Superdawg Has A Little Camp-Out

Me and the Dawg quite like living ooop here in the North-East where its not too difficult and usually quite quick to find a quiet little hideaway where there are no madding crowds to get far from and where only the local shepherd and the keeper visit from time to time. (Hopefully not when you’re snoozing in your tent)

So me and the Dawg and the Son-In –law had a Friday night out somewhere up Weardale where nobody goes and very few people are all that bothered anyway.

Bruno attempts so self-anaesthetise as he’s not allowed any alcohol

We got wet on the way up, blown about overnight, midgied, sunshine and sausaged in the morning (this is not a metaphor, we ate sausages…)

A cave – now parked in the list of places to explore with a helmet on.

Geologist and anti-cat protester Bruno points out some coral fossils in a streambed. Some say it’s Frosterley marble. Others say it’s nowhere near Frosterley

The idea was to camp on top of a local Nuttal/Hewitt but the wind blew hard and the rain slashed down in sheets, so we ended up in a very nice sheltered green spot at a mere 500 metres.

An interesting limestone kirk very close by….

Bruno enjoyed the akto. I had some rum, a chicken curry and radio 4.

We might do this again.

With The Splinterers On Pen Hill

This was the Splinterers third walk, but only the second for me since for various reasons I didn’t go on the last one.  (I’m not sure if this group has a proper name, yet by the way – so, in the meantime, I’ll use “splinterers” cos they splintered from the Durham County Council guided walks and, I understand, there are splinters of the splinterers too – what my granny would have called a “spell”…)

It was Sheila’s turn to lead and so, armed with a map and walk description out of the Northern Echo (I think..) seven of us and a small Dot of a dog. (Bruno was too knackered from the walk around Dunnerdale the day before – he’s showing his age a bit…)After visiting West Burton’s waterfall, – see pic with flowers – its not what it seems… we hurtled off from up the dale for the bridleway that goes to Carlton in Coverdale. Another group seemed to be following the same navigational strategy but kept going the wrong way, so despite being ahead of us, they occasionally turned up behind us. I would say that the walk descriptions in newspapers are quite often fairly hard to follow…

So we crossed the pass between Pen Hill and Harland Hill to Carlton where lunch was declared in the grounds of the little chapel there.

After a bit more moorland walking over to the local gallops, a short committee meeting was held and the Northern Echo route was abandoned for an assault on the North face of Pen Hill where a break was had by the beacon, which seems to be collapsing a bit. Never climb on the beacon is my advice, even though you might find a bunch of flowers up there.  Avid readers with Very Long Memories might remember that we’ve been here before…. Here we met a family group having a bit of a ramble with their many dogs, one of which was a Dandy Dimble or something (Dandy Dimnont- just googled it…) – a sort of very furry sausage dog…

We followed the scarp edge of Penhill for a bit – a fine high-level trundle and then steeply down an old sledway to the Morpeth Gate road – best known for the fact that it doesn’t go anyway near Morpeth – and probably a drove road to and from the market at West Burton.

A short diversion brought us to a high viewpoint on a crag overlooking Bishopdale. It was here that Dot the dog (not much bigger than a punctuation mark) viciously attacked a passing rambler who defended herself bravely with a stick. Her partner joined in by jumping up and down and whingeing. I’ve included several pictures of Dot the dog, just to demonstrate just how scary an approach from such a beast could be. Shortly afterwards, Dot had to be restrained and told off for being a naughty girl and running about daft whilst ignoring all instructions to come and get her lead on.

We finished the walk steeply back to the waterfalls and the pub at West Burton for jinkies.

It was about 11 miles and 2500 feet.

Several of the pics included in this blog post were provided by Jackie Ritchie, Dot’s boss…

Dunnerdale – Eventually

We all agreed that it must be Tractor Tuesday. And then there were the roadworks…. and the navigational challenges of the Broughton-In-Furness City Centre traffic system that squirted the knipemobile out on to the wrong road. And the meeting of wing-mirrors up the narrow lane to Kiln Bank. Such were the delays that we started a bit late. We parked at Kiln Bank and quickly bagged Fox Haw – a big and rocky nobble on Brown Haw – a playground, frankly, teetering above Dunnerdale. “We” were me, the bro, the Dawg and Ria and the plan was to bag the three tops on the Brown Haw ridge going South, work a  way around to do White Pike and White Maiden and collect Pikes, Caw and Brock Barrow on the way back to the car. Some of this went quite well.

