Just Up The Street

I had unfinished business in the land of the Upper Coquet in the form of an unbagged Tump called Swinside, a rounded lump of a Tump with some Very Nice Views.

I collected the digitally injured Dawn* from her dockside den and we progressed haltingly up to Alwinton (couldn’t remember how to get there from the coast) and we parked reasonably prettily at the start of The Street, a green trod of some antiquity which heads over the Border.

This is easy walking and height is soon gained and the views soon get better and better and the target bag was soon bagged, followed by lunch out of the hefty Southern breeze on a soft grassy carpet Northern slopes.

After lunch the same hefty breeze gave us a bit of help getting up to the Street’s junction with the Pennine Way where we turned left , or, as some might insist, West and with the considerable help of the long line of Lancashire mill slabs we romped easily over Mozie Law and Lamb Hill to the Ten Mile Hut aka Yearning Saddle mountain refuge aka shed…  for Lunch #2

Some serious tussocks were then defeated as we entered the lovely gill or cleuch of Buckhams Walls Burn which has some cracking camping spots were it not for the two herds of highland cattle crapping all over the place and mooing and other cow-like stuff.

A brief road-walk where we encountered just the one car, brought us back to the knipemobile which was exactly where we’d left it.

Upper Coquetdale is particularly beautiful, though, I must say…

12 or 13 miles or so and here’s a map… 

*Dawn cracked a bone in her hand whilst resisting the force of a huge and lively wave on a Northumberland beach whilst testing the temperature of the North Sea and in plain sight of Holy Island and is wearing NHS strapping. This is not, however, preventing her taking part in the North East Skinny Dip, a circumstance which may well have caused others to back off whilst rejoicing in a nice and irrefutable excuse not to do it. Determined, or what…. (nuff respect by the way) (which is why you should bung some dosh into her virgin money-giving account by clicking on the Mind logo below!!!)