Arnside Hostel Weekend Day Three

Ray’s peremptory ‘Philip!’ finally dragged me out of my sleep.  We were scheduled for another 8am breakfast but I had been sleeping soundly while the others got ready.  In the end I was a couple of minutes early – which had the bonus of my getting a pot of coffee first.

The start of the walk was a little drive away, mostly in the direction of home.  Haydn was heading on his own way to pick up his caravan so we bade him farewell and loaded up our cars.  First port of call was the Bakehouse, where Martin and I picked up pies.  A pretty blonde girl who had been in the Albion the night before was serving us and seemed a little unsure about what pies were available and what each in the stack of freshly cooked ones was.  Maybe she had been on the wine.  Thankfully we each got our first choice of pork and black pudding pie.  Marvellous.

In setting my sat nav, I hadn’t been quite sure where the car park for the start of the walk was.  I had guessed and unsurprisingly, it turned out, got it wrong.  Luckily it was in an obvious place so we quickly turned round and got parked up.  While we were getting ready, Alec kept walking backwards and forwards looking confused.  ‘Anything wrong?’ I asked.  ‘I’ve left my bag back at the hostel.’  Ray then piped up.  ‘I can’t find my trainers, I must have left them at the hostel.’  Eric whipped his phone out, the one phone with any signal, and Alec gave them a call.  Yes, the bag was there.  Weighing up the options, he decided that, as there was nothing he needed immediately from the bag, he would drive back up again later in the week.  We would have to share our water and hope it wouldn’t rain too heavily, Eric’s lightweight kagoule being the only spare.

There was a path out of the car park but it wasn’t the route I had marked on my map (I couldn’t find the maps I had printed off – back at the hostel as well? – so I was using one Eric had handily done).  Instead we walked a short way up the road and out the back of a farm.  It was a bright and sunny day but there was a biting wind keeping the temperature down.  Behind the farm the land rose steeply through patchy woodland.  Our route was somewhere amongst it but at the exact spot I’d marked, we struggled to see a way through.  A quick change of plan was to do the route in reverse and hope to find the path from the other end.

It was a pleasant, gentle stroll, fairly level, that took us to the pretty village of Hutton Roof.  From there we turned sharply uphill for a steady climb to rockier ground.  There was quite a lot of vegetation – thorn trees, bracken, birch – so we were trammelled along a certain route.  Consulting my GPS I saw we weren’t quite on the route as planned, but were going the right way so it was nothing to worry about.  As we climbed higher, the views opened out to the east, from Ingleborough to the south, up through the Dales to the How Gills in the north.  A wall of limestone crags stood to our left though we weren’t on the rock ourselves.  It was easy going and we soon found ourselves on Newbiggin Crag and nearing our turning point.  A knot of paths made the route a little confusing here and for a moment, to Alan’s distress, it looked like the climb we had just done was in vain.  Just then a gate through the stone wall appeared and we could press on.

Nearing Farleton Knott a man and his two kids were coming the other way.  They were dressed for walking and the kids were having a good play, sword-fighting with their walking poles.  When we passed, the little boy turned to his daddy and asked, ‘What are they doing?’  A number of the rest of the party asked themselves the same question as we pushed up the final slope.  Our approach scared off another family who were messing about on top so we had the summit to ourselves.  There were excellent views all round, including the crags of Newbiggin, all the hills we had walked across over the previous two days, and the roaring M6 nearly below us.  The cold wind was making a bit of a nuisance of itself, so we didn’t hang around long, instead dropping into the lee of some crags for a bite to eat.  The pork and black pudding pies proved to be delicious.

We were walking below the tops of the crags along easy grassy ground before turning up along a track to take us to the road that splits Newbiggin Crags from Hutton Roof Crags.  We now traced the original ‘out’ leg as our return leg.  Once again my notion of limestone was confounded.  Instead of the bare, open pavements of the Yorkshire Dale, this area was again covered in beech, yew, bracken and brambles.  A narrow path wound its way through the dense scrub that didn’t permit any deviation from its course.  We weren’t heading towards my path, or the trig point at the summit.  Finally there was a chance to steer in the right direction, but even then that was curving too far east.  A sliver of path towards home seemed to present itself again but this rapidly ran out and we found ourselves pushing through thorns and undergrowth alongside a wall.  Gorse lashed us from below and spikes on the branches stabbed us from above.  Alan caught his hand on brambles and dropped a trail of blood behind him.

