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.

Howden le Wear Walks Trilogy - Walk 4

Bruno was having a barking morning – mainly at anybody who dared to walk past the house – or blackbirds – or anything, really. So after careful scoffing of a bacon butty, I suggested that as it was such a nice day, we could go out and finish the fourth walk in the Howden le Wear trilogy. You know the one I mean. The bonus walk. Anyway, it mended him from the barking, in favour of standing whining by the drawer containing his lead.

And so we did the walk. It was, indeed, a lovely, sunny day, and the temperature was reaching a scorching 3 degrees C. That’s plus 3 degrees.  Unfortunately, the overnight snowstorm that had turned to a gentle drizzle had hit the ground which has been well below freezing since November. The result was a skating rink.

To avoid the pirouettes and la-di-da’s involving close contact with the ground, I found that by leaning back and mentioning that there were “wabbits” further along, I could get Bruno to pull in as straight a line as possible and thus, avoid much in the way of effort at self-propulsion. This was fine till he cocked his leg when I overtook him and unbalanced him so that a little yellow fountain was produced. This curved through the air in a graceful arc and produced a beautiful rainbow. Obviously.

Soon, we were in Howden le Wear and doing Walk 4. This goes through lots of fields, some of which have been mined for coal, initially in bell pits, then in proper pits with black-faced miners and stuff, and then in huuuuuuuge open cast holes with tonka toys at the bottom. They put all the countryside back again, but not necessarily in the correct order. Its very smooth in parts.

We crossed an old tubway from an old coal mine. The old tub being played by me, post Christmas and, thanks, I’ve now completed my quest to rid the house of fine whiskies and tins of beer. This is just for anybody who was worrying about how I was coping with all that liquid.

The stiles were all, generally OK. One was a bit wobbly and another had some hawthorn which was a bit over-familiar with my jacket. It needs some government cut-backs.

The walk description is mainly OK, although there’s a few things that could be improved, I suppose.

And it was outrageously muddy around Field House farm. Luckily, at the moment, the mud is frozen solid. It’ll soon thaw out, though, and anybody fond of their wellies should note that they’re likely to lose one or both to the morass.

What it really needs is six girls in bikinis acting out The Battle of Marston Moor with handbags.

The walk is three miles and links up with the other three walks. Me and superdawg did six. Cos we’re brill, innit?

Its a good walk. 

And that about wraps it up for the Howden le Wear walks.

A Weardale Walk for the Backpackers – Reccy

I’ve got just about two weeks to reccy three walks to get them into the Durham County Council Summer guided walks programme.

I had a go at this walk a few weeks ago and was rejected by a river. This time me and superdawg had worked out a new route which doesn’t cross the river.

And so, after parking prettily in Stanhope on a slithery car park, we marched off up Stanhope Dene. Stanhope Dene is a deep, wooded gill which is a little bit spoiled in places by some caravan parks and some not very old mineral mines. Some people quite like caravan parks and mines, though.

The walk follows the Dene past the mines and into an upper dale. This has a narrow path which encounters a few tricky landslips at one or two points. These are easily avoidable by forward planning (i.e. going a slightly different way). There’s also a deep pool (ideal for a swim in the summer) which has a small waterfall at it’s head. This is a really good spot to watch salmon jumping on their way upstream to spawn. November is the time to do it, so wrap up well and take a flask and a dog to sit on.

We crossed a small re-entrant and wandered up over the moor to the CtoC cyclists route, which at this point is an old railway line. This leads unfailingly (provided you go right and not left) to the cafe at Park Head. I called in to have a chat to the owner about what would happen if forty ramblers turned up wanting tea and buns. He said it’d be OK, provided we warned him beforehand. I will do this. This cafe is a fine establishment, well known to many cyclists and we couldn’t just walk past.

Onwards and downwards along the old line to Crawleyside and then along Crawleyside Edge – a quarried gritstone edge with a good view of Weardale and places to sit and not do very much. And then, into Shittlehope with it’s slightly scary but fenced-off path teetering over a limestone slot of a gorge. But we’ve been here before. There is the cave, of course – Lynnkirk – but the scramble down the river to get to the entrance would be too much for DCC’s Health and Safety to endure. So we won’t go there.

