Blackie and The Naxie – Howden le Wear

And so, with a nagging dawg, we drag ourselves out from a Yuleish stupor of roast beef, red wine and various liquors and stumble off through the snow to Howden le Wear.

The purpose, apart from exercising superdawg’s latent powers of bouncing around in the snow, was to have a look at the prosaically-named Walk 1 in a small collection of leaflet walks produced by the Council. The remit is to have a look at the route descriptions and the paths.

This one is just two and a half miles long, has one bit of a pull up a hill, and a selection of refreshment stops – just the kind of walk you might want to do in an evening, in fact. If you’re not fully refreshed after doing this walk, then you’r enot trying very hard.

The walk description is quite good, and has lots of local information such as the  long-gone whereabouts of railway stations, coal mines, brick works and that kind of thing. The Naxie and Blackie are, in fact, the names of the local pastures. Hill 60, pictured here, is the spoil heap from a long-defunct coal adit, named Hill 60 by soldiers returning from The Great War for Civilisation (aka WW1)

There’s a lot packed into the walk, in fact, and its all the better for it.  I enjoyed it, and so did superdawg. there’s no problems with the paths – they’re all well used by locals by the evidence of lots of footprints in the snow.

The walk is two and a half miles – I did six, cos I walked there and back.
Two more Howden le Wear walks to do…