Day 9 - Kirkby Stephens to Keld

This is Jonathan on Frank’s Bridge. It’s not a shopper-gone-wild story. That’s just the name of the bridge.








Unlike the other days, we did not wake up to blue skies. However, when we left it was just a light rain and a touch of a breeze. By the time we’d gotten about a mile out of town, the rain was blowing straight into our faces (what else?) at 40 mph. At times I was blown off balance. The first two miles were pretty rotten, and I thought, I’ve got nine more of these miserable miles to go? And these two miles were on paved road. Oy vey!

Let me back up slightly. We stayed at The Manor House in Kirkby. It is run with an eccentric hand by Jean Leeson. I do heartily recommend her establishment. The place was spotless. The bed sheets were ironed. She made me a proper English breakfast. She had cats. She anticipated my every need. Need your laundry done? Your room warm enough? Too warm? Want some tea? How many sausages? If I had known how miserable the first two miles were going to be, I would have asked Jean to tell the others that I had already left -- and hidden in the closet.





Mary in camo.











This is the “rest easy” chair about a mile out of town. Jonathan is hiding from the wind and rain.










Cue the ominous music. Look at the rain clouds hovering over us. Look at the dark and murky moor. We are weatherized to the hilt.

Mary was sucked in by the moor water up to her hip. My boots got stuck in the moor mud and I fell over sideways. My backpack kept me afloat until Tom could rescue me. I was a beached whale. A turtle on its back. A scotchtaped balloon.

Let’s look at the bright side, shall we. Hmm, thinking…thinking…thinking. Time’s up. Oh, yeah, our ascent is fairly gradual.

This is our goal at the top of the hill, The Nine Standards, they’re called. They are giant stone things. They’re not cairns, obelisks, or idols. They’re not in a circle, and they’re of all sizes. I don’t know what they are or were. I only know they make dandy windbreaks.

But then we must go on. So out from behind the whatevers and onward. But onward to where?

The guidebook helpfully says that there is no path to where we need to go next. The bog/moor sucks up footprints as soon as they are made. That’s not strictly true. There are tons of muddy footprints. They lead everywhere. In every direction. We trudge off in a direction set by the GPS. Two women were in front of us and they have started off in the wrong direction. Jonathan, ever helpful, is yelling at them and trying to wave them down. They finally hear and head in our direction. Together we slog off on what we hope is the right “path.”

A combination of compass (other group) and GPS get us started off at our next “decision” point. The compass lady seems pretty competent so I don’t check my GPS until we’re headed down a miraculous gravel road. It’s almost too good to be true. All together now: That’s because it is too good to be true.

Jonathan and Mary are pretty far away and I can’t tell them that we’re on the wrong path. We need to be still up on the ridge, walking through more bog and muck and moor and shit like that. I think even if they could hear me, they’d probably pretend not to. Our gravel road, as we can all see, is headed for a rendezvous with a paved road. A road that will take a cold and tired walker directly to Keld.




Why would anyone want to give up walking in this?

You can’t tell here, but the water actually runs brown from the peat and black dirt that abounds.

We all met at the road and agreed that we took the wrong trail, and then it becomes like 20%-off day at REI. Everyone was cheered that their torture was over. They can get to Keld by road! Everyone except me. Which means Tom and me. Tom is Pack-Man. He carries the heavy water bottles. He carries my walking sticks in his pack when I don’t need them. He pulls me out of bogs. He walks behind me to make sure I don’t window shop along the way. (You never can tell when someone will have a 2-for-1 sale on the bog.)

I want to go on the trail. Tom generously says he actually wants to go on the trail, too. I always think that there will be something great that I’ll miss if I don’t follow the guidebook exactly (est.).

So we part company. There’s a way back onto the trail a quarter mile down the road. It begins with no bog and no mud, so I think, This is a great decision I’ve made.

The route was beautiful -- I must look up synonyms. The route was beauteous and comely. That’s better. But it certainly had bog, mud, and shit. (No more cutesy euphemisms.) It also had streams that we had to cross, or maybe it was one stream we had to cross many times. It doesn’t matter. The bank collapsed as I was trying to climb it during one such crossing, and I slipped and landed in the stream. Water immediately poured into my boots. $*!@%! I didn’t walk the rest of the way to Keld, I sloshed.