The walk is 9 miles and has 1000 feet of ascent. The idea is to do it on the Sunday of the Backpackers Club AGM in May.  If it gets accepted onto the programme, I’ll put some more info about it in this very blog.

Its a good walk, though – I’m happy with it now. It’ll be grand in springtime.

 Well, I must say, we’ve been very adult about Shittlehope this time. Well done. Have a star.

snigger………

Windermere Contains Dangerous Levels of Cheese Claim Scientists

Tree Ruined by Over-Exposure to Blue Stilton

I don’t think this is particularly true, but several commentators have got quite animated about it recently. Thos who don’t think there’s any cheese in Windermere, particularly Dangerous Anthropologically Produced Crumbly Lancashire have their hands stamped on and labelled Lactose Intolerant Deniers (LIDS), despite all actual evidence to the contrary that anything crumbly or full of holes but tasting of cheese is to be found in the murky depths below all those sailing boats.

So, today, me and superdawg picked up the Bro in Kendal and went off to find out for ourselves.

Our first Port of Call was the imaginatively named “Unnamed Summit, School Knott 247metres”  This was well frozen today and has a small outcrop on the top. The view of Windermere was all right, I suppose.

We then trogged off to the venerated Grandsire. This is a nice little hill with a small outcrop on the top. You can see Windermere from there quite well.

Down the hill we went to a small and solidly frozen little tarn, which Bruno had a little skate on, and then the tough 30 metre climb up to yer Actual School Knott.  This has a small outcrop on the top and a bit of a view of Windermere.

You can probably detect a theme by now.

We wandered around a Windermere housing estate for a bit, ran panicking across the outrageously busy  and maniac-haunted A591, being passed by three girly runners with lovely bottoms, and up through the woods to Orrest Head, which has some small outcrops on the top and a view of Windermere, plus, as a bonus, some benches to sit on.

It was here that I scoffed my chicken salad sandwich.

We lurked through various back allies, footpaths and the rougher parts of Windermere town, where some of the housing is worth less than a million and a half quid, and then upwards and along a bit to a view point, which had some outcrops and a view of Windermere, finally emerging on the summit of Brant fell, with it’s outcrops and fine view of Windermere. We tried to climb an outcrop but fell off.

Cheese? We couldn’t detect any. This is not conclusive, obviously. Lack of cheese on just the one day doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t any.

I trust the scientists, me. I think they’re great.

Anyway, we did about 9 miles and 1500 feet of upwards movement. Bruno’s poo bag split whilst he was crossing a wall (I’d tied it to his lead as I don’t really like to put those things in my pockets or rucksack in case they..er…split….) Dhuhh.

New Ice Age. Roddymoor Destroyed by Glacier

This is not strictly true, although it may be just a bit early.
Today’s walk has appeared in the Pie Blog on severalteen occasions previously. It is the January adopt-a-path walk checking out various paths and bridleways on the North side of Crook. This is the side with the hill – just about a thousand feet high, in fact. I’ll do the walk again in July.

We (me and superdawg) discovered two decrepit stiles and a missing “public footpath” sign, which has probably been borrowed by Pikeys for it’s aluminium. I will report on all this, including the paths which didn’t have any problems, in  a couple of days. There’s nobody in at County Hall anyway.

We also met “Bud” a nice little dog and his more scary friend “Fluffy”, a twelve stone crossbred rottweiler  who arrived at speed with raised hackles and a threatening growl and stuck his nose up Bruno’s bum. This is ill-advised for many reasons, I have to say.
We also discovered that after all the snow has melted, it leaves behind a lot of litter and dog poo.
There’s a lovely wind factory on the tops. One day , children, everywhere will look like this

We met some chickens, some sheep and a young lad walking his puppy. (This is not a euphamism by the way, he really was walking a puppy) and some horses and chickens.
We also discovered, in the graveyard at Billy Row, a small grave with fresh Christmas toys and flowers and so on. What was a bit surprising, and very touching, was that the occupant of the grave died in 1940. That’s seventy years.
How many of us will be remembered by a family for seventy years?

And that was it. 5 Miles and 650 feet. No pubs were open. And it was cold and grey.  Its a start, though, eh?