Simon Fell and Ingleborough

This is the very last pair of the Yorkshire Dales 2000 foot tops series. It all went approximately to plan, so J_on_ tour can keep his buff.
The bit that went wrong was me getting up a bit late, so it was nearly eleven o’clock when I parked the knipemobile at Clapham. It was OK, though, I just chopped a little bit off the planned walk.

The walking up to join the Three Peaks path on it’s final downhill lurch to Horton was  really very enjoyable. Its very easy walking on short green turf, y’see, and the views towards Penyghent, across a fine karst plateau are, well, very fine. Somewhere along the route, I lost my banana. But I was cheered up from the post-fruitless-mourning by the bright sunshine and blue skies, although the force four “breeze” from higher latitudes was a bit more than chilling.

We wandered towards Ingleborough, turning off to follow a wall up to Lord’s Seat – a grand limestone nobble with a cracking view of Upper Ribblesdale. To get there we had to cross “Rawnsley’s Leap”, a monster of a ladder stile which is listed in Yorkshire Limestone Climbing Guides as V-Diff. We crossed it back again a few minutes later and rambled up to the summit.

I wanted to follow the path which runs along the edge of Ingleborough’s magnificent corrie, and to do this me and the dawg had to negotiate a wobbly wall defended by barbed wire. This went without too much of a hitch and Bruno has all his bits, and so have I, apart from the parts which have been removed surgically, in Bruno’s case, the vet in Bishop Auckland, and in my case the Urology Department at Bradford Royal Infirmary’s inebriate ferret “Jason” who is introduced into the tight underpants of those who’s wives consider that they have sufficient children. If you catch my drift.

Anyway, the path along the edge of the corrie was icy but good to walk on. Soon we were on the summit, bemoaning the loss of our banana, but enjoying, instead, ginger cake, coffee and chocolate. I talked briefly to a lad who was doing the 3 Peaks and was heading for a ten hour time.  He seemed cheerful enough, so we didn;t tell him any fart or vasectomy jokes, but plunged off over the edge of the Brigantian ramparts to Little Ingleborough, down to Gaping Gill and then back on the lanes and through the tunnels to Clapham.

This is my last 2000 foot top of this series. I saved the best till the last.
For information of those confused souls out there, this wasn’t my first ascent of Ingleborough. I’ve been there before, many times since my first in October 1971. I’ve been on two fell searches on the hill and helped recover the remains of a scouser who lost an argument with a large boulder. And camped on it a couple of times and been inside it. Its my favourite Yorkshire Dales hill. I’ll likely climb it again.

12 Miles and 2250 feet of climbing.
The next question is, though – what shall I do next?
Hmmmmm……

A Bit of Pennine Posterity

You may need to forgive me for the next bit.
When I were a lad, the cotton mills in Earby had more looms than there were people in the town. My old mum worked twelve looms and we lived very close by. Next door, in fact.
Spring Mill (now a holiday cottage company)  worked 24 hours a day. It couldn’t have done any more. It worked itself to death. It did try it’s  hardest/ Everybody tried their hardest.
As kids, we knew the hierarchy of the millworkers from the sweepers to the weavers to the tacklers and the boilerman. There were clogs and shawls. And pints of tea and dirty jokes on the loading bay. Its a world that went , maybe forty or fifty years ago.
Me and my brother, sometimes,got to sleep in the big double bed in the back bedroom. From here you could hear the mill working. All night.
And the rhythm of the mill and the white noise that it produced would lull the knipe sprogs off to sleep.
And the rhythm of the mill is preserved in an unlikely rock classic of the 1960’s.
And here it is.



Spring Mill had exactly the same beat and rhythm as this. It was a lot noisier,though! But the percussion track here is Exactly the sound of the mill. Exactly. Enjoy.

A Little Trundle Up the Hush

I visited Brian today and we had a little wander up Dowgang Hush at Nenthead. We only did, maybe a mile and a half, but with 400 feet of ascent and lots of poking around.
Roughly at the top of one of the branches of the hush are the remains of an old coal mine.

I noticed that the coal mine shop or, maybe it was an office  or a workshop (it has a fireplace) was covered in bright orange lichen. I’ve not seen this before. Any lichen experts out there?

