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.

Teesdale – Moking Hurth and High Force

My plan for today – up until last night anyway , was to go and bag Penyghent and Plover Hill as part of the Yorkshire Dales 2000 foot tops thing.

The weather forecast was a bit borderline for the Dales, specially late in the day, and I didn’t have any change for the pay and display, and I could have a lie-in if I went somewhere closer to home…… so I went to Teesdale. In particular, I went to the Gibsons cave visitor centre care park, which is free.

I determined to go and have a look at a little crag on the North side of Teesdale which has some caves – and then come back to the start using the Pennine Way.

It was sublime. In fact it was very sublime. Gwan – ask me how sublime it was. It was, sublime. That is to say, it wasn’t beautiful, not in the usual twee sort of romantic green kind of beautiful. No it wasn’t that. There was lots of snow on the ground for a start. And then the sky was grey and white and heavy and, and the high moors were bright white, and maybe there was a bit of hillfog. So there wasn’t actually a boundary between the hills and the sky. The hills became the sky and the sky became the hills. There were flakes of snow and no horizon. There were deep drifts and frozen gates, impossible to open. It was bleak and tough and unyielding. It was, in fact, The Pennines. I really like it when its like this.

So, after leaving the easy lanes, we blundered into the white desert and there was hard work, for a time. And swearing.

Bruno plunged through a soft new drift into a beck and struggled dogfully out again. There was limping for a while.

We lunched (I lunched, Bruno dribbled) on the limestone crag at High Hurth Edge. This is a fine suntrap in summer. Today there was a little shelter from the sneaking wind and a fine , if monotone view. There’s some caves in the crag – Moking Hurth, 1000 feet Grade II, and a pothole – Moking Hurth Pot, 35 feet deep, 800 feet long and Grade II. Must have a look down here sometime… there is mud and crawling to be done….

We descended by easy tracks to Forest in Teesdale school and crossed the river to join the Pennine Way.

The Pennine Way, for some reason, was icy, and quite slippery till I reached the bottom of the snowline, somewhere just upstream from High Force. There were a few people rambling on through the juniper woods.

The juniper woods are quite remarkable. The trees are ancient and mainly sterile, so every year, as many juniper berries as possible are collected by Natural England and given to a nursery. Any germinations are shared between NE and the nursery – and quite a bit of new plantings have been done. Its a great place. It smells of gin. There are fierce suntraps in summer and its a favoured place for adders.

We passed High Force and came to Low Force where we found – a pair of trainers. Just removed and left, by all appearances. I wonder if anybody is missing? Low Force would be a bad place for a dip on such a day. High Force would be more efficient if ending it all was the aim. You might survive Low Force.

It started snowing heavily. We left via the wobbly Wynch Bridge

Its a good walk, this. Quite easy to do. 9 Miles and 1200 feet. Which isn’t much…

Incidentally – I saw some signs of spring today – a flock of about 30 lapwings by Cronkley – and by High Force, a flock of about 50 lapwings heading West. Coming back from their hols at Redcar, no doubt. That’s a sign of spring that is…..