We entered a gentle valley. The clouds were moving fast, so the sunlight winked off and on as we walked. It was like having someone look over your shoulder suddenly, but not in a creepy way.

We spotted isolated farms (some of which were entrepreneurial enough to want to sell hikers hot chocolate and tea) and abandoned buildings. This is an old area of green beauty and difficult terrain.

Our reward for taking this trail was the wildlife. We flushed out a brace of grouse that had been hiding in the low scrub. We frightened six bunnies as they darted across from stone wall to trees and meadow. We watched a curlew (maybe) float on the wind looking for prey. It’s too early in the year for midges and other annoying insects. I really felt good. My feet didn’t. I’m trading them in.

Keld is little. Even a joke would be too long for it. But here we are at Keld Lodge, a hiker’s paradise. There is a drying room for wet and stinky shoes and other wet objects. It couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time for me. Hmm, methinks other hikers have fallen victim to the moors and streams.

Keld Lodge is contemporary in design, while The Manor House was pure English country. What a contrast!

Our friends who always got lost appear to have straightened themselves out because they beat us to the Lodge today. And we got lost for the second day. Turnabout, eh? We also made friends with two very, very tall young German men, who speak with almost no accent. They mistakenly only allowed 12 days to complete the journey. That means an incredible amount of walking. Today’s tally for them is 20 miles. And they said they lingered over breakfast.

Ablelour (est.) scotch and a half-pint of Keld Ale. That’s my other reward.

Day 8 - Orton to Kirkby Stephens

It's pronounced Ker-bee Stevens. You're obligated to pronounce it that way even if you only say it in your head.

Kirby Stephens. Wasn’t that Samantha’s second husband on Bewitched? Anyhow, that’s today’s destination. Thirteen miles of rolling dales, which may be a redundant phrase.

I thought we had left Cumbria for Yorkshire after Patterdale, but apparently that’s tomorrow’s milestone. All this time I’ve been thinking: All Creatures Great and Small takes place in this county; Dalziel and Pasco and Charlie Priest wander around and solve crimes here. But, no. Wrong county. Despite the severity and austerity of the moors, I should still have been thinking bunnies and daffodils.

Once again, upon rising, the sky was deceptively blue. By breakfast time it had clouded somewhat. When we left Orton it was overcast.

I’d like to say the beauty outweighed the “trudgery” of today’s hike -- and it was beautiful -- but I think I’m becoming accustomed to the beauty and now expect more, bigger, better. The Lake District set a very high standard.




In the picture on the right, Jonathan is talking to a young farmer whose land we tramped through. He was shoveling bits and pieces of mud, dirt, or something from one place to another. He told Jonathan that a big machine had been through the pasture last summer and had left big ruts. In order to grow hay this summer, the farmer had to fill in the ruts so the grass could grow on level ground. If the ground is level, he doesn’t harvest a lot of dirt too.




Of course, we saw moors. This time the moors came with horses. Part of the path also belonged to horses walking in an endurance race. Like a relay race for cars, the horse and rider must finish the course during a certain period of time.

It is in the moors that our little group was humbled.

Jonathan decided to take a different route than the rest of us. With a variety of public footpaths and right-of-ways, the choices presented to the walker are often numerous.

We agreed to meet at something called “Bent Farm Camping Barn,” not too far from where we parted. When we reached the camping barn, it was deserted. Jonathan had taken the shorter route (supposedly), so that was surprising. We hung around awhile, but no Jonathan. I left a note on the barn door tucked under a door knocker. (Remind me to carry scotch tape the next time.)

In any event, the rest of us walked on. The wind picked up. West to east is best because the wind is at your back? Nonsense. It was in our face, making us look down instead of up. We also came to an area of steep descent and had to look down. All that down looking made us miss our next course change. This was significant because when you’re traveling through pastures, you have to be able to find the stile or gate that will keep you on the path. Otherwise, you’re trespassing!

We wound up on another public path heading in the opposite direction to where we wanted to be.

