I wake at five o’clock to a blush of pink over the moors in the east. August is almost here, and dawn is already coming late enough for me to see it at a semi-decent hour. The sun is bright at 7:30—another warm cloudless day ahead.Breakfast at Hillary House this morning includes a homemade damson jam for my toast. It’s a dark purple, plum-berry-like fruit that’s not too tart or too sweet. I wonder if they sell it in the US. My breakfast companions are a pair of travelers who are doing the Herriott Way walk in two days instead of the usual four to five. I don’t get that kind of drive, but they are avid about their trip and its details.
It is indeed Herriott country that I’ve been in the past few days, and the farms are far apart and sprawling. I can understand how making one house call to inoculate sheep could take him all day. This area is also, to my surprise, Wensleydale cheese country, as I discovered while reading a brochure at Keld YHA. Who else but Wallace and Gromit smile from the top of a brochure beneath a talk balloon of “Crackin’ good cheese!” The endorsement is for the Wensleydale Cheese Factory in Hawes, south of Keld. (Unwittingly, Wallace’s passion for the cheese ended up bringing the Wensleydale dairy farm from the brink of bankruptcy, and it’s now thriving quite nicely.) For the first time on this trip, I wish I had a car to drive out to places like that on a lark; I’ve bought Wendsleydale with cranberries in Olympia, and can now give the experience a good mental image of its source.I set out alone from Reeth today at about 8:45, despite the fact that I’ve got five friends on the same trail to Richmond. Not everyone gets going in the morning at the same time, though, and it seems to work best that we all leave at our own rate.
This eleventh day of walking is another day of passing through villages linked by miles of farmland, hay fields, pastures, and some road walking. The path roughly follows the River Swale but isn’t close to the water for very long like it was yesterday. There’s no one’s back garden to walk through, and I meet up with the usual unperturbed cows, and sheep that scatter or don’t, depending on their temperament. I end up spending the whole day alone and am grateful for the eleven miles and several hours to myself.
Beyond Grinton Bridge outside of Reeth, right before a farm road junction, I walk across the field of an underground bee colony. They all buzz a tremendous buzz at heel level, diving into tiny holes in the dirt, swarming over bumblebees that they carry off, hovering over the ground at boot-sole height. I walk with them for about 100 yards, and they move aside from my feet. None of them come after me, and they seem docile as I stoop in for a closer view.
In the Steps Wood, I go up a mini Pilgrim’s Way, a set of some 375 flagstone steps reminiscent of those at St Michaels Mount in Cornwall, or Rocamodor in France, only a lot shallower. This is a path that nuns from over the hill would take to visit the monks-only abbey behind me at Marrick Priory (now in ruins).At Marrick, the first village I come to today, I can’t quite figure out the right roads using the Footprint map, so I hail a woman who is driving down the street in an ATV. She is suntanned, wearing a pink tank top and shorts, and hauling an open cart that has two freshly shorn sheep inside.
“Is this the way for the Coast to Coast path?” I ask as she slows down beside me on the narrow road. I indicate what I think is the correct left-hand turn coming up.
“Oh, you’re on the wrong road, love. This road will send you right back round where you came from.”
Sheesh. I’ve done it again. We poke at the map, and then she directs me with a rapid string of instructions and corresponding arm movements. “Back up this road, straight up that road there, past the phone box, past the old school house, take a track that crosses the field and passes Nooncootsnuuk” —it looks like Nun Cotes Nook on the map, and like nothing she’s pronouncing—“and then follow it along through the fields. Stop in at Elaine’s Tea Shop. It’s at Nooncoots. Tell her Ruth sent you. That’s me. You’ll have to walk 50 yards off the track. Just came from there m’self. Cheers!”
I thank her, grateful that I’ve once again avoided a lengthy off-trail detour and re-track because someone was around to ask right when I hit a sticky bit. I marvel that such resources are always at hand when I need them.
I meet up briefly with Nico and Marja at the other end of Marrick and walk with them down a sloping large field before we part so that I can take tea at Elaine’s. As I learned at Shap, never pass up a personal invitation from a local.
I expect Elaine’s Tea Shop to be a storefront establishment in a little village called Nun Cotes Nook. It’s actually the front glassed-in conservatory of a private farmhouse overlooking fields and moors.A tall woman in a cotton skirt and Snoopy tank top is vacuuming the tearoom as I arrive, and the tables and chairs are in disarray.
“Are you open?” I ask, climbing the steps to the door. It’s only about ten o’clock, after all. “I met your friend Ruth a few minutes ago. She suggested I drop in.”
“Oh, yes, yes. I’d love to have you. I’m Elaine.” She drags the vacuum away and straightens the furniture. “Pardon the mess.”She places a menu on the tablecloth and turns down the volume on the TV in the corner. A cooking show is on. I sit down with the menu. The array of pies, cakes, and other goodies is astonishing for a private establishment like this.
“Everything there is homemade,” Elaine says proudly. “Jams, cakes, scones. I used to run a B&B but dropped back to teas once the children were born. We also have camping grounds, and I cook dinners and breakfasts for them.” I suspect she’d grow the tea herself if she could.“How many children?”
“Five. All of them are at home because of school holiday. I can’t wait for six more weeