Short Walks - Bewick Hill

 

Because the distance of the walk is not important - it's what you do with the walk. This one was necessarily fairly short - about 4 miles, in fact, and took roughly the same number of hours. A substantial amount of this time was spent lazing in the sun having lunch and chatting. This, I submit, is a Useful Thing To dD. LTD spent much of the same time in dreamy snoozy snory land. This is also a useful thing to do. This is time well spent. This is not a competition. There are no prizes. These hills, on a benign day like this,  allow you to breathe and think and empty the niggles from the mind.

 

Having neglected Dawn for some time in favour of some pre-TGO backpacking trips and some stupidly long walks (all very enjoyable - I'm not complaining) - it was time to catch up, not only because  I've bought a tent off Dawn for my next TGO challenge and I owed her some spondoolies, but also, that, well, it was just time to catch up. So we caught up a bit and made some tentative plans.

 The route choice was mine - a couple of Tumps to bag and 700 feet or so of contours. The hills turned out to be rather lovely - Harehope Hill - easy with short grass and a view and Bewick Hill with heather and a very large and impressive hill-fort plus some World War 2 pill-boxes in very good condition. On the way up, Dawn noticed some cup and ring markings and we investigated these further on the way down. Cup ad ring carvings are very very old and quite mysterious - that is to say that nobody knows why people made such an effort to make the circles and cups - and that the rock is quite hard so these would have taken some effort.

In the middle bit, we just laid in the heather in the warm sunshine with a skylark larking about nearby and a bumble bee or too and, on close inspection, some ladybirds.

This is all enjoyable stuff. It's all very well hurtling about the countryside in a bid to complete a huuuuuuge route before Something Happens, but sometimes, often, it's a really good idea to relax a bit and soak up whatever there is to be soaked up. You have to, just, chill, man.....  catch some rays, watch a ladybird wander about on your left Scarpa, have a chat, eat cheese and snooze...... and make some plans. And then go home and tell your Mum all about what happened.

More fax an info about Old Bewick hillfort is here (click the word "here") (over there, not here)