Frank asked directions of someone in a car, so he took off by road to Kirkby Stephen, further reducing our little group. Mary, Tom and I found a piece of a trail that took us through more pastures, with interesting and sometimes narrow fence gaps. We broke through to Kirkby Stephens via the oddly named “Bloody Bones Lane.” We laughed at what must have been behind that name until we came upon the bloody bones of a small animal. Someone was trying to make sure that the lane lived up to its name. Other than that creepy reference, the lane itself was leafy and it was like walking down an English lane in a period movie.





Bloody Bones Lane










17th c. church in Kirkby Stephens








We finally found Jonathan at Kirkby Stephen. It turned out he had gotten lost too. Our error-free days of walking had come crashing to an end. Hubris, Tom said, had received payback.

Now here’s the funny story to cap a woeful day. Did Jonathan see the note I left for him, or was he far in advance of us? First off, Jonathan happened upon the ending point of the horse race. It was fascinating to him and he stopped to talk to people. He thought that since the horse race ran along the bridlepath/public footpath, we would come walking by where the horses were. Unfortunately, the end of the race took place just south over the rise from where the footpath turned east. By the time Jonathan realized this, we had already passed by. He hurried to Bent Farm Camping Barn, but we were not there. And there was no note on the door. He ran into a couple of other walkers. They asked him if he was Jonathan. He was surprised that they knew his name. It turned out they, too, had been to the camping barn, saw the note, which had blown away, and conveyed the message to Jonathan.

Jonathan ran (!) to catch up to us, but by this time, we had started down the wrong path. He continued on but then got lost and found himself having to vault over a fence onto a soccer field at one point.

All’s well at the end this time. We have interesting, albeit sad, stories to tell. We were lost lambs today. But now we’re found.

Day 7 - Shap to Orton

Let me first start with this picture of Mary walking through a fenced pasture. It was so cold and wet yesterday that I didn’t take any pictures. I just wanted to get to where we were going.

So this is a pasture just like the ten or eleven we went through in the rain and cold. Pasture after pasture after pasture …

What you don’t see in this picture (and I will spare you) are the cow patties and sheep plops, the churned up mud and grass, and the rabbit holes just the right size to step into and twist an ankle.


This is the actual start to our day. Less than five minutes walk from our B&B was the 1/3 point of our trip. It is an overpass of a Virgin bullet train track. (The irony is too intense.) We wanted to memorialize this occasion. Especially given what we now know, we really wanted to congratulate ourselves for lasting as long as we have. Instead what we memorialized was a moment so typical of how we start our day.

Less than five minutes into our day’s hike, we are applying blister packs (F&M), taking off clothes (Tom), putting on clothes (Jonathan), and taking pictures (me).

We never did take the triumphant group shot.

Is it raining? Why, yes, it is. When we woke around 7:00, the sky was blue and it was warm. When we had breakfast at 8:30, it was beginning to cloud over, but there was more blue sky than not. By the time we left at 10:00, it was raining and the temperature had dropped. A few minutes after the bridge shot was taken, stinging rain and wind blasts hit us in the face.

Why do people walk mostly from west to east on the C2C walk? Primarily because the wind is at your back. Off and on throughout this day the wind hit us in the face. In other words, my friends, the wind was not at our backs. It was most definitely in our faces.

Fortunately, it was mostly light drizzle and occasional wind gusts that hit us. The walk was the gentlest and shortest of the last few days. I’ll give you the punch line for the day right here: we arrived only slightly soggy, in good spirits, with almost all parts in working condition. Everyone told us it would be an easy day, and it actually was.




This is a Virgin bullet train. I know you can’t see it. By the time I got my camera up, the train had whizzed by.












I was so focused on climbing up the stile -- I’m well trained at this point -- that I didn’t notice that I could have just walked around it. Tom is demonstrating.







We traveled along the moors and noticed “cairn circle” on the map. Tom and I trudged to the spot and found a vague stone circle. Nothing mystical happened; no pot of gold appeared, Tom wasn’t beamed up, his astigmatism hasn’t been cured.

The picture on the left is of one of the few plants that will grow on the forbidding moor. Of course it is a forbidding, prickly plant.

It was very windy on the moor. Jonathan found a hole, one of several scattered across the moor. Frank says no one knows who or what created it. It was ideal for hiding from the wind to have our lunch. We felt like rabbits. Mary told us about the asps that live out there. It was a short lunch.






