Overall average 2.2 mph.  719 meters climbed. 

 

My host for the evening showed up right on time.  He got himself a pint and he, Paul, and I sat talking about walking for a while.  Then he drove me back to his B&B.  I’ve never been made to feel more like a guest who just happened to be paying.  We had a great, wide ranging conversation on the way.  He is also a former serviceman, though he carried it a bit further than I did.  We talked guardedly at first about world events in which our two great nations have entangled themselves, then opened up a bit when we found we both agreed we had stepped in it.  I had a highly therapeutic soak in a hot tub.  I couldn’t think of a single thing they could have provided that I lacked.  I fell asleep under my book.

 

This morning, I had a lovely breakfast, then got a ride to Penrith Station.  My host had even called the rail company and figured out what trains would be best for me.  More good conversation on the way and I’ve been rolling south quite comfortably ever since.  Before I post this, I’ll dig back out the details.  I would recommend anyone wanting to tour the lakes or the dales to consider using these folks as a base.

 

 

I just ran a little spreadsheet of my walking so far.  It comes to a hair over 230 miles.  I expect to largely take a day off from walking today as I get myself resettled in Wiltshire.  I look forward to not relocating every day.

 

Missing persons and the trials of a hotelier

I’m writing this on the train that just pulled out of Penrith station.  You’ll find in the course of the narrative why I got no writing done Saturday or Sunday nights. 

 

I decided in the end not to hitch back to the trail head from the hotel.  The walk along the road was a significant chunk of the whole day’s walk, and I felt sure that on Saturday morning, traffic would be lighter.

 

At breakfast at the hotel, I wound up sitting near a large group of people – two men, two women, three girls, and a boy.  I’m guessing two of the adults were siblings.  I saw them going over a clipboard of pages each of which had a photo of a building and then a bunch of data presumably about that building.  I heard them talking about times of day they were to be at different places.  I concluded they were shopping for a property somewhere in the area and were somehow striving to make it a holiday trip as well.  I walked out while they were still trying to figure out how to sneak in a couple of the tourist things the kids wanted to do.

 

The walk along the road was unpleasant, but I was right about less traffic.  I was also walking along the south side of the road so as to be facing traffic, and the verge there was wider and smoother.  I was back to the trailhead and walking away from the road in a little over half an hour.  This put me back out on Bowes Moor.  Fortunately, it wasn’t an exceptionally soggy stretch.  Not a lot of scenery to talk about.  The weather was lovely, and the going was fairly easy. 

 

Midday, I walked by a couple of other reservoirs.  One of them was bordered by a bunch of nature reserve.  There were piles of birds and rabbits.  I had to step right over a nesting bird at one point.  I think she was a grouse hen, but I hadn’t seen one so close before, so I’m not sure.  Her little ones were out on an expedition on the ground around her, so I stepped very carefully.

 

After the reservoirs, I was back into pasture.  I ran into a group of two couples somewhere between 65 and 75, I believe. I talked with one of the fellows for a while.  He had walked the Way in its early days – before most of the trail improvements I had benefited from.  He was still very complimentary to me for doing it at all, even if it was softened up.  I was impressed with the details he remembered about particularly troublesome and particularly pleasant parts of the trip.  They were making a little slower time than I was, but they were walking the same path.  One thing this trip has done is harden my determination to stay in shape. 

 

It really seemed like no time at all until I was walking down into Middleton in Teesdale where I was to stop for the night.  Middleton is an extremely pretty little town that was built on lead mining, so probably at the cost of a large number of lives.  Mining ended a long time ago, and now it’s a farming center and tourist destination.  The few miles of the Tees west of Middleton has a range of walking paths and is very popular.

