2013 TGO Challenge – The Last One?

The 2013 TGO Challenge is highly likely to be my last TGO Challenge. it will, after all, be my twelfth (should I arrive in Montrose) I mean who wants to have thirteen Challenges?
There are reasons why this is likely to be my last attempt at a TGO Challenge, and all will be revealed in a couple of weeks – following the story of whatever transpires on the 2013 TGO challenge.
In the meantime, here’s a little relevant video. I’m off to the Lammermuir’s shortly and then the TGO. I’ll be back at the end of May. There will be no mobile blogging.

Lone Rangering (Adopt-a-path stuff) Blanchland and Edmundbyers

One of the ways in which the imminence of a TGO epic becomes obvious is my routine walk around a whole bunch of paths around Blanchland and Edmundbyers. I’ve been doing these paths twice a year for yonks now, with a few minor additions here and there. Its a fifteen mile trundle and , on a day like today when the amount of green in the countryside is almost breathtaking after that long, brown and white winter and the sun is shining and there’s a lively moorland breeze to play with whatever hair you have left and there’s a PEK and tomato butty and an orange in the pack……

I didn’t take the dog on this one. The reason for this is the fact that the ever-so-laid-back Galloways at Pedams Oak once mugged me when I had the dog and it kind of put me off. Its just as well, really because the fields are full of fairly new young lambs just now and wandering through a lambing field with a dog isn’t really such a good idea. I suspect the local sheepfarmers have had enough challenges this year without me and superdawg  causing panic with the new lambs – even though Bruno would be on a short lead. By the time I’m back from the TGO challenge, the lambs will be more able to cope with stresses like this.

So, on my own And With Nobody With Me, I trundled off for a six mile circuit in the morning and a nine mile circuit in the afternoon. Apart from the usual mud in Deborah Wood (Didn’t I go to junior school with Deborah Wood…?) the only problem I found was a bunch of fallen trees on Path No 1 in the Parish of Hunstanworth. This path is also falling to bits, and has been so for several years. It gets ever so slightly worse each year. I’ve reported it to the Council, which is just what I’m supposed to do.

In other places, there were no special problems. New waymarks have appeared and some encroaching gorse has been trimmed and there’s a bit of erosion on a moorland path. This is a bridleway and is very popular with yer cyclists. The surface is shaley and pretty tough, though. Today there were five cyclists and ten walkers.

Cracking day today – almost warm, but with a strong headwind. But blue skies. I did find a small patch of snow in an old quarry. Actually, it was quite a big patch of snow. My camera failed to record the pic I took, though. I need a new camera. Again.

So, that’s that till October, when I’ll do it all again.

Now for the TGO. Incidentally, there’s now at least three blogposts with TGOC 2013 gear lists. FFS!. Pieblog readers may be relieved that I haven’t got the time to do a gear list.

Using a Dog For Navigation Part 1 - Cross Fell

This blog post is only to be read by those for whom the carrying of a map and compass is a mere foppish pecadillo. I didn’t do it on purpose, oh no – it was the dog’s fault and it was up to the dog to resolve the issue once the problem had been identified.

This blog post also contains a novel and innovative er.. innovation… in the field of interactiveness. There will be, at some point, a gross over use of the word “Utter”. readers will be able to choose how many “Utter”s to read by sending the word “Utter” and the number of “utter”s required in a sealed envelope with a cash, cheque or postal order payment to the “Mike Knipe Support British Breweries” campaign. A worthy cause, I’m sure you will agree.

Y’see, getting ready for a day walk can be a fairly long drawn- out process involving coffee, porridge, toast, breakfast TV, cheese butties, selecting maps, finding car keys and falling over the dog. Once Bruno gets wind that a long walk is in the offing he starts runign around in circles making yippy puppy noises and blocking the way out of the front door whilst drawing attention to his lead and harness which are in the “Bruno’s Lead and Harness” drawer. This often makes me forget things – mainly cameras, lunchboxes, car keys and boots. On this occasion it was the Outdoor Leisure map of the North Pennines containing the fine details of  how to get up Cross fell and back down again. I discovered the loss about halfway up the Pennine Way out of Garrigill.

the day was clear, though and it’s not as if I’d never been up Cross fell before. So I plodded on. It started raining. I plodded on. The cloud base lowered and it became ever so gloomy. I formed a plan.

