More Knee Exercises on Alston Moor

I had a short visit to see Brian today to exercise the kneecap just a bit more – a little at a time, y’see.

We went to Blagill, and wandered towards by a very pleasant riverside path.  This walk is very popular with locals, apparently, and much picknicking is done in the summer. There’s also one or two waterfalls with some swimmable plunge pools at foot.

We stopped at Gossipgate Bridge for a Barrat’s Sherbert Fountain with a liquorice dip. I was immediately transported fifty years to the very edge of the civilised part of the West Riding , which was probably the last time I scoffed a tube of sherbert dip by a beck, or anywhere for that matter. I feel the need to reassure those feeling any nostaligia for 1950’s sweeties, that these do not appear to have changed much, except that the liquorice dip used to be a liquorice tube which enabled the sherbert to be inhaled. I expect that this may have killed several of my more delicate pals, but you must remember that the 1950’s was long before asthma and allergies and if people coughed a lot they probably had TB or they’d just nicked one of their Dad’s Capstan Full Strength, or, indeed a Senior Service if your Dad had been in the Navy.
But I digress.

Brian knew where there was another, more bigger waterfall and with an entrance to the Nenthead Level – an underground system which linked Nenthead with the railhead at Alston, some seven miles long.
We had a look, but were defeated by thick woodland and an ever-so-slightly perilous path. I had a poke around the river bed, which is carb limestone at this point (it being sandstone a few yards upstream)

Defeated, but not cowed, we returned by the Gossipgate bridleway which rises to Blagill hamlet in about a hundred metres of up and a couple of kilometres across.
We finished by experimenting with Brian’s boomerang. This is a real boomerang and not some kind of euphemism. It wouldn’t come back (we know a song about that…) and Bruno was demonstrating his excitement at the prospect of catching it and ripping it to bits, so we went back to Nenthead for coffee instead.

A short walk with a lot of “stuff” in it.  Only three miles and 350 feet of uphill.
Here’s a picture of the cat who lives next door to Brian, just because she’s a nice cat.

This walk could be extended into Alston at not much extra effort if the walker needs to go shopping, have tea and crumpets or get absolutely rat-arsed in the wide choice of public houses before stumbling back up the lonnin…

Slitt Vein and a new sub-Hewitt

This blog post is entirely about having a walk up  Slitt Wood in Weardale to have a look at the Slitt Vein (nothing suicidal, its a mineral vein wot you can ackcherly see cos all the ground around it has been quarried away ) – and the bagging of Black Fell a 604 metre top designated as a sub-Hewitt in http://www.hillbagging.co.uk/, and which I’ve only just noticed…. pause for breath….and nothing at all to do with the launch of http://www.ukhillwalking.com/, in which there’s a small article about hillbagging from yours truly. In fact I won’t mention http://www.ukhillwalking.com/ ever again.

Appropriate, though, I suppose.

So, being completely unaware of the launch of http://www.ukhillwalking.com/, me and superdawg parked neatly by the phone box in Westgate and wandered up through the ever lovely Slitt Wood, just as far as the mines.

Now these mineworkings have just had a lorra lorra money being excavated and restored, to some extent. For interest, there’s the bargain steads – big containers for each mining team’s production, the excavated smithy with it’s  rock drill holes in the floor – presumably to prove they worked – a deep, deep shaft, fenced off, a wheel pit with a water supply from a dam up the hill and the footings for an Armstrong hydraulic engine, which replaced the wheel in the wheelpit – used for pumping water out of the mine. Plus some interesting and wet culverts.

if you walk up the hill on the newly created permissive path (like wot me and the dog did), you follow the edge of Slitt Vein and, at the top of the hill, there is the vein, stripped bare of it’s surround of ironstone, and with it’s galena mined out from the middle – but big and proud and strong, a damn great lump of quartzy rock. So that’s what a vein looks like…

After this, we wandered up the road (the beck being too lively to cross today) – and lunched in some forest in a warm and bright spell. The forest has lots of old pits and heaps in it – still being on the line of a lead vein, but this stuff is full of purple flourspar. I borrowed a couple of pieces. I’ll put them back if requested… 

And then we wandered over the moor alongside a wall that’s shown on the map as derelict, but which, according to an inscribed stone at Black Hill summit, was restored by the Golden family in 2001/2. They seem to have done a cracking job.

As the sun came out, we retreated to the Dale and followed the river downstream to the start. Bruno had a paddle and a bark in a deep salmon pool. We had no idea about http://www.ukhillwalking.com/, obviously and I’m not going to mention it.

10 miles and 1500 feet and one sub-Hewitt bagged.

Bollihope Wet Dogs Club

Various circumstances lead to this short doggy walk at Bollihope in Weardale starring Molly, Pip, Superdawg and Rachel and Matt.