 

I stayed at the Teesdale Hotel, which had been trading as an inn under a variety of names since the 17th century.  I checked in and got into town clothes then wandered around admiring buildings and parks and taking advantage of a lot of benches.  I ran into Donald who was in town waiting for his son John to show up.  They had scheduled to meet in Middleton on Saturday afternoon then walk on to Forest in Teesdale to catch back up with Philippe, Gary, and Pieter.  I had afternoon tea in the bakeshop, and when I came out, Donald was still there waiting. 

 

I poked around a little used book shop and picked up a 1967 guide to the Cotswolds I thought it might be interesting to compare to what I find there now. 

Some of the members of the group I’d sat near at breakfast were in the same shop and edged away as though afraid I’d been following them.

 

Literary side note:  I did finish Jane Eyre, and I feel like I did two traditional British ordeals – the Pennine Way and it.  I was feeling fairly done with the Brontes, but when I finished it, I still wanted to do some reading, so I went ahead and dipped in to Wuthering Heights.  Turns out it is very engaging, and I do feel a slight connection to it having walked over the very moors in which it is set. 

 

Another slow circuit of the market and I still found Donald waiting.  In the end, John never did show up.  Donald wound up booking himself a room at the Teesdale Hotel and making periodic calls home to Canada to try to get news.  What seemed likeliest was that John had landed in Manchester as planned and found that the bus service up to Durham on a Saturday wasn’t running. 

 

We wound up sitting in the lounge bar of the hotel talking and reading.  There were electricians working on what looked like four or five sedimentary layers of fuse boxes and circuit breakers usually hidden behind wall panels there in the bar.  The general manager saw me looking at the work and stopped by.  He rested a hand on my shoulder and said “You didn’t know you’d booked in to Fawlty Towers, did you?”

 

In the course of the evening, we became acquainted.  Turns out he worked for years as an engineer, but got tired of the commute down to Manchester.  A friend of his from Newcastle has had some success as a property developer.  When he bought the hotel in Middleton, he was offered the job of managing it.  He’s been at it just 5 months and has come to discover that while the building has a fabulous basic structure and unbeatable location, a lot of the systems need major repair. 

 

His Saturday had started with a plumber working on the auxiliary hot water boiler.  This introduced a leak that shorted a pump that shut down electrical power to half the hotel.  This took much longer to diagnose than it’s taking me to tell.  Eventually, they found the fault, took the pump out of the electrical circuit and had everything working again.  Not before the cook had to make me a lamb curry by candle light, apparently.  He was just about all in, and conversation with a couple of strangers appealed to him.  He told us much of the story I’ve recounted in the past two paragraphs and said if he had too many more days like this he’d be packing it in.  I stepped into my role as Perspective Man and suggested that in the old days, he probably burned just as much time and generated just as much frustration in just six or seven days worth of commuting.  This legitimately seemed to make him feel better.  He wound up giving Donald and myself a tour of the cellars, including the beer cellar where it is a year round 50 degrees from the depth and an underground stream by the look of things.  He also showed us the roots of the staircase – all English oak and painted in the public parts of the hotel.  He wants to get the paint off to show the wood again.  The most interesting bit was that some of the cellar doors still have their original, wooden bodied locks, still working.

 

In the end, we all talked till nearly 10, by which time I was nearly exhausted.  A little bit of reading and to sleep.

 

Garmin Facts:  12.2 miles in 4:48 walking, 44 resting.  2.5mph moving.  2.2 mph overall.  524 meters climbed.

Pete learns to read a table

My short walk today sorted itself into three chapters.  It opened with a boggy bit across open moor.  It wasn’t as boggy as yesterday afternoon.  I only had to broad jump once.  Next there was a bit across open fields and old cart roads, alive with rabbits and birds.  Nothing spectacular, but easy walking.  Finally, there was the walking along a busy highway bit.  That wasn’t my favorite.

