Stanza Stones Trail Day 3

‘The plates are very hot, but the food is cold,’ the landlord told the table next to us at breakfast.  Winking at us he added, ‘If a joke’s good one day, it’s good the next.’

The landlady had joined us earlier as we stood on the patio looking at the chickens and black pigs.  She told us her favourite hen was a black one and that she loved to pick it up and turn it all around to let the light catch the iridescence in the feathers.  ‘I don’t know what she thinks of it, probably thinking, “Let go of me!”’

With a couple more cheesy jokes from the landlord we were on our way, stopping first at the Post Office for another packed lunch.  While the main lady was in the back making the sandwiches (halfway through she called out, ‘What did you want again?’) an old bloke came in picked out his papers and dropped off the right money with a cheery call through to the back to let her know it had been done.

Jill gave me a lift back to Bingley to start the final day’s walking.  For once the day started in beautiful sunshine and warmth.  The first part of the walk took me along the canal, past the impressive Five Rise locks, and I could relax without worries of navigation or bog.  There were a few people around and the town pressed up against the canal on either side, but it still felt very peaceful.  Groups of ducks paddled around, some with ducklings; swans mingled amongst them.  Crowds of tadpoles wriggled about through the vegetation at the waterside.  A dragonfly hunted through twinkling clouds of midges.  On the far side of the canal a heron slowly stalked something in the water, its speared beak ready to be flung forwards.

After some miles I had to turn off the canal and head uphill towards Rombalds Moor.  Before meeting Jill at the next stone, Dew, I was going to try to bag another off-piste trig.  The map showed a plantation of trees stretching over the slopes of Rivock Edge but reality showed that they had all been felled.  This isn’t always a good thing for making your way across country, as the felled logs and branches can form impassable obstacles, but it certainly made seeing your goal a good deal easier.  I followed the right of way for a while, turning aside at the gate telling me the road I had hoped would make a shortcut was not for the general public, then cut up steeply by a stone wall.  The top levelled out into a grassy plateau, gently caressed by the now less manic breeze.  The splendid view was of the Aire valley and the towns spread along it.

Having taken my trig photo, I retraced my steps and was soon with Jill by the Dew stone.  She remarked how it had been designed to be seen after emerging from the trees and wondered what the people thought of the situation now.  The stone is upright, inserted in a gap in a dry-stone wall, with a split in the centre of the stone itself.  Through and over the gap was a lovely bucolic view of fields and hills.

We parted company again and I had an easy and enjoyable walk through the still remaining part of the wood.  Being a conifer plantation it was a bit dark and lacked variety of vegetation, but I quite like the silence of these woods.  When I left them, I turned uphill again, past the Doubler Stones (a pair of anvil-shaped stones) and on to more heathery moorland.  The top of the climb finished at the sudden escarpment of Addingham High Moor with the Wharfe valley down below.  The route turned here and climbed some more up to the high part of the woods on Rombalds Moor (another trig point!).  A bird of prey flew out from the trees and perched on a rock ahead of me.  As I quickly tried to take a picture it flew off a bit further and sat on some heather, eying me suspiciously.  This time I got a better shot and decided it was a sparrowhawk.  Having sat for its picture, it took off over the moors.

The walk had been fairly easy going up to this point and I had marched on at a good pace.  But as another short climb began, I started to feel the week’s walking in my legs.  I started singing to myself a variant of the old Stones tune, ‘This could be the last climb, this could be the last climb, maybe the last climb, I don’t know.’  Thankfully at the top it was a level walk past the radio mast, past the Thimble Stones and to that convenient marker of the presence of a Stanza Stone: Jill.  The path over the boggy moor is paved with flagstones and the poem, Puddle, is carved into a pair of these on the ground.  I imagine the space where they’re located does indeed fill with water in rougher weather.

We now had a race on.  Jill had to walk back to her car, drive round the moor then walk out the last stone in about the time I did.  My task was easier as I just had to cross the moor.  The flagstones took me quickly to a bonus feature (via a trig point), the Twelve Apostles stone circle.  I was sceptical about what this might amount to – some things marked as stone circles don’t look much more than a couple of rocks near each other – but this was a proper little circle, rather like the Nine Ladies on Stanton Moor in the Peak District.  I then had another attack of scepticism as I wondered how ‘reconstructed’ the site might be.

I soon found the start of Backstone Beck, which would lead me down to the final Beck stone (they must have worked hard on these names).  First stop was at the Poetry Seat and the Poetry Postbox.  You’re supposed to put a poem in the top, turn a handle and get another poem out at the bottom.  My muse having sat this one out, I didn’t have a poem to post, and didn’t take a chance on getting one out.  The idea of it is probably better than the reality.

The leaflet guiding the way was accurate in getting me down near to the Cow and Calf rocks but I decided against its suggested diversion to a quarry with ‘excellent examples of cup and ring marks’.  Hmm.  Instead I dropped steeply down by the beck and followed the rather particular instructions to look for a big rock by some gorse bushes.  I spotted a likely candidate and a squeeze through the overgrown vegetation revealed the Beck stone, sat in the middle of the gorge, looking both entirely in and of its place, and also odd and unnatural.  The constant presence of water made some of the text hard to decipher, but it looked very picturesque.  As the sky threatened to rain, I had a 10 minute wait for Jill to arrive.  We admired the stone, congratulated ourselves on getting that far, then turned back up the narrow path back to the car park.

With that, there was just a celebratory pint of Yorkshire Terrier in the Cow and Calf Hotel, a visit to Jill’s niece-in-law (is that a real term?), Barbara, who kindly made us a tasty tea and whose delightful girls entertained me with their nonsense, and then it was on the train home.  It had been a thoroughly enjoyable few days and a tough walk, but one that was interesting and rewarding too.

