Best of Teesdale Walk

Best of Teesdale is the title of the third walk wot I’m doing for the Durham County Council Summer Guided Walks programme. Today was the day for going and doing the first reccy.
A glimpse through one of the arrow slits at Knipe Towers revealed a covering of lovely fresh powder snow. This is great for the walking but really crap for the driving. And so it proved. It took me ages to get to Bowlees Peckernick Place just a bit up the Dale from Middleton. I drove veeeerrry veeerrry slowly and didn’t crash into anything at all.

But here we have an empty car park, full of soft, fresh snow and there are blue skies and the robins are having wobblers in the hedges – and so we embark on our journey – down through the lambing field to the wobbly bridge. The wobbly bridge is, of course, Wynch Bridge, the oldest pedestrian suspension bridge in the entire universe and a replacement for an earlier one that tipped a shift of leadminers into the foaming Tees twenty feet below.

The Tees was foaming a bit today, in fact, and it also had the added interest of a small iceberg. Strangely odd, yet , at the same time, oddly strange..

We progressed. Up The Pennine Way, past the stone sheep that Bruno had barked at as a pup, on past Low Force and through the juniper forest to High Force and on, yet further on past the roadstone quarries and up through some more junipers to the iron age settlement site, the remains of which nowadays consist of a tin-roofed railway truck.
Then  it go really cold. The wind was blowing a hoolie around Bruno’s lugoils (ears) and so, we closed all our pit zips, pulled down our hats and peed in our gloves (I lied about the last one by the way) – and stumbled off into the teeth of a howling gale which occasionally plastered us with spindrift.

We teetered up the old neve and , frankly, blisters of blue ice and the wind made us slide back down again. Time passed. Energy was invested. heads down, we lurched forwards. In fact we lurched into a beautiful blue snowdrift. This was beautiful to look at but impossible to cross. I mean impossible. We did try. Eventually, we (me) decided to use the bypass, which , together with the blinding spindrift lead us into white oblivion. I couldn’t find the bloody path again.

After some time and more expended calories (I’m so glad I drank all that Christmas beer) – I found a cairn and this lead us slithering and falling back down to the lovely River Tees.

A stony path with holes in it and some very large slabs of ice, presumably from the river, but piled up at the sides, took us past the pencil mine (you’d have to come on the walk to find out about the pencil mine) and , eventually to Forest in Teesdale, where we lunched eventually and crossed the river on a lovely bridge.

An easy but very icy path took us to Moking Hurth caves. It seems that the snow has been stripped off the fields on the North side of the Tees, leaving a landscape encased in hard ice. Behind the walls there are some snowdrifts, but they’re not huge…..?
An old route of mixed roadway and tracks brought us back, exhausted, to Bowlees.
This is a walk which should appear on the DCC programme in August. Hopefully, most of the snow will have melted by then.
I noticed that Bruno was walking quite stiffly when he got out of the car, and maybe he was squeaking with some pain. I’ll be keeping an eye on him but I think it was just the tough conditions, and powder snow sometimes burns his pads a bit.
We did 13 miles and 1700 feet of climbing. Phew.

Photography not allowed at High Force

Superdawg had the idea of heading up Teesdale for some leg-cocking in the juniper woodland around High Force, and also to have a look at the waterfall which should be in spate(ish) due to the recent batch of lambing showers we’ve been having.
And so, armed with the now traditional cheese butty and banana, we parked the knipemobile at Bowlees and crossed Tees by the wobbly bridge (aka Winch Bridge) and headed off up the Pennine Way towards High Force.
Deep in the juniper scrub, just inside the Natural Trust reserve, we came across a small group of Countryside Volunteers doing some (presumably voluntary) work on the NT’s “Dirty Hands” campaign to encourage volunteering in the countryside - aka the “Get Dirty for the Natural Trust” campaign. They were bagging up a batch of juniper seedlings, apparently for sale to a garden centre in Haltwhistle. I was a bit surprised by this, specially since this juniper woodland, just like everything else nowadays is supposed to be “Under Threat” but, as one of them explained, they had to generate some income for “Green Projects” such as the new road and visitor car park for Black Sail Hut and the wind generators for Malham Tarn House. So, I expect that’s OK, then. It kind of explains how B&Q in Bishop Auckland were selling Spring Gentians for £1.99 each last May too, I suppose.
Of them, who’s ID badge introduced as “Maggie”, a skinny, bespectacled hippy-type with beads, spied my digital camera and said words to the effect that she hoped I wasn’t going to snap any pictures of the waterfall. I told her that I was fully aware of the Natural Trust’s “ban” on photography at High Force and I promised not to take any pics without the proper permit. (They’re £12 for a day ticket at the High Force Hotel, apparently) I did sneak the snap shown above – don’t tell anybody!
She did insist on examining the images on the screen, though, just to make sure that I hadn’t been naughty. Luckily, it was just before I took the snap but she did see the "glamour" pics I took of the dog asleep in front of the fire...
I thought it was all a bit officious and left me feeling just a tad annoyed. They’ve also gone a bit overboard with the “No Photography” signs, which are all the way up the Pennine Way from Winch Bridge to Cauldron Snout. I’m wasn’t entirely sure how they police this till I noticed a security camera attached to an old ash tree – and, laughably, very badly disguised as a nesting box! It was the little antennae and the whirring noise as I passed that did it. How they manage to get delicate little things like Maggie to carry out the threat to confiscate the cameras of miscreants is a mystery, although I did notice a cardboard box with a couple of cameras in it at High Force. I wondered how legal this could be….. I though there was a slight whiff of something “herbal” about her anyway and the thought crossed my mind that maybe they were selling the cameras to pay for their habits. But no, I shouldn't be suspicious. volunteers do a great job, specially in Conservation.
Anyway, so much for the dirty handed Countryside Volunteers Natural Trust

Incidentally, I wasn't too impressed by their plant identification either. One of the boxes marked "Juniper" had some gorse in it - complete with yellow flowers, too... (dhuhhh!)