 

On my trip materials, Alan had written that the Bowes Moor Hotel was on the Pennine Way.  (OK, actually, he hadn’t.  He’d written that Tan Hill was on the way, which it was.  I got confused.  I’m leaving the error in here, because it caused me to behave and feel in a particular way.  Alan’s notes made it very clear that I had to walk along the road, I was just too dazed to read them correctly.  All my fault.)  There’s a spot a mile or so short of the village of Bowes where the Way splits, so I phoned the hotel from that decision point to find out which branch they’re on.  Turns out they’re actually about two miles west on the A66 from where the trail crosses that busy road.  It didn’t wind up being difficult walking, but it was unpleasant.  People really fly down these roads, and I’m sure that having lived the last 10 days at a walking pace makes it seem all the faster to me.

 

Eventually, I did get here and checked in.  I’m in a neat but small garret room.  Looks like the kind of place that would be held special for hobbits in middle earth.  At one end of the room, even I need to mind my head.  I got out of my boots and rested my legs for a few minutes then put on my town shoes and caught a cab to Barnard Castle.

 

It turned out to be a really beautiful little town.  First stop was tourist information where they told me my best bets for internet connection were the newspaper and the library.  As it turned out, in either case they could get me time on an internet connected computer but that I could not hook up my own.  As a result, I could review my email and make sure there were no emergencies – there weren’t – but I couldn’t put up journal entries. 

 

After taking care of email, I pottered around the castle ruins for a while.  It’s a pretty big pile built into a bend in the river Tees.  The rest of the town is then wrapped around the castle at about the same angle as the river bend.  Makes for a nice combination of town and landscape.  There’s a circle at the south end of the market street with a round, fairly pointless building in the middle of it, maybe it gets used for something on market day.  It is decorative. 

 

I was just poking around the streets and saw a sign for a barber.  I started this trip wanting a haircut, and have of course just gotten shaggier by the day.  I dotted into Just Cuts, Sarah Winter proprietress.  I waited, pretending to read my book while listening to the conversation as two young boys got haircuts, then it was my turn under the scissors of what I sincerely hope was the skinniest and the most wired lady barber in county durham, if not the whole of the north of England.  She gave me a good haircut and was charming.  She’s interested in a trip to America and wanted me to give her ideas of where she ought to go, but she had no very clear notion of what she hoped to do beyond just being in America.  With that agenda, I aimed her at New York.  It was a little unnerving to have all that nervous energy radiating behind me and knowing it had sharp things in its hands.

 

I had almost intentionally dawdled around till I thought the museum would be closed.  I couldn’t drum up any real enthusiasm to tour the art, but the building and grounds promised to be lovely.  I walked over there and saw that I’d pegged it – museum closed, grounds open.  I walked around for a bit until it started to cool off, then I grabbed a cab back here.  Tomorrow I’m on to Middleton in Teesdale.  I’m hoping to catch some kind of ride back to the trail head so I don’t have to open the day with two miles along the highway.  Even if I can’t dodge it, it ought to be a bit quieter on a Saturday morning.

 

It’s hard to believe I have only two days walking left.  I’ve got a complex mixture of relief and a sense that I’ll miss walking along the moors.  The practicalities of waking up somewhere new every morning and trying to sort out where I flung everything the afternoon or night before are getting old.  On the whole, the Pennines have been very good to me.  I’ve had to use my sunscreen more often than I’ve had to use my raingear. I’ve seen some wonderful scenery, and collected a fair number of characters.

 

I think I’ll close for now.  If I stay awake for it, there’s the second installment on TV tonight of an absolutely breathless documentary on the history of London.  I saw the first bit last Friday night in Mankinholes, it was thoroughly diverting, partly for the suspense of wondering whether the narrator was just going to burst from enthusiasm.

 

Garmin Facts:  8.9 miles in 3:11 walking and 21 minutes resting.  2.8 mph on the move.  2.5 mph total.  250 meters climbed.

It's like flying

I sit now in the pub of the Tan Hill Inn where I am staying tonight.  It’s a warm, friendly place.  You’re here either because you walked here or because you live nearby which is to say middle of nowhere.  Everybody asked where I’d walked from and had stories about their own walking.  A foursome from Norwich recommended that if I wanted some flat walking during my last days in England I could do worse than walk around their county. 