It was driech (one of the reasons). In fact it drizzled for pretty much all of the walk. We parked at the normally popular pickernicking spot at Bollihope, just left of Frosterley. In summer, there’s often an ice cream van stationed here. Just a tip there for anybody who is fond of a 99 planning a Weardale walk.

And we followed the line of an old tramway down by Bollihope Burn, through the old quarry with the cowboy pass, past White Kirkley and the limekilns and down to Harehope Quarry where the carved seat was and the lump of Frosterley Marble. The marble is exactly the stuff that can be seen in Durham cathedral. Its not really marble, but cooked limestone. Its very near the Slitt Vein which runs from here to Cowshill and goes through Slitt Wood at Westgate – a poplier place for this blog.

I had a brief poke into Harehope Gill Lead Mine and found the water too deep for the wellies. The apparently loose entrance arch stood up to a bit of violence to see if it would fall down on me, and it seems reasonably safe just now.

Apparently, the mine produced 1165 tons of lead ore from the Slitt vein between 1816 and 1888 and the miners’ privy is part of the archaeology. 72 years of miner poo, eh? Its probably just as well that they shovelled it away.  The there was another three years  of privy visits later on and then it the mine produced fluorspar for a while. How busy the privy was  is not recorded.

We returned whence we came. Just under 4 miles. Bruno did a few more as there were no sheep till we got to White Kirkley, so he had a bit of a bounce around.

Then I couldn’t get the wellies off as they were full of water. Its the suction, y’know. One day they’ll stick permanently.

This is an interesting and easy walk with lots of geology and industrial archaeology to gawp at.

We all got fairly damp, specially those with the extra legs.

Deepdale and The Butter Stone

 

In view of the idiotic price of petrol, and the fact that I got up a bit late, I decided to have a local walk. Bruno mentioned that we’d never been to the Butter Stone and, drooling at the prospect of a rock fabricated entirely from Kerrygold, he was quite assertive about it.

So, we allowed enough petrol for the forty mile trip to Barnard Castle and back.

And so, after parking neatly on the main street, we wandered down to the River and used the gas pipe bridge to get across – and soon we were in the frosty-yet-somehow-still-muddy wildwood of Deepdale. The hills around had a general cover of new snow, which must have fallen last night and the breeze blowing over the snowfields was searching.

The wild wind wanders around the old wintery wood

Wondering whether it would waken the weather

Winding it’s windy fingers round the old wald world.

Yes folks, it was perishing.

Woodland paths are always filthy at this time of year, and the path through Deepdale is a fine example of filthyness. It wanders up and down the sides, just like the wild wind, in fact.

But – I did notice that there was a lot more bird song in the woods today. Outside the woodland, in the pastures and meadows, there is no apparent life at all.

At one point it traverses a short tilted shelf  overlooking a vegetated crag where the path is slippery with slutch and where a slip would have dire consequences. Bruno was strictly on the lead here. If I fell, he was coming with me.

At another point, there are six stone plinths which are the foundations for the Bishop Auckland – Tebay railway which crossed the gorge at this point. The trackbed of the viaduct was about 50 metres above this point.

Later, the path escapes to the long Eastern Pennine slope where there are small crags with overhangs and dry bracken – ideal for scoffing a chicken and bacon butty out of the nithering breeze.

Even later, we wandered across the edge of Battle Hill firing range and over easy moors to the Butter Stone, disappointingly (for superdawg), not made of butter at all.

The Butter Stone, so local legend has it, used to be the place where  the villagers of Cotherstone, undergoing a self-imposed lockdown during the plague, would leave dairy products for trade. And these would be swapped for whatever they would have needed. I suspect that this would at least contain salt, since villages in those days would be pretty much self-sufficient.

I also suspect that the stone had a deeper significance and an older function, because its not very big, to be frank, and it would have had top have had to be well known in plague times. There was, in fact, a small votive offering in a little depression in the stone. A penny. Not much of an offering. I added a  5p. Again, not much, but a wish or a blessing (or a curse) escaped me at the time. I expect you’d have to circle it three times clockwise for a blessing and widdershins for a curse. Or something.

We passed down through Lartington Hall parkland which at one time was a walled pleasure garden and at another, belonged to a 10th Century Danish aristocrat who gave it to the Bishop of Durham. It has some very fine old trees…

As I returned to Barnard Castle, it went dark.

We did 11 miles and about 1000 feet of uphill

The snatch of poetry , by the way, is an English translation of an old poem – I can’t remember whether its Old English or whether somebody just made it up and said it was Old English… .

Flan Fuelled Cross Fell from Kirkland

I don’t know why I suddenly decided to climb Cross Fell. It must have been lurking in the undermind.