After rather too long battling through all this, with a final wall of hawthorn and gorse behind us, we were finally out in open country again.  There wasn’t much of a path but it led us in the right direction and eventually to a stile at a high stone wall.  Not much of a stile though – it was one-sided and we had to jump off the far side.  The path then led towards a fence with another broken stile – two stumps on either side of barbed-wire, plastic sacks wrapped round the barbs where you were to cross, and the top part of the stile lying on the ground.  This, the GPS indicated, was the crossing we should have spotted that morning.

In no time we were back at the cars and ready to head for home.  It had been an excellent couple of days with some good walks in very attractive scenery.  We had seen some wonderful sights and had comfortable accommodation in the hostel.  The pubs were very good, and the fish and chips had been outstanding.  Not to mention the pies.  A success all round.

Arnside Hostel Weekend Day Two

Considering the day’s drinking, I woke up feeling surprisingly well.  Skipping over the shower room’s muddy floor, I dodged around under the weak stream of water to finally clean off the preceding 24 hours’ filth.  The gang all met for breakfast around 8am and I had to do a small amount of pleading to get my share – having not signed in at the right time on arrival, my name wasn’t on the list, although I had paid up.  The food was pretty good, especially the sausages.

In defiance of the weather forecast, a little rain was falling outside, so we started the walk in waterproofs again.  There was a pause in the village as Martin and I picked up sandwiches for lunch from the Bakehouse, the rest of the group making do with whatever snacks they still had in their bags.  The first part of the walk took us along a disused railway line by the waterfront.  The weak drizzle had quickly cleared up so we stopped again to remove some gear.  On the fields to our seaward side, sheep were grazing on the salty grass.  Over the estuary we could make out the beginnings of the Coniston fells though their tops were hidden in cloud.  We passed some villages on our way and admired the impressive buildings and their enviable views across the bay.

Beyond Milnthorpe we turned into Dallam Park.  For the first time we were seeing more people around – pretty much all of them accompanied by dogs.  It’s a deer park and after some distance we spotted some pale fallow deer – not bushes as Eric thought – near the top of a rise.  They kept a close eye on us but didn’t seem perturbed by our presence, nor that of the endless parade of pooches ushered along by the other walkers.

Outside the park, on the edge of the village of Beetham, I wandered off the path to look at a sign describing a renovated corn mill and its hydro-electric turbine built on the river Bela.  An aging hippy, sucking on an electronic cigarette, pounced on me and started telling me facts about the place.  The others came over and Wavy Davy quickly found his rhythm.  He had a huge fund of stories and factoids, telling us all about the salmon spawning in the Bela, swimming up and down the weir and fish ladder; how he worked for Lady Mary Townley impersonating a 1920’s quarryman, telling tales of local legends to visiting school parties; how stunned he was to witness the mating dance of a pair of peregrines in a quarry there; how wind turbines are iniquitous because they decapitate birds and how water turbines are so much better.  We could have been there all day.  He asked where we were going and gave his advice about where to go too.

Leaving our far-out friend behind, we stuck to my original route through the posh village.  We climbed first up the road and then through woods near Slack Head.  The trees, more coppiced beech and lots of magnificent yews, were growing between and on top of outcrops of limestone paving.  Except this was nothing like that in Yorkshire, not only because of being in woodland, but it was covered in thick moss, like a furry green rug pulled over it.  It was quite a sight.  The very top was an exposed ridge of limestone, Whin Scar, and through this cut a largely natural staircase called the Fairy Steps.  The gap, perhaps 18 inches wide at its narrowest, drops down steeply through the rock over slanting and damp steps.  The legend is that if you can climb the steps without touching the sides, the fairies will grant you a wish.  Given the precipitous and slippery nature of the steps, we kicked that idea into touch and grabbed hold of whatever purchase we could find on the sides.  The rest of the descent was somewhat gentler, though there were still some exciting bits of soapy rock, handily covered in wet leaves.

