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.
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