And so, armed with a cheese and onion flan (only Southerners and the genetically effeminate eat quiche), a fine banana a mince pie (we still  have lots) and some fair trade chocolate, the knipemobile screeched to a halt in a shower of flying pebbles in the turning circle of the unoccupied holiday cottage village of Kirkland, on the windy side of Cross Fell.

There’s a nice bridleway which goes to Garrigill from here and it is this that we slipped over and nearly cracked both wrists on, and, after being suitably punished by an attack from superdawg using his ice-crunching powers, we followed gingerly through a fierce but brief snowstorm towards Gregs Hut. Gregs Hut is named after a famous North-East pie retailer. The extra “G” was lost during the doomsday survey.

Historical fact #1

There’s no need to go as far as Gregs Hut, though, so we didn’t. Instead, just after tiptoeing over some well frozen but still somehow wobbly bogs, we turned off over the moor to the scree and snow slope that guards the equally frigid summit area.

 

Any thoughts of having a bit of a tarry in the summit shelter soon faded as the nithering wind discovered the chinks in the seventeen layers of thermal liberty bodices and merino stuff as I sat and scoffed the quiche..er.. flan.  Bruno helped, in view of the urgency of avoiding a slow but probably quite enjoyable death from hypothermia and we soon sloped off and slithered off down the Pennine Way to find bridleway number two, which took us pleasantly back down the hill.

We had a brief stop in some brief sunshine in a little shelter on the edge of a view of Eden, but we were soon off again.

Just before we got back to Kirkland, I did notice some ancient ploughing terraces, and, found later, that these were, in fact the “Hanging Walls of Mark Anthony” Bugger all to do with Mark, actually, and much more likely to be lychets – terraces on a hillside created by repeated ploughing.  These things are all over the Pennines, as it happens – some really good ones at Eggleston in Teesdale. They’re quite good for botany because the plants on the little scarps are different from those on the flats. Have a look next time you find rows of long, green platforms on a hillside.

Anyway, we did just under 9 miles and 2300 feet of up. 

Be a man, scoff some flan. Just a tip, there.

The Dodd, Middle Rigg and a Bare Bum

When the weather girl announces an anti-cyclone and sunny intervals, it’s always best to take advantage straight away with a nice walk, followed by an enormous tea of fine aberdeen angus steak mixed with gravy and dog biscuits followed by a long a snooze on the settee till its time for supper, according to Bruno.

And so, we turned up on the Cumbria/Northumberland border just above West Allendale and sploshed off over the soggy moor in the general direction of The Dodd. The Dodd is a boggy Pennine just over 2000 feet high and, as the cloud base was around 1800 feet, it was a tad murky on the top. I had to navigate to find the summit cairn. This failed. So I switched on the yellow GPS thingy and put in the grid reference. This failed as well There was no cairn where it said the top was. So, instead I wandered off to the East in search of the bridleway that runs down Middle Rigg – and, found the summit cairn.  Bruno took the opportunity of each pause for navigation to eat the remaining patch of snow/ice. He and his kind may well be responsible for the retreat of arctic ice. Has anybody checked the pack for teeth marks, I wonder?

Note the maximum speed on the screen, though. I can be quite quick when I want to be…. (maybe its been switched on in the car…dhuhh)

And so we romped and sploshed just a bit down the lovely broad and grassy ridge till we popped out below the fog. It brightened up a bit and I found a rectangular enclosure with high walls, ideal for scoffing an egg and tomato butty in, out of the wind.

I was a bit puzzled by the enclosure, which I thought was an old sheepfold, except that sheepfolds are usually round, or have compartments which can be used to put the animals through some kind of process…. like shearing or washing. Its next to some old mineworkings, so I wondered if it was a temporary shelter for ponies, perhaps….

Anyway, we followed the ridge downhill with good views of West Allendale and, where the path meets the road, we turned back up another path which runs along the intake wall for a couple of miles. Eventually it arrives at Carrshield (where the cheeky gnome/elf can be found guarding a gateway. I believe he’s having his prostate checked…).

Carrshield has some extensive derelict mineworkings and the destruction around River West Allen is remarkable. And interesting. There’s some old mine buildings, about to be restored/converted into houses, which contain peculiar arches and what appears to be a large stone oven??  I’ve no idea to be honest.

A plod up the main road brought us back, through the hamlet of Coalcleugh (coal cluff), an interestingly cold and draughty place,  to the border and the car. We repaired to Brian’s at Nenthead for coffee and catfood. I had the coffee. I’m not sure Brian’s cat will be too happy about this…
We did 9 miles and, as we started at nearly 2000 feet , just over 1000 feet of ascent.