The plan consisted of two elements.

Element One (Or “A” if you prefer) – My old GPS. This would be used to record waypoints (not much battery life in it). I could retrace to one of these uisng the “GOto” function. It doesn;t have maps. This was invented before maps.

Element Two (or B) The dog has an amazing and proven ability to retrace his own steps exactly – and I do mean exactly – over several miles.

Plan B – I could just go home. It was raining after all. I had an excuse. I could blame the dog.

Soon, we were damply entering the refrigeratorish innards of Greg’s Hut. Greg’s hut was occupied by some ladies (or girls if you prefer) listening to a walkie-talkie device which was producing the noises made by somebody with a severe speech defect giving instructions in Welsh on how to bake shortbread using a faulty microphone. It was some kind of radio-ham’s thing and the voices were coming from Cross fell, apparently. They left soon after our soggy arrival, announcing that they were on Wainwright’s Not the Pennine Way route.

Their place was taken by a young (well, younger than me anyway) and very damp lad who said his Dad was close behind. His Dad joined me in the main room whilst Son scoffed in the annex. Dad said only one word during half an hour and kept his concentration on his map. He appeared to consider that the living room of Greg’s Hut was just like a London Tube train where any human contact could be seen as a threat or an offer of very expensive sex. His only word was utterred as me and Bruno abandoned the oasis of calm for the slashing storm outside. And the word was “Bye”. I thanked him for the interesting and enjoyable chat.

Me and the Dawg pressed on. AS we climbed the hill, the cloud lifted with us and by the time we were at the summit furniture, the sun was peeking shyly through the glower.

I could see the tall, thin cairn at the other end of the plateau and me and the dawg romped off towards it. All around, the mist was ripping itself from the fells and areas of distant fellsides lit up with an orange glow.

 

(wait for it… wait for it…)

Its difficult to put into words the utter, utter, utter joy of that short walk over the flat top of Cross Fell (is that too many utters? Have I overdone the utters ? Am I a nutter for the utter?) You know what to do. A fiver should be enough. Hurry up, though – TGO coming up next week and this involves many bars.

I could see the length of the infant River Tees from here heading off towards Cow Green and decided to follow that. This, dear readers, is what’s known in yer navigating world as “handrailing”. Handrailing is my favourite thing. the trick is to handrail the correct handrail and not something that you thought was the right one but wasn’t. There is only one River Tees, so I followed it.

This is quite nice, really. Its a bit rough in places, and there’s an inconvenient fence which gets in the way a bit, but there’s some cracking camping spots and if you keep following it (its best to transfer to the South bank at some point), it ends up at a bridge at the meeting of the River Tees with Trout Beck and puts the now completely knackered rambler on a good, hard road that will take him and his still annoyingly energetic pooch back to the fleshpots of Garrigill and all he has to do is to keep putting one foot in front of the other for miles and miles and miles…..

We did 18 miles and 2500 feet of upness. Bruno did roughly double that and ate quite a lot of snow, there' being a bunch of glacier-like lumps of the stuff in shakeholes and becks and other sheltered places.

 

TGO Training by Tarras Water

It won’t have escaped your attention that me and Dawn are having a crack at the TGO Challenge this year – starts in not very many days… oooer…..   and it becomes important to have little backpacking trips for the training of the mind and body into the rigours of ..er… backpacking trips.

So, last week, I parked the car in the Kiln Green car park in the Meikle Toun aka Langholm and after buying a couple of award-winning pies from the award-winning butchers shop, me and Dawn blundered off up the excessively steep slopes of Whita Hill which seems to have all of twenty-seven closely packed contours between the bottom and the top. Luckily, it also has a little well with an iron cup on a chain and some very nice water.  It also has a nudie man running up and down. We tried to ignore him. he looked a bit furtive…

Other furniture  on Whita Hill include a huge obelisk to somebody or other and an odd and rusty memorial to Hugh Mc Dairmid – a  renowned poet, known to his friends as “Chris”.