Secondly, Brian was turning over bits of the spoil heap, which was mainly lumps of shale, when he announced that he’d found a fossil. On closer inspection, the spoil heap was, in fact littered with oval-shaped rocks with ripples down the side. These were fossilised trees. The ripples are, or were the bark and these things were just a bit thicker than sapling size. I took a photo. In fact, I took a fossil.  Its about ten inches long by two or three inches wide and weighs about four kg. That’s the wife’s Christmas present sorted out anyway.

What?
Look, it’s 350 million years old…..

We returned by a different route and only slightly disturbed the couple of kids camped by the pond near the mine.
Aren’t the kids supposed to be at school just now?

Adopt-a-path walks in North Durham

Readers with really good memories may remember that I’ve done this walk a couple of times before. In fact, it’s two walks – one five or so miles starting at Blanchland and one of about ten miles starting at Edmundbyers. I do this twice a year and the purpose is to provide Durham County Council with a report on the state of a number of public footpaths and bridleways. I do the reporting on-line.

I don’t take superdawg because there are supercows on part of one of the walks and they once mugged me to try to get at the dog. They can be a bit lively sometimes as they’re suckler cattle with young and a bull. I don’t mess with them any more….

But worra smashing day for doing this kind of thing. There were blue skies all day and the thermometer in the Knipemobile on the way up there was minus one. There were ice patches on the road and some of the ice didn’t melt all day. This, together with the wind blowing off the arctic ice pack from somewhere oop North, meant that I had my cosy stuff on today. It could be described as “refreshing”

Walk number one was along by the river and through some woods to the small township of Townfield and then back over the moors to Blanchland with a small diversion for an off-route path. Everywhere was pretty much unchanged from the last time I did this in May. I took a trowel to try to drain some of the boggy bits in the wood. This was particularly unsuccessful. I’d need a proper spade for this. This is beyond my willingness….

At one point, whilst plodding up the road wondering whether or not I had angina, I was passed by a walker going very fast. He kept picking stuff up and putting it in a plastic bag. he was picking litter, bless ‘im. He marched off towards Stanhope with a growing bag of chuckaways.

I also met four walkers, two of whom weren’t where they thought they were and were having a slight whinge about the map. I pointed them in the right direction and we had a good chat.

Not much to report, really.

Walk two was along the lead mine trail from Edmundbyers, past Pedam’s Oak, where they’d locked up the youngsters in a barn If I was them, I would fear for my life, I think. Their mum’s were in the next field having a moo.

I returned by a higher path and met another five walkers and three cyclists. this is remarkable. I never meet anybody up here.
On the way back, I started noticing sweety papers and isotonic drinks bottles. I picked up quite a bit of litter on the way back and deposited in somebody’s wheelie bin in Edmundbyers. I’ve not come across litter before. The evidence was that whoever was responsible , did it very recently. Amongst my finds were some tinfoil containing half a ham and pease pudding butty. This is a North-Eastern food habit. The bread was fairly fresh (possibly frozen overnight)

I might have a rant about this. You’re expecting a rant, aren’t you? Be honest.  You’re expecting me to say that whoever leaves their chocolate wrappers, empty plastic bottles, yoghurt tubs (yoghurt tubs?) and ham and pease pudding butties is a slob and a slut and dirty sleazebag. Aren’t you?
Well, I’m not. I left the food for the local vermin to scoff but removed the packaging. rats need love too, y’know. And the owls eat ‘em.
15 Miles and 1700 feet of up. For some reason, this walk is a mile longer done anti-clockwise…  ?

Competition Winner – The last top

We have just the one correct answer to the what-will-be-my-last-Yorksire-Dales-2000-foot-top competition.
The plan is that on the very next Sunday I will park the knipemobile at Clapham and walk over Moughton Scar to Alum Pot. From there I will climb Simon Fell and walk along the ridge to Ingleborough and then back to Clapham using the Gaping Gill path.
So, the answer is “Ingleborough”
And the winner is unknown, but whoever it is lives in North_east England (no, it’s not me or any of my relatives) and works for the NHS and has a blog with the name http://jayzspaze.blogspot.com/  Nice blog, though…..
If J would like to email me, using the email address in my profile, and provide a postal address where he would like his spanking new merino wool buff sent, I will put it in the post.
Congrats to J.
If it all goes badly wrong and I don’t make it to the summit of Ingleborough, then I’ll be wanting it back. (Only joking)
Some people got the right walk and suggested that Simon Fell would be the last one, but I’m saving the best till last, see?