Drumaldrace and Dodd Fell

Right – Let’s have no more of this nonsense about pet dogs writing blog posts. Bruno has never mastered the keyboard and in any case, he just drools over internet pictures of beef and lamb all night. Gives him an appetite, apparently.

So the other thing that happened last weekend was that I met the nephew in a sunny car park in Hawes and, together with the literary canine we plodded off up past the cheese factory and through Gayle and up the hill to Drumaldrace, passing my camping spot behind the wall which I used during last summer’s trundle down the Pennines sans any navigational stuff. It was a quite fabulous early spring day with a perishing wind, but bright and warm sunshine and lambs gambling in the fields. One of them bet that Bruno couldn’t write a sensible sentence and another wagered that the bloke with the white beard was even worse.

We progressed along the roman road to Kidhow gate, pausing only briefly for a chicken butty and a banana (thats what I had anyway…) and then, beneath the floating hang gliders, gently drifting about and the eeejit off-road bikers buzzing up the Pennine Way, and the convoy of off-road vehicles containing people even fatter than me, plus the skylarks, curlew, oyster catchers and golden plover and the occasional jet flying over, I was struck by the sense of wilderness and bloody PEACEFUL fecking Yorkshire dales. Look, I mean, is it me? Can’t things just be quiet for a minute?  You’re disturbing the frogs….just calm down a bit, guys….

Anyway, we got to the top after a short campaign of tussock trundling. The view was enormous and famiss hills such as Pendle and Scafell Pike and Great Gable and Wild Boar fell and some unidentifiable North Pennines could be made out very clearly. And Morecambe Bay AND the North Yorkshire Moors, so very nearly a sea-to-sea vista. Not that anybody in a land rover full of obesity with a winch on the front, or the sinister masked riders of the two wheeled lawnmowers buzzing off towards Settle would have seen any of this cos they wuz bouncing up and down too much. I hope that most of their fillings dropped out. I expect that some of them were playing Led Zeppelin on their CD players. At least that would drown out the noisy birdlife.

But the hang-gliders… Bless ‘em. Silent and graceful and, probably, a bit cold…. Not even a cough or a harrumph, or a shout of joy or even a  giggle as they floated over the lovers entwined in the juncus two hundred feet below….

The walk down back down to Hawes was less noisy.

We did 13 miles altogether. Its a good walk. Its probably better on a Tuesday when all the petrolheads are at work or in the queue at the job centre or something.

Nice to see the nephew again, though. We chewed a fair amount of fat – and not the sort that my cardiac nurse needs to worry about. We’ll be doing something similar once again fairly soon.