Having dropped down, we climbed up again through the nature reserve of Gait Barrows.  Again this is limestone pavement and again it was covered in vegetation, more trees and more scrub.  Paths and tracks criss-crossed it and we found ourselves wandering in circles until Alan pointed us in the right direction (without encountering any barbed-wire fences).  A long section of road walking finally put us onto the last leg of the day.  Alec and Ray headed straight up alongside the railway line in order to get to the pub in time for the Manchester derby match.  The rest of us plunged on into more woodland.  The colours were stunning again with explosions of orange and lemon amongst the still-clinging-on green.  There were browns and golds, coppers and amber.  It was a dazzling array of colour, overwhelming the senses like some kind of druggy trip.  The weak sun tried to add its light but the leaves seemed powered by their own luminescence.

It had been a long day and everyone was starting to feel the effort.  Arnside Knott stood between us and the hostel and its bulk was looming closer all the time.  First we passed Arnside Tower, an unexpected and pleasant sight, then a farm full of dogs in various states of liveliness and decrepitude.  And still the sheer face of the Knott grew larger.  ‘I don’t have a good feeling about this,’ said Martin.

But it was all a tease.  Our path skirted to the left of the Knott before striking for the summit in gentle slopes.  The views were impressive despite the greyness and the cloud limiting things.  We didn’t stay at the top too long but found ourselves having to do quite a bit of wandering to find our way down amongst the many paths, all going the wrong direction.

Back at the hostel I dodged around again under the trickling shower (floor still muddy), got my evening clobber on and knocked on Martin’s door.  He woke up and then joined me on the walk to the village.  The football had just finished (‘Shouldn’t have bothered, neither side deserved to win,’ was Ray’s opinion of the match).  I asked the barman if the rugby was going to be on and he assured me that it would be.  At 4pm, I asked again and he gathered up a pile of six or seven remote controls then started pressing them to try and sort the channel out.  He hit the right one for the screen in front of us and we found the game had just begun.  Our man carried on pressing remotes and somehow switched our screen to a DVD.  Luckily it was nothing embarrassing but I called him over again and, at last, we were back on the rugby.  We had only missed Australia’s first try.  The match was a little more one-sided that the previous day’s had been but was enjoyable anyway in the display of dominance that Australia gave.

Slowly everyone else arrived.  Haydn had been down to Leighton Moss for the day but was disappointed with what he saw.  He had walked out to the far hides only to find the water had been drained so there were no birds there.  I told him we had seen curlews and cormorants in the estuary.  ‘You’ve seen more than me then.’  A woman at the next table was telling her friend about a great book of poetry she had found, ‘100 Poems to Save Your Life’, and quoted from one.  ‘They mix you up, your mum and dad.’  Wait a minute, mix?  Mix?  Good job she didn’t quote John Cooper Clarke.  ‘The mixing beer is mixing flat, the mixing flats are full of rats…’

Dinner that night was at the local fish and chip shop, which has a good reputation and an adjacent café.  Alan placed himself outside – the only way to reserve a table.  It was worth the wait as the food was delicious.  Martin did especially well, getting Haydn’s unwanted peas and Alan’s leftover chips.

After eating, we retired to the Albion.  Alan and Eric switched to wine (how sophisticated) and there was a heated debate about the dubious merits of the Daily Mail.  Outside the pub, after an early finish, I turned right towards the steps down from the front terrace.  Eric, because that wasn’t in the direction of the hostel, asked me if there was another way out.  I turned and said I didn’t know.  He swivelled round and walked straight into a glass partition between the tables.  The glass took the blow without shattering, as did Eric’s specs.  Unfortunately the toughened lenses stabbed a crescent moon cut in his eyebrow and blood came gushing out.  A smoker stood on the other side of the partition gazed on in horror.  Eric blamed Alan for switching him to wine and walked back to the hostel with a tissue pressed to his head.  The day’s efforts must have got to everyone as, with Eric bandaged up, we were all in our beds by 10.