 

I’ve just had a perfectly competent fish and chips, but how can I easily give you a sense of the place?  It’s the first time I was comfortable coming right down to the pub in my traveling clothes without a wash up and change.  They’ve got a website if you want a flavor of it.  I haven’t seen it myself, but it’s on the wall here:  www.tanhillin.co.uk.  One thing you can say when you’re eating here – you’re in the best restaurant for miles in any direction.

 

Dinner last night was a little more elaborate.  I was at the Indian restaurant in Hawes.  I had a lamb dish the name of which I cannot recall, but the menu said it was Persian influenced and a side of spicy Okra.  I had a sense they don’t get much call for the latter.  I stuck to my brief ride on the wagon by drinking nothing but near beer.

 

Good breakfast at Ebor House.  It was the first B&B I stayed in with lots of modern art.  I asked the proprietress about it.  Turned out she has a son and daughter both artists.  I settled up for the laundry service and walked away smelling sweetly, if a little strongly, of English laundry powder.

 

I finally came up with a good analogy for the kind of walking I’ve been doing.  It’s quite a bit like a cross country flight.  Each stage of the walk starts with a climb of some magnitude up to cruising altitude.  Once that is reached, it’s a lot less work, just the occasional drop or climb to avoid turbulence as it were.  Then, there’s the descent into an airport.  Just like flying, on an easy day, you basically climb once, cruise, and land once.  On a more challenging day, I have to stop and change planes at a few airports – that is, I have to come back down to a low level then climb back up for a second cruise.  Usually, there’s some kind of reward for the descent and climb back out, but sometimes it’s just drudgery.  Finally, you come down for the last landing of the day and your overnight stay.

 

One more point in the analogy’s favor – if you have good clear weather, you get great views during the climb and the approach for landing.  If the weather’s socked in you don’t see much.

 

On that plan, today’s walk had me taking off from Hawes in a modest overcast and mist.  I had decent views back at the town and its environs, but colors faded beyond half a mile.  It was a steep climb through fields.  I was struck again by the beauty of the fields and walls.  I’ve convinced myself it’s all a matter of successive approximations.  My theory, is that somebody 800 years ago build a really ugly barn on such and such a spot.  600 years ago, it started to bother someone, and he or she built a better barn.  Apply this theory to the entire landscape, and you get Yorkshire.  The rhythm of the walls harmonizes with the hills they’re built against.  If you think I’m exaggerating, come have a look for yourself then tell me I’m wrong.

 

The first cruise took me across a huge moor.  I had a dried apricot and water break in a little wind shelter at the summit.  It was quite a bit higher than P-y-G, but no where near the sweat to get to because it was such a smooth, long climb.  Coming down the other side was a little steeper and boggy, but my heroes the path pavers had been there, so I could zip by looking at the evil black pudding on all sides. 

 

I ran into a foursome from Derbyshire who were walking the opposite direction.  By the look of them and who was walking with whom, I pegged them as a middle aged couple, their daughter, and her husband.  They asked me whether I was traveling with four other fellows, and I knew I was closing in on the Canadians. 

 

My next landing place was a town called Thwaite – which I am told means clearing in the woods.  (Mom – I’ve also learned that “Wick” at the end of a place name means they have a market.)  My guide mentioned that there was a very good tea shop there.  I knew I’d catch up there.  Well, the fellows managed to surprise me.  I actually found them a half a mile short of Thwaite, napping in the sun on their ground cloth by the side of the trail.  Philippe was the only one awake, but he woke up the rest of the crew.  They told me they had heard the hostel at Keld (the normal stopping place for the day) was full.  They didn’t want to struggle on to Tan Hill, so they were just staying in Thwaite.  Who knew how long the sun would last, so they were taking advantage of it.

