Jinkie’s Challenge

I’ve been out rangering today up at Blanchland and Edmundbyers. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again, so I expect that you may be bored with this kind of thing. So instead, I’ll explain the concept of Jinkie’s Challenge, something wot I thought of whilst marching through the heather without a map again. I’ll illustrate this with pics from today’s walking.

The other thing is that I’ve applied for the TGO Challenge next year and there’s always a chance that I won’t make the cut, so a Plan B is always a good idea. (Mr Manning should not read this blog post as I wouldn’t want him getting the idea that a person with a Plan B would be a choice candidate for the stand-by list…)

So the Jinkie Challenge is to visit the three highest public bars in England. These are (as far as I know, but I’m willing to be disabused) The Cat and Fiddle, The Tan Hill Inn and the Kirkstone Pass Inn. This should normally take about two weeks, I would have thought. And a route not completely up the Pennine Way could be made from the Cat to Tan Hill – and, it’s a long-established long distance walk, and a high level route to Kirkstone Pass could be made from tan Hill over Nine Standards, The Howgill Fells and the Shap Fells. I

I considered calling this walk the Three Pubs Challenge, but it seems to me that its more than likely that a lot more than three pubs could be visited between the three targets . So, why not go the whole hog and visit as many as possible? I thought up some rules:

1) The route is not fixed and using the Pennine Way all the way up the Pennines would lose the walker Jinkie Points.

2) The start can be any of the three pubs.

3) A proper boozing session should be had at all three of the three highest pubs.

4) Extra Jinkie Points can be earned by visiting as many pubs as possible in between the other two although there’s no requirement to go mad on the beer at each one. On a rough route I thought up, there are a minimum of twenty other pubs. There could be more since I haven’t looked at a map.

5) Even more extra Jinkie points can be earned for each summit over 400 metres bagged on the way.

This could be the hardest pub crawl in England.

Or not.

In any case, this is my Plan B for TGO challenge time, or I may just do it anyway.

On the rangering, I did 15 miles, got wet twice, found two fallen trees and a bit of duff shoring and they’ve mended a stile that’s been rejecting me. I also found that the Blanchland village deli does a nice cornish pasty.

Jinkie, by the way is a childish word that I use to get Bruno to have a drink from a stream on a hot day – in case there’s no more water for a long way ahead, and may also be an exclamation on spotting a distant pub on a warm and thirsty day.