As we got closer to Orton -- subject of many jokes, including ‘Orton ‘ears a ‘oo -- the weather got a little better. We could see meadow flowers in the sunlight. We caught a glimpse of the rare moor orchid. We rambled along a babbling brook. Birds were singing. This is what we had hoped the walk across England would be like. If we have to pay for this moment by scaling vertiginous fells, then that is what we have to do.






And so, in short order, under threatening skies, we found The George Hotel, had a pint of Cumberland Ale (me) and Guinness (Tom and Jonathan), and listened to the rain begin to fall -- outside.

Day 6 - Patterdale to Shap

On the banks of Ullswater, looking back at where we had been staying.











We stared longingly as the steamer heading up Ullswater.









We were all excited and anxious about today’s walk, one of the longest of the trip: 17 miles. When we woke, we looked out of the window and saw rain, mist shrouding the tops of the mountains. Oh, oh.

Wainwright says in his books, our proprietress reminded us, that it’s okay not to hold to the way if conditions are dangerous. Hikers get lost regularly on the foggy paths in the fells (peaks). Our collective sense of direction (maps + GPS + democracy) has been infallible so far, but not even the collective can see cairns (piles of rocks keeping the hikers on the path) in the fog. So we decided to go the longer (18 miles, est.), roundabout way.

A bonus is we would not be obligated to attack the “steepest part of the C2C walk.” The steepest part? We thought nothing could be steeper than some of the parts we had already tackled. When you’re going pretty much straight up, how much steeper can you get?

We had been unnaturally lucky so far with the weather. Today that luck would change; lots of rain and gusty winds were expected. I had on long underwear, a thin wool shirt, a regular cotton shirt, a thin polar fleece pullover, hiking pants, a rainjacket, and rainpants. I enumerate them again because, unlike other days, I kept the layers on for most of the trek.

We chose our new route from a highlighted map previous hikers had forgotten at the B&B. I mean, wouldn’t you do the same thing?

Let me insert here that some of this route is very confusing. Our proprietress said one poor guest tried three times to get on the trail and wound up coming back around to Patterdale. Tom did not want to be a story that our landlady could tell, so he said we should stay somewhere else in Patterdale, in disguise, were we to re-route ourselves back.

The first part of the hike involved following most of the eastern shore of Ullswater, one of the famous Lake District lakes. Tom and I had been on Ullswater about eleven years ago when we brought my mother and the boys to England. Only then we had been on one of the steamers that ply up and down the lake. Even at that time I remember thinking, as we rounded a bend that exposed the second half of the lake, this lake is really long.

This is one of the most beautiful, scenic spots I’ve ever seen. Gently rising hills on one side, stark fells on another. Sheep pastorally grazing on the hillsides. Little stone cottages dotting the shore. Yellow gorse, green trees, orange-brown bracken, tiny violets. It would be wonderful to sit somewhere and just stare. But not when you’ve got 18 miles (est.) to go. Besides, we would have about eight miles along the lake to admire the scenery.

Yes and no. Yes, we got to admire the scenery. No, we didn’t do much of it, since our faces were turned down to get the, at times, stinging, pelting rain out of our faces. Before you feel too sorry for us, I should say that after about an hour or two of that, the rain turned to an acceptable drizzle. It drizzled the rest of the way of our ten-and-a-half hour walk. Now you can feel sorry for us.



Frank and sheep in a face-off.










Beautiful but treacherous stone steps. The ones in the fell the other day were even steeper!










The path turned east, away from the lake, and we found ourselves between stone walls and sheep pastures. The stone walls were to keep people out of other people’s property. The sheep just ran amok. We’d often come across them in our path, staring us down, daring us to come closer. Fortunately, that’s just the look they’re born with. They’re also born with a flight response. We couldn’t get near one of those sheep if we tried.




A last look at Ullswater.










Gorse + stream + green grass = pretty.










After trudging, the new word we’ve substituted for “walking,” along for another few miles, the scenery suddenly changed. We were in the stark and forbidding moors. We had gone from the closed-in valley settings of the last few days to the wide, flat expanse of the moors. There were no sheep on the moors, only mud. We got very good at dodging puddles, but the longer we were at it, the more we just started slogging through the puddles. It was too much effort to try to keep our boots dry, especially with the rain pouring down our rainpants and directly into our boots. Hah!