 

I walked on and stopped for a fruit cake and cheese tea.  Let me just say that I had expected more opportunities for this kind of mid day civilization stop and that they would have been welcome.  It was a wonderful break.  I heard Gary’s voice checking the crew in to the inn while I was finishing up my tea.  I paid up and met up with them out front.  We established that we will probably meet again in Teesdale.  I walked on while they were deciding whether to take a side walk or just find a place to nap away the rest of the afternoon.

 

The whole leg from Thwaite was gorgeous.  First the sequence of fields, if anything nicer than leaving Hawes.  Then I walked through a place with a bunch of wind beaten, sheep grazed trees growing in a thin crust of ground.  They looked like nothing so much as giant bonsais.  The turf had been recently cropped short, so it looked like the kind of moss often used around bonsais in a pot.  It all made me feel about one inch tall, but in a more favorable way than that phrase is usually used.  I was walking around and along the eastern side of a hill with a dale and a parallel hill to the east of me.  Views were just stunning.  It gave me a premium view on the limestone scars most of the hillside opposite had about 1/4 of the way from the top then the scree fields of broken limestone bits about ¼ of the way from the bottom.  In this clear day, the rock looked blue grey, but I knew from experience that through the usual haze, they looked violet and very decorative.

 

My path took me through reefs of wildflowers that looked like proto daffodils.  Probably really no kin – the foliage looked completely different, and that counts for more than the flowers.  Other parts of the walk, I was in the scree line of my own hillside.  That was a little unnerving and called for a lot of rock hopping.  Everything was actually pretty well settled – nothing like a field of slate would have been – but I couldn’t help thinking what a small splat I would leave if for some reason the rock decided to move while I was on it.  At the head of the dale opposite, there was a lovely sequence of waterfalls.  I didn’t even notice how many little climbs and falls I was doing to move along the hill, but it started to tell on my legs.

 

Fortunately, I landed soon on the outskirts of Keld, a tiny village the guide calls the most northerly village in Yorkshire.  I’m actually in a tiny projection of county Durham right now, if that matters to anyone.  I will be thankful to the people of Keld, and particularly to the friends of Christine Ball and Mary Aitken for a long time to come.  These two were sisters who loved distance walking, and after their deaths their friends put up a bench in their honor in a lovely little piece of parkland beside a small waterfall.  I had a very refreshing rest there.

 

Time was getting on, so I pulled myself up and started the climb for the leg to Tan Hill.  The early part of the walk was fine, no fireworks views like the leg from Thwaite, but easy walking, smooth steady climb.  About halfway through, though, I took a bridge over a tiny stream called How Gill.  All of a sudden, I was walking along a level part of the hilltop that was absolutely sodden.  The track was difficult to find, and even when I was sure I had it, I kept coming up perpendicular to 4-7 foot wide waterways full of oily water and obviously boggy at the bottom.  The last time I did any organized broad jumping was back in junior high.  I wasn’t very good at it then, and the run ups were easier and the consequences of failure less messy.  I cleared eight or ten of these and was starting to think I had to be lost, even though I was walking almost perfectly along the line I had programmed off the map this morning.  After one particularly challenging jump – on the landing from which I blush to admit I finally fell down for the first time, on a miraculous little bit of dry ground – I found myself standing up right next to a very narrow post with waymarks on it showing I had arrived perfectly on the line of the Pennine Way.

 

Now, in the chapter on Keld to Bowesin my book, there was a veiled reference to the fact that most through hikers going all the way to Kirk Yetholm take a different route for this part, but it is strangely silent on why.  In the text supplied to go with this section of the walk, my guide Tony Hopkins (I doubt it’s the actor, but I refuse to look at the about the author and dispel all possibilities) tells me about the remains of disused coal mines on the opposite hillside.  He tells me about the birds I’m likely to see.  There’s some other fluff.  Frankly, I think he could have edited some of that stuff down and mentioned that I was likely to find myself in the middle of a trackless waste leaping over boggy streams at the edge of my range and endurance.  This patch only lasted about ¾ of a mile, but it looms large in my memory of the afternoon.

