14.9 miles today, and the weather was fine. The walk started beautifully, even before I left our room when I saw the sign on the back of the door. We went up the green hills to the village of Keld, and then kept climbing up to the Tan Hill Inn - the highest pub in all of the British Isles at 1732’ above sea level. Which sounds not very high, but I swear, there really has been a lot of hilly climbing and descending on this journey. I have to figure out soon how much I’ve gone up and down; my son has been deriding me ever so gently.
The walk along the green hills of the last bit of Yorkshire the path goes through was so pretty. Calendar highlights of English countryside pretty. Breathtakingly pretty. Then we made it the high moor pub and had refreshing lime & sodas. Dragging ourselves away from the convivial atmosphere of a pub full of Saturday walkers, cyclists, motorbikers, drivers, all enjoying the sunny but not too hot day, we continued our walk onto Sleightholme Moor.
The guidebooks describe this as a wet section of the Way, and even after a week’s record setting heatwave that is no joke! The peat ground is over saturated and squishy. It’s kind of fun to walk on the parts that are dry enough so you don’t sink into it because it springs you back up. But with the teeniest bit of moisture it sucks you in. There is no deviating from the path, and you are warned of this from the get go by a memorial to a man who died on the moor while birdwatching. No more explanation, so I spent the almost two hours we were hopping on grassy bumps and jumping over expanses of mud wondering whether it was a heart attack, a fall into a deep sinkhole, or if he was slurped into the gripping mud. Macabre stuff, which matched the many dead rabbits and dead birds we passed by today. Actually, everyday brings quite a lot of dead animals, I just don’t bring them to mind again when I sit down to reflect and write in the evening. There have been lambs, a badger, hawks, smaller birds, way too many rabbits to count, rats and mice. You can’t spend 6+ hours outside walking through landscapes without both life and death. But today seemed particularly bleak. I was centimeters away from squashing three little chicks when my trekking pole frightened them out from the heather. Thank goodness for some sudden agility and quick stepping.
Signs continue to warn you to follow the guideposts and stay on the correct side of them. Or else. The guideposts help you navigate the dryer and safer way through. We had to eat lunch while in the moor and found a small wooden bridge to sit upon to get out of the mud for 20 minutes. Finally a wider dirt track appeared, and that led us to fields and farms that in turn brought us into the outskirts of the village of Bowes. There were many lapwings very upset at us, we must have been near their nests as they flew around and around just over head making an awful noise. But they were beautiful to watch, and we moved through quickly to disturb as little as possible.
Bowes is at the end of the gap between bigger hillsides, an area used for thousands of years for travel. There is archeological evidence of stone aged peoples moving through here, Bronze and then Iron Age transportation routes connecting Ireland to Scandinavia, the Roman road that the A66 now sits upon, and in Bowes itself, the site of a Roman fort and the stones from it used to build a 12th century medieval castle of Henry II, now itself in ruins. It is an odd sensation to be walking across land, maybe even on some of the same routes, that so many throughout huge swathes of history have walked before me. What were they thinking about? What were their hopes, fears, comforts, hurts? How are we similar? The differences seem obvious, I prefer to think about our connections.
Today started in Yorkshire, went into Cumbria, and ended up in Durham County. The one pub in Bowes, the Ancient Unicorn, closed last autumn, so we arranged a pick up to nearby Cotherstone village, and the Fox and Hounds pub; it is amazing. Adorable village on the River Tees, fabulous food, extraordinarily welcoming host, the best rooms. I recommend very highly!!