If Tom were keeping a journal, this is what it would say: Barbara told me I couldn’t pack my own suitcase. I’m only allowed to get things from the left half of my suitcase.

You have a lot of time to think in the moors.

In the middle of the moors, we came across a small road with two cars parked on it, and another car bearing down on us. In the middle of the remote and desolate moors, we had to stop and look both ways before crossing. That just struck me as hilarious.




That's a mighty stinging raindrop on the lens.











After trudging through the moors for a few miles, we came to a small town. Even at walking speed, we were through the town in minutes. That’s how small. Ah, seeing towns must mean civilization, B&B, Bushmills. We must be close. We fired up our maps, computational equipment, satellite link-ups, and figured out … we still had another six miles to go. At least.

Back to trudging.

Because we were not on the Wainwright course, almost all the walking we had done was off the guidebook map. But we were coming back into guidebook territory. There were C2C trail markings on the map. We could rejoin the C2C path instead of walking on the road. We could be hikers, not trudgers, again.

This is what gave us pause. When Frank took the low road (literally, a road) and the rest of us took the high road (anti-literally, the path), if you will remember, Frank arrived in Scotland (the B&B) way before us.

Should we give up the sure road for the unknown path which may add time and difficulty to our hike? Should we punish our already whining feet by taking a potentially rock-strewn, rollercoastering, poop-decorated meandering trail? Oh, why the heck not.

Enigmatically, on the map the trail seemed to be a straight southeast line from where we were to the town of Shap, our goal. How was that possible? Shouldn’t we have to twist and turn around obstacles?

After we twisted and turned through public footpath entrances, stiles, and gates to begin the trail, we found ourselves in a large sheepfold. The map directions were to proceed to a point on the opposite wall. Sure enough, we found a stile. On the other side? Another sheepfold. The map directions pointed to a point on the opposite wall. Sure enough, we found a stile (however, distinctly different in form from the last). On the other side? Another sheepfold.

And so on and so on for at least ten iterations. And that is why, my friends, it was a straight line on the map. We just walked diagonally from sheepfold to sheepfold.

Sheep poop a lot. And it was raining, so there was mud. Poop and mud. An observer would have thought us drunk, as we weaved side to side to negotiate the fields.

We stood on a slight hill and viewed Shap. Mary and I had different counters. Hers logged in at 20 miles, mine at 18. Our feet didn’t care how far, because to them it was simply too long. The hardest half mile of the entire trip was the half mile down the main road to our B&B.

A friend of the proprietor was going to have dinner in the B&B’s restaurant. (That sounds like a contradiction doesn’t it, that a B&B would have a restaurant. Wouldn’t that make it a B&R?) She stopped to talk with us while we waited in the living room by a blazing log fire to be called to dinner. She lives at the end of the village near the trail and often can see weary hikers coming into town. Some of them look barely able to walk another step, so she sometimes offers a ride to them. She could have been talking about us an hour ago.

She also solved our bag of stones mystery. When she was younger, one of her jobs was to build stone pathways on Scottish hiking trails. Bags of stones would be helicoptered in, and she and other workers would put them into place on the trail. Frank verified, mystery solved.

There are no pictures after the moors because I was too exhausted to dig out the camera, buried under layers of clothes, to take a picture of the sheepfolds. Look at one of the other sheep pictures. Seen one sheepfold, seen ‘em all.

Will I count sheep to get to sleep? Maybe. Maybe I’d even reach “1.”

Day 5 - Grasmere to Patterdale

This rock is what underlies the ground in Grasmere. It is what we walked on (only rockier) throughout the day.











That distant hilly range is where we're headed.







This is the story of how we lost Jonathan the first time. I'm writing this with several days hindsight, so I know we managed to lose Jonathan again. He is the curious scientist who delights in exploring and asking questions, and his thinking is unexpected. And this is why we lost him. But before we lost Jonathan, we had to get over the Grisdale Pass.

Grasmere was just lovely, and we all regretted immensely not having had more time there. There was no time to visit Wordsworth's cottage, to Mary's dismay. She had been reading his sister's journals, as well as Mary's mother's journal about her visit to Grasmere several years ago. It is because of the significance of Grasmere as a poet's rest that the tourists come pouring in and the town has more businesses to cater to them. We had a fairly good dinner at a regular restaurant, not a pub, as a result.