 

Finally, the ground became more groundlike again and I climbed a little to reach the top of Tan Hill, which goes and throws a wrench into my whole airplane trip analogy because the inn here is bang at the top of the hill, so you have to imagine that I’m staying in some kind of flying hotel.

 

That about brings us up to date.  Tomorrow is supposed to be easy walking, so I’m planning to take a side trip to the town of Barnard Castle.  Fellow in the pub tonight told me a visit to the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle would be worthwhile.  I’ll also have another try for a cybercafé.  I hadn’t realized quite how well I was getting away from it all.

 

Cheers.

 

Garmin Facts:  17.1 Miles walked in 7:00 walking and 1:29 resting.  Moving average 2.4 mph.  Overall average 2.0 mph.  1,065 meters climbed – no wonder I was tired.

Quest for clean clothes

Still sitting in the parlor of Ebor House, listening to my laundry being done in the back room.  That’s part of why I keep sitting here working away.  I’m in my walking shorts, a tee shirt, and my polartech vest.  I could go out to eat in this, but I’ve got a fighting chance of getting long pants back before restaurants close, so I’m holding out.  I’m not starving because I bought myself a packet of what are called Chorley Cakes at the post office shop in Horton this morning.  I had two of them during a break on the trail and two more with cocoa when I arrived here.  They were a light, medium crisp pastry filled with piles of currants.  They weren’t habit forming or anything, but they were pretty good.

 

I had stopped in the post office shop partly for such provisions, but mostly because I noticed while unpacking last night I had not left the key to my lodgings in Malham in the room as I had thought.  I found them in one of the many pockets I have on my hiking togs.  I meant to buy an envelope and postage to mail it back, but the woman who ran the shop said her neighbor’s son works at the Buck Inn and offered to deliver it to him.  I thanked her kindly, put my Chorley Cakes in my pack, and hurried along.

 

I hurried all day because Hawes is the largest town the trail calls on, and it was becoming urgent I find a Laundromat.  When Mom and I were at Dove Cottage, one of the things we were told was that the great poet tromped all over the hills and rarely washed either himself or his clothes.  I’m here to tell you that unless something has changed about people in the last hundred years, he was a smelly poet. 

 

Anyway, I wanted to get here as early as possible in the hopes of finding a Laundromat open.  When I asked my hostess at the Ebor where to find such an establishment, she told me there was one but that for a modest fee she would do my laundry.  Bonus points.  I still need to go out and see about some kind of broadband connection, but at least one chore has taken care of itself.

 

The other reason I hurried through today was that there were fewer real attention getting features.  There were some lovely views and some mucky bits.  I got to watch a shepherd an his dog at work on a nearby hillside for part of the walk.  It was a mostly agreeable rolling walk, either modestly uphill or modestly downhill with only a few steeper portions in either direction.  A lot of the track was very uneven, and taking it fast with few rest breaks was hard on my legs, but I’m confident they’ll be fine after a rest.  This may finally be a short entry.

 

I walked most of the afternoon with the Canadians.  When we got here to Hawes, they realized they had actually booked rooms at the Green Dragon in Hardraw, famous for its waterfall, less well known for being another 3 kilometers beyond Hawes.  I left to find my digs while they were still deciding whether to change lodgings or walk on to Hardraw.  It had been a fairly easy day’s walk, but there’s something about thinking you’re done that makes any further seem like a struggle.

 

Really not much else to report about today, and my computer battery is closing in on empty.  No news on the laundry front, so I think I’m braving Hawes in shorts and a fleece pullover. 

 

Garmin Facts:  14.3 Miles in 5:16 moving only 36 min resting for 2.7 mph moving and 2.4 mph overall.  481 meters climbed.

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.