North Pennines Walking Festival – Cross Fell

This was my final contribution to the North Pennines Walking Festival and this time I was acting as back stop/hillwalking-type safety bod for a walk up Cross Fell lead by Gordon and Jenny from Barnard Castle Ramblers. Actually, I strongly suspect they could have managed without me, but Elf and Safety suggested that somebody with some kind of qualification should be on a walk up such a big hill and, as everybody knows, I passed both my eleven plus AND my cycling proficiency whilst studying humanities, arithmetic and the successful avoidance of sago pudding on Thursday lunchtimes at New Road Junior School in Earby between 1959  and 1963. (The cycling proficiency was a close run thing due to a faulty bell and duff brakes) (and my mum was highly suspicious about why my trouser pockets were always full of sago pudding on Thursdays)

And so, I plopped over the misty Pennines to Kirkland to wait for Jenny and Gordon and the four walkers who turned up and, in improving conditions, we set off hopefully for Cross Fell

This went well and soon, or, perhaps, eventually, we all turned up at the cross shelter on the top for the scoffing of butties and bananas etc. We did notice that the radar station on Great Dun Fell had disappeared and that a wall of cloud was boiling up to the South and East, and so, after taking bearings on a prominent cairn and a GPS waypoint on a crucial path junction somewhere over there ------->, we set off on a Southerly course and were soon enveloped in cloud.

But it was all right, cos we’re skilled hillwalkers who never get lost, and we wewre soon at the path junction and descending underneath the cloud cover back to Kirkland via the Hanging Walls of Mark Anthony and the huge and impressive Western corries of Cross Fell.

The walk was 9 miles and it started raining just as we arrived in Kirkland City Centre.

All good, clean fun.

Here’s a map.