For more about the Stanza Stones Trail see Ilkley Literature Festival

Stanza Stones Trail Day 2

‘The plates are very hot,’ the landlord told us as he delivered our breakfasts, ‘but the food’s cold.’  The bacon, sausages and the rest were, of course, warm and lovely, setting us up for another day.  The pub didn’t do packed lunches but our man recommended we call in at the nearby Post Office and general shop in Chiserley to get something.  The shop was a compact warehouse of all kinds of handy items from fruit to chocolate bars, from bottles of wine to Fray Bentos tinned pies.  The lad who was serving went to the kitchen behind the counter to make my ham sandwich while a lady served our landlord, who had just come in.  ‘See,’ he said to me, ‘it wasn’t just a rumour that you could get your lunch here.’  ‘How much change do I owe you?’ the shopkeeper asked our man, ‘I chucked your money in and now I’ve forgotten.’  ‘30p.  And I’ll take any tenners you’ve got in there too.’

My day’s walking started at the pub (I was cheating a bit by not dropping back into town to start the day, but it seemed ridiculous to go down there just to walk back past the pub.  I knew I was only letting myself down, so that was all right).  The skies, after being clear and sunny when we woke up, were now covered in cloud and soon after the rain began.  At first this seemed ominous, but luckily it soon stopped, though yesterday’s wind was still hanging around to chill the air.  Up on the hill, with the wind blowing, I found myself in the middle of a huge ocean of pink and purple heather, stretching out over the hilltops ahead of me.  A narrow, rocky path led me through the colourful scene.

Having just climbed up onto Wadsworth Moor and its ocean of heather, I now had to drop down into a valley.  Again I found myself on a narrow, overgrown path.  This was head-high with bracken which obscured the tiny track under my feet and I had to keep shoving the vegetation aside in order to see what I was stepping on.  This was important as the surface was wet and covered in loose rocks, and the path was extremely steep.  I tripped slightly at one point as the bracken stems lassoed my shins and for a heart-stopping moment thought I was going to somersault all the way down to the farm below.

It was slow going but I got there in one piece and then was faced with a steep climb up the other side.  This time the moor, Warley Moor, was open and bare, populated with cows and sheep.  The wind whipped into me and the path dragged on and on to the distant top.  I eyed the ‘rocking stone’ described on the map but in the gale and on boggy land, I just couldn’t bring myself to make the detour.

The right-of-way seemed to go straight through Slade Farm but its fences didn’t look very inviting so I circumnavigated the perimeter through a deeply muddy, cow-trodden field, past some piles of rubble and waste, onto the farm track, where a pair of dogs behind a gate suddenly leapt into life and barked like mad things, making me jump out of my skin.  They continued to bark at me, now they knew I was there, until I reached the main road, making me grumble even more.

Out on the road I stepped into a terrific headwind.  The wind kept nudging me, like someone trying to annoy you by repeatedly poking at you.  Nudge.  ‘Quit it.’  Nudge.  ‘Quit it.’  Nudge.  ‘Quit it.’  Nudge.  ‘I KILL YOU!’  It pushed, it shoved, it body-slammed me, tirelessly.  An old beardy bloke on a bike pedalled slowly past me.  ‘Lovely day,’ he shouted above the wind’s roar, ‘Invigorating.’  ‘Blows the cobwebs away,’ I answered.  Appreciating my irony, he obligingly laughed.  A police car rolled past, but didn’t offer me a lift.

Finally I turned off the road, through some fascinating old quarry workings and out to a stone wall with a seat in it where Jill was waiting.  On the seat, behind which Jill told me the Mist stone was, it was beautifully sheltered from the wind and its constant, lunatic yammer in my ears.  We sat for a while admiring the excellent view from the edge of moor, looking down over Oxenhope, and then did the tiny scramble to the stone.  The sky was clearing and things were looking up.

After waving Jill off I marched across the moor on another diversion to a trig point, this time somewhat more easy going a route than the previous day’s.  All the same, I was starting to feel tired as I walked along narrow lanes towards Cullingworth.  The road was long and the tarmac unforgiving.  I was just slogging along.  Then, as happens, the endorphins came back on-stream and I was feeling better again, singing ‘On Ilkley Moor’ (spied in the distance from the Mist stone).  At the far side of Cullingworth I dropped into Goitstock Wood for a bit of a change of scene.  It was a good choice.  The sunlight dappled through the leaves above as I wound alongside a rocky path through the trees, with the stream chattering over rocks to my left.  Further on it got even better as I passed a small waterfall which tumbled into a sunny pool, overhung with bright green ferns.  Mayflies danced in swarms above the water as spray drifted across to me.  It was just a wonderful place.  Instead of tiredness or delirium, I was taken outside myself, thinking of nothing but the surprising beauty of the wood.

For the rest of the walk I was flying, chatting with other passers-by about the unexpectedly good weather, and admiring the simple charm of stonewalled fields.  Beyond the woods south of Bingley, I could see that the dark clouds that had hung above Ilkley Moor all day were still there and, crossing Shipley golf course, a few spots fell, but they couldn’t dampen my mood.  Big, white-washed boulders led the way across the quiet links and into town.  I had arranged to meet Jill in the Library Tap on the main street in Bingley but as I came up I could hear loud singing, like some afternoon karaoke session.  At the door, I turned around and headed up to Wetherspoon’s.  I was early and was planning to call Jill to let her know the change of plan but I heard her call out to me from the other side of the road.  She had also turned down the Library Tap, having come back from a wander round Haworth, and was just waiting for me to arrive.

Back at the Hare and Hounds later, I had a delicious venison burger, a few pints, and a relatively early night.

For more about the Stanza Stones Trail see Ilkley Literature Festival