This was supposed to have been an easy walk up to Grisdale Pass, past Grisdale Tarn, and down into the next valley to our farm B&B. There were other, more difficult alternatives: high trails to St. Sunday and Helvellyn peaks. We wanted the easy ten-mile path to the next valley. Three and a half hours, the guidebook estimated.





We went up unmannerly rocks, over little rivulets that sought gravity's path down the hill, through the abundant mud. It was so cold at the top that, despite how hot we were from our climb, we had to put on extra clothing.

Grisdale Tarn is dark. Dark water even on a day with glimpses of sunshine. Maybe hikers in the heat of summer are tempted to swim in its waters, but not today. As we hiked towards one end of the tarn, we spied huge black plastic bags full of something. They were close to the beginning of the trail going up to Helvellyn. Frank, the other curious scientist of our group, made the extra effort and walked over to one of the bags. He came back and reported to the rest of us. "Rocks," he said. Rocks? Why would you bring rocks to a place that already, to our intimate knowledge, had lots of rocks? Remember, I'm writing this from the vantage point of many days later, so I know we find out the answer to this puzzle a couple of days from now. But just to let you know: the bags of rocks were helicoptered in and were not sitting there waiting to be helicoptered out.

We had lunch among the rocks on the other side of the pass and stared down at the valley below. How have the English managed to maintain the charm and curiously lost-in-time look? Sheep farms, stone buildings, meandering lanes, all pretty much as they have been for hundreds of years. Answer: government subsidies. Sad but true, the government knows tourists like to see exactly what we, too, have come to see: sheep farms, stone buildings, meandering lanes. They pay people to maintain this illusion, because tourism is big business in this part of the country. Even knowing this, you can't help finding the whole shebang very attractive anyway.




Valley view.












That's the way the cookie crumbles: a lost gingerbread man.








The uneven rock paths make the going slow and our group was still plodding way past the time, according to the guidebook, when we should have been hoisting a pint in Patterdale.

When we finally got down to the valley, we began walking on farm lanes and roads. It's interesting to watch farm life, including the thunderous pounding of fence posts by a machine and circling of the farm by farmers on ATVs. Whether by choice or government decree, we don't know, the remnants of very old buildings stand yet, in counterpoint to the products of modern technology. It is one of these ancient buildings that Jonathan started to explore. It was somewhat off the road, so none of the rest of us, footsore and aching for a pint of best bitter, was tempted. We continued walking down the road, knowing that Jonathan could easily catch up.

We passed a couple of signs that claimed to be footpaths, but following the instructions in our guidebook, we sought and finally found the one it suggested as a way into Patterdale. Before hieing off down this trail, however, we waited for Jonathan. Frank even walked back down the road a way to see if he could see Jonathan. We finally decided that Jonathan had taken one of the other paths on purpose. He, too, has the guidebook we've all been using. So we continued on our way.

We came to this path, the prettiest we have seen so far, on our final climb over to Patterdale. The grass was soft under our feet and not strewn with poop. The mud was easily side-stepped. Wow! This is what we thought the walk would be like all the time.

When we got to the main road of Patterdale, our farm B&B was still about a mile down the road. Invitingly, across the street was The White Lion pub. Let's just pop in for a quick pint of best bitter.



And there at a table was Jonathan with a pint of best bitter. Jonathan! we exclaimed. Where have you been, we asked. It turned out he had taken one of the other paths by accident and made it to The White Lion a few minutes before us. Mystery solved, group reunited.

Where our farm B&B was located was another mystery. We walked to where we thought it was and where the GPS said it was, and there was a farm, but no sign. Wouldn't a B&B have a sign? Finally, someone looked down and there in the mud, covered by junk, was a sign with the farm's name on it. That was ominous.

It could have been a complicated story with an unhappy ending, but it actually was rather benign. A big wind had come by the week before and knocked the sign down. The owners were happy to welcome us. The rooms were comfortable and there were dogs to play with. A couple were foxhounds who were out of foxes to hunt but had a lot of energy nevertheless. They bounded all around. Most of the rest were Australian kelties (sp.?). They were extremely friendly and liked to peer in the dining room window at the guests eating.