We took our time to bag various nobbles and lumps which might be the summit of Raven Crag and descended a bit for the better defined but less enjoyable “The Knott”. This does have a cairn and a fine view of the tide coming into the Duddon estuary. We’d spent two hours doing two and a bit miles.  So we lunched.

The next part was probably fairly easy – a series of bridleways , some with a rocky surface with deeply indented and ancient ruts made by narrow carts by Jackson Ground and up by the River Lickle towards White Pike, which dominates the skyline and looks really really big. No, I mean, really big….   I was having some trouble getting my legs to work* and time was a-wasting, so a short committee meeting was held during which it was agreed that maybe we could go straight to Pikes and Caw and boycott White Pike and White Maiden altogether. So we did. or, rather, we didn’t.

Pikes and Caw, though, provided more rocky fun and specially good views of , well, everywhere… and the mist descended onto the Coniston fells and a cold wind started up and summer hiccupped and stuttered for a moment or two. Pikes and Caw’s lack of popularity probably only lies in their lack of altitude. It’s probably best for everybody if it stays this way. I probably shouldn’t mention them at all, really.

The descent from Caw is quite steep and involves a short rockstep which is breeched by little gullies. Nothing too technical, but the gully I picked was quite narrow – too narrow for both me and the dawg, in fact, Bruno being enthusiastic about getting down ended up on my head as I slithered down through the juniper. This is probably not the safest way to descend a steep and scree-girt bouldery gully, I would have to say.

Finally , we scrambled steeply up to Brock Barrow. Brock Barrow has a choice of two rocky tors which compete with each other for the priviledge of being the top.

And so, the final bag was bagged. We’d covered two new Wainwright Outliers, two more that I’d done before (Pikes and Caw) and a couple of Birketts. I now have just three Wainwright Outlying Fells to collect (I keep them in a locked shed in the Lower bailey at Knipetowers – just behind the kennels near the North Lodge….  )

We did about 8 miles and 2400 feet.

* I’m blaming the statins for the failure of the main leg and bum muscles to work properly. I’m giving them an unauthorised rest to see what happens…

 

Pennine Way Middleton to Forest in teesdale (and back)

Sunday’s walk up the Pennine Way from Middleton in Teesdale to Forest in Teesdale – and back again was the fourth out of five Durham County Council walks aimed at completing the bit of the Pennine Way that traverses County Durham.

  

I did the reccy on Friday. This is a figure eight route of just a bit over fifteen miles with the crossing point quite near to Bowlees.  Wanderers up Teesdale  might care to note that the cafe at Bowlees has re-opened after having been “done up” to a high standard. So – on the reccy, I allowed myself to be exploited to the tune of a cup of rosy lee and some chocolate cake – and on the Sunday, our small party of five (including Anne as steward once again) had a brief period of celebration in the sunshine with pots of tea, cakes, coffee, hot water, etc etc…

So, our small and select band – almost lost in the car park in the sea of Richmond and Barnard Castle Ramblers who were off on a jaunt in a different direction (There wuz fahsands of ‘em Sarge…)

The route is described by the map wot I put at the bottom of this post. Its not hard to follow and provides no difficulties for the alert navigator and his trusting followers. There are no dangers, apart from the occasional frisky cow and the huge drop off the path into the foaming and roaring Tees some sixty or seventy feet below at High Force and the organ donors motor bikers roaring up and down the B6277 on Sundays who may appear suddenly in the same manner as the Edinburgh train does at that railway crossing at Belford – only these are a bit quicker….

And – we found a source of sloes. I’m not going to reveal where these are, but there’s a significant supply – and, despite my moans about there being another shortage of sloes this year – I found yet more in Weardale whilst walking the dawg and our temporary foster-dog Freya just a couple of hours ago.

The autumn winds were blowing a bit on Sunday, so it’s a reminder that it’ll soon be sloe time, inevitably followed by sloe gin time. Yay!   Where’s me old Slade singles…?

I stuck a video in here as well – Bleabeck force in spate. Thanks to Graeme for some of the pics.

 

Teesdale Water Videos

Just testing me camera and how to post videos. No need for Terrybnd to lose any sleep...!

Hmmm - seemed to work quite well.  Here's another from yesterday's reccy walk up by the Tees. As you can see, the River is almost in spate

AS you can see, the video recording starts before I'm ready for it.

Dhuhhh....

I ought to use more short videos on the blog, really - and the only reason I haven't done so far is that my computer was full and didn't have enough space to get the video file out of my camera and on to the computer. But my son's just built me a new computer with lots of space and speed and it's fan isn't full of ten years of dust....