Our route for the afternoon was short, though and we only had to descend the other side of the hill to Little Tarras Water, finding a spot sheltered from the half-gale in a sheepfold. Its not a brilliant place for camping, though – its either bumpy, prickly or soggy, or all three.

We ate the pies. Dawn had brought peas. I tried JJ’s suggestion of one of those little puddings in a plastic tub, boiled for a while and then by adding custard powder to the boiling water – spotted dick and custard. this ensures very little movement from the prone position for several hours. I’d taken a supply of rum for a change, and this helped in this respect, too. It was also a very good libation for looking at thistles.

A fox barked through the night and the moon came out for a while. In the early hours it began to rain and by dawn (small “d”, the other Dawn has a bog “D”) it was drizzly and mizzly and we set off in the late morning. It wasn’t the weather for getting up and we hadn’t got too hard a walk to do that day.

Wednesday’s route was also reasonably short and during the night I’d rejigged the route a bit so that we could get back to Langholm by Friday lunchtime(ish) so that there would be no panics about Dawn catching her train at Kirkby Stephen on Saturday. When I say rejigged, what I really mean is that I buggerred it up as far as a training walk is concerned and the days would be fairly short….  So, we wandered up by the Tarras Water – a very fine dale containing a few farms and a couple of cottages and not much else. This is Langholm Moor – an area where grouse moor management is deliberately benefiting the Hen Harrier. This is good news for Hen Harriers, but veyr bad news for crows judging by the number of Larsen traps. Its a very boggy, soggy and tussocky place, though and flat, green camping spots are thin on the ground.

We camped in yet another sheepfold (still windy!) on better ground high up the glen. Yet another fox barked at the darkness..

Thursday saw us struggling through deep heather, tussock and bog over the col between Arkleton Hill and Pike fell and , after a brief excitement with a deep gully, we were soon on tracks down to the settlement at Mosspeebles, just by the A7. The A7, as it happens, has a pedestrian route all the way to Bush where we joined a track heading up Meikledale and then the very beautiful Wolfhope Burn. Wolfhope Burn’s beauty is enhanced by  sporadic natural woodland of hawthorn and ash which will be an absolute delight later in the spring. At it’s head there’s a fine, open corrie with a burn of clean water and good camping. Still windy, though, and the number of sheep carcases along the burn and the sides of the dale was noticeable. We were supposed to cross the col into the valley of the Rig Burn that night, but decided that since we’d found a nice spot to camp, and we didn’t know what it was like over the hill, that we’d stay put. A cold and frosty night followed. Dawn had some excitements which only she is allowed to report on….  A fox barked once again (Different fox, I suspect…)

Finally it was Friday and we had to get back to Langholm. We crossed the col, cleverly avoiding having  heart attacks by zig-zagging up the steep slope and, after a brief encounter with more tussocks, bog and heather, we soon on an unmapped and very wide built track which came high up the glen to meet us. This is either for forestry or for wind turbines. The investment in building this road must have been enormous. Either way it’s an eyesore….  but it did make our life a lot easier

There’s a bunch of new roads around here and some apparently new forestry and ue to the easier-than-expected movement we were soon passing the sheep sheds at The Rigg and then passing new plantations of holly, we were yet sooner on the road at Westerhall. We followed the road past Burnfoot and Henwell is increasingly heavy showers and followed the track though the Buccleuch estates back to Langholm

Here, I called the police. That is to say, I rang 101 and got Police Scotland who seemed to know who I was and what I wanted before I’d said very much at all. In fact, when I rang them on the Wednesday, they told me my home address and phone number which they’d “remembered” since the time I rang them from Moffat on the first Moff-peebles walk. Since I got accused of abandoning my car in order to go into he forest to top meself whilst on a 3 day walk at Kielder, I’ve formed the habit of telling the local police what I’m up to and the fact that I’ve left (aka abandoned") a car somewhere and when I’ll be back and so on. they don’t seem to mind this at all and, in fact, the Police Scotland operators are always really friendly and helpful, so its never been an onerous task.

We did about 30 miles.

Its a very nice area by the way. You should go. its nice an wild and a much better place to be on an English bank holiday than the madhouse that is Cumbria. At least you can have a wee in peace up here…

And the pies are really good.

Nothing can go wrong….

Are we ready for the TGO?  I can’t speak for Dawn, but I’m never ready. I don’t really know what you have to do to be ready. Success is never guaranteed, but given reasonable luck, reasonable weather and a bit of day-to-day management and the avoidance of sinking into a deep depression, geographical or psychological (i.e. we travel in hope) – and a small supply of cheering rum , or similar – we have a fair chance, I think..

Competition to Win an A-Z Adventure Atlas

 

Obsessive readers may remember that around Christmas time there was a short promotion on the pieblog, and also on one or two other blogs for a discount on A-Z Adventure maps. Some may remember that I had a little epic back O’ Skiddaw whilst using one (nothing to do with the Atlas, it was more a case of duff navigation in thick weather)

Any road up – there’s now an easy to enter (and to win, if you know where the hills are…!) competition via twitter here : Competition to win an A-Z adventure atlas

I quite like these Atlases as it happens – apart from the huge spondoolies saved on buying the OS maps, they’ve got a handy index of obscure places with grid references and the atlas is a nice size to fit in a pocket or a map case.

You’ll have to be quick, though…. only a few days to go before the competition closes.

Today’s pieblog pictures of from me and superdawg’s very recent walk in the North Yorkshire Moors during which we bagged the very lovely Heads – a sub-HuMP , no less, and had a bit of a strollette around the moors. I go to NYM regularly, about once every five years (I hate the complicated drive from here to there…)

there will be a short gap in blogposts shortly whilst me and Dawn have a trundle around the hills of the Borders just a bit North of Langholm. I understand that there’s an award-winning pie shop in Langholm. Hmmmmmm   pies…

Stop messing about and click the link for a go at the Adventure atlas competition…..!

 

Stanhope Denes and the Bit In Between

I think this is the third time this walk has been done as part of the Durham County Council Guided walks programme.

On Wednesday, I met 25 peeps, including the stewards Maria, Eric and Compulsory Dave at the Fossil Tree in Stanhope in mizzly rain. As soon as we set off, though, it stopped raining and all we had to contend with then was the howling gale.

Two walkers – Robert Cunningham and Graeme Ferguson have sent me some pictures, so I’ve used many of them here in the blog post. If anybody else wants to send pics of guided walks, I’ll try to include as many as possible. No prizes, though …. at least, not yet  (!)

Stanhope Dene comes first, of course, and this went reasonably well until we hit the slope failures just above the mines. These broke the group up nicely and we were running just a bit late, so lunch was declared at the East Whiteley Burn. This is often a bit sheltered, and, quite a nice place to combine yourself with a cheese butty and some chocolate. It was a bit draughty today, though….

Stanhope Denes has a few signs of spring – some daffies and a primrose or two lambs in the fields– a chiff-chaff and some kind of raptor wheeling around and calling – lots of greenery in the form of newly sprouted ransoms, a bit of frogspawn and multiple dead rabbits. Anything that eats carrion is in for a bit of a meaty bonus following that long and extended winter, I think….

The slope failures, up and down diversions and the long, heaving slog up to the CtoC railway line took it out of several walkers (including me), so it was a relief to get into the Park head cafe for a nice, hot cuppa.

Deep drifts , and then, a day or two later…..

The snow enjoyed so much by superdawg on the reccy a few days earlier has almost all gone…

Turning South, we hit the headwind, so there was little respite from hard work until we finally hit the shelter of Shittlehope Dene. Instead of wind and contours in here, we just had slippery mud and a fallen tree…..

There was some staggering to be done on the final march into Stanhope. Since we’re British, of course, heads were held high and The Bonny Moor Hen had just a bit of extra custom. We do like to support local businesses, innit…?

Quite hard going today, really…..   thanks to Robert and Graeme for the pics, and to the stewards, and the proprietress of the Park head cafe and the landlady of the Bonny Moor hen, and the ordnance survey for the maps, Sainsbury’s for the fair trade coffee in me flask and Lancashire for the cheese in me butty.

9 Miles. (Hah!)