Wolds Way Day 4

Huggate - Settrington Beacon

The chef popped out during breakfast to deliver my packed lunch.  ‘Did you have the poached egg?’ she asked.  We didn’t.  ‘It was Dan’s first go at cooking one.  I asked him how he found out how to do it.  He said he Googled it.’

The original plan for the day had been to meet at the Middleton Arms in North Grimston but the pub wasn’t going to be open so we had to re-plan.  Instead we would meet in Wharram le Street and decide what to do from there.  The day was forecast to be warm and sunny while the next day would be heavy rain so it would be better not to leave too much for the following day.

Open fields and lanes, over which a kestrel hovered, unbothered by me, took me easily to Fridaythorpe.  A house on the edge of the village bore a blue plaque informing passers-by that therein dwelt ‘Lance Moxon, the first person in the Wolds to start collecting antique washing machines.’  Clearly it was a special place now that almost everyone in the Wolds collects antique washing machines.  Presumably.

I’d never thought much about Fridaythorpe – an unprepossessing place with a main road hammering through it – but the area around a pretty pond was very pleasant.  Fish swum in the open water and swallows swooped down to drink from it – having only recently emerged from its depths after their over-winter slumbers at the bottom, if you believe the old tales.  I took a diversion to the attractive church, which fortified me for the route round the distinctly industrial animal feed plant at the end of the lane.  It was soon past and I was into beautiful dales again where curlews called with their electronic phone sounds.  At the foot of Worm Dale is a piece of land art, Time and Flow, a swirl of banked up earth.  Unfortunately the tops of the banks were covered in long grass which rather spoiled the effect.  Less disappointing was the next in the series of poetry benches which described walking down the valleys as moving ‘in the ghost of water.’  Thixendale, the village, looked very pretty.  I couldn’t see Dave and Sue at the Cross Keys and resisted the lure of peanut butter cookies for sale outside someone’s house, so I didn’t stop.  Instead I found a sunny hillside to sit back amongst the wildflowers – mainly daisies, buttercups and thistles, but also on closer inspection many tiny flowers whose names were and are beyond me – and to admire the views.

Further on, a couple coming the other way asked where they would get to if they kept walking.  ‘Erm, the west coast,’ I suggested, before pointing out Thixendale on the map.  They had come from Wharram Percy, the abandoned mediaeval village, which was where I was heading next.  The grey ruins of the church of St Martin’s stood out at the bottom of the valley and hurried my steps.  There was no one around as I arrived and stood watching swallows drinking from the pond in front of the church.  It was all tranquil and calm.  The place didn’t immediately have the effect I had imagined, some kind of rush of antiquity.  The church was in use for a couple more centuries after the village was deserted and so seems rather more modern.  The bulk of the old houses are slightly further up the hillside and are covered in grassland, making them little more than ripples in the ground.  Nevertheless, as I walked around and read the information boards, my imagination slowly sparked into life and by the time I walked out, my head was swimming with fantasies of what it would be like to have lived there five centuries ago.

The official Wolds Way route climbs up to the road to get to Wharram le Street but I had read that Wharram Quarry was now a nature reserve, famed for orchids and butterflies, and so I took a diversion that way.  It seemed unpromising at first as the path followed the old quarry trackbed past signs telling you to keep out.  I hit the road and assumed that there was no public access until, happily, I discovered the actual entrance.  The quarry was a wide open space covered in scrubby plants and flowers.  I dodged the nettles at the gate and wondered how I was supposed to approach it.  The board promised bee orchids somewhere amongst all the tiny plants spread out in the acres of green.  Without much hope, I plodded a kind of circuit of the area.  Near the entrance I found early purple orchids still not fully in flower but that was it for orchids until right near the end when I spotted some yellow things.  These turned out to be common twayblade.  Not a bee orchid, but a new one for my list anyway.

As arranged, Jill was at Wharram le Street.  I was a little ahead of schedule and given the forecast I thought it was a good idea if I could knock off a few extra miles while the weather was good.  We re-arranged to meet at Settrington Beacon, another 4km along the route.  It would make the wet day a little shorter.  Good paths led me along fields and through a sheepfarm.  Mostly the land had been devoted to crops with few livestock areas.  Walking through a sheepfarm made it feel more like the Peak District.  There were some fallow fields higher up, overgrown with campion.  Here I saw a hare, staring at me from the undergrowth with one dark eye.  When I raised my camera it padded heavily and quickly up the track and away.  Passing a field of oilseed rape I startled a hen pheasant who was followed by a stripey, peeping chick.  In the woods other pheasants gave off cries like old-fashioned car horns.  Near the end of my route for the day I was met by Jill coming down to meet me, which was a welcome surprise.

The Star at Weaverthorpe, our accommodation for the next two nights, wasn’t open but as we walked up to the back door we were greeted by a cheery hello from an upstairs window.  The little girl who saluted us was quickly joined by her mother, Ali, who jogged down to let us in.  Things were fairly free and easy, and Ali was happy to let us have a drink in the beer garden at the front before we rushed up to our rooms.  While still having our drinks we were joined by Rick, who was accompanying me on the final two days, and Tracy, who is local at was setting up a ‘glamping’ site in the village (see yorkshire-wolds.org.uk.  They were both paint-spattered from decorating the interiors of some camping ‘pods’.

We went our separate ways to get scrubbed up for dinner – Tracy would be re-joining us later – and met up again in the bar.  One of the signature meals was the pizza – about a metre long oval of thin, crispy base covered in lovely toppings.  I had the ‘Godfather’ (lots of meat), though I had been tempted by the ‘Jambo’ (named after one of the pub dogs, a Great Dane).  Pete, who was also accompanying me on the next two days, also turned up and all of us went out, carrying our beers, to have a look round Tracy’s new site.  It was looking good and her ambition is very admirable.  A number of pods were almost ready to go, the toilet/shower block (made of two shipping containers bolted together and clad in wood) was ready to fit out, and there were a number of old railway carriages that were next on the list for refurbishment.  It was a little cold out in the fields so we retired to the bar to tuck into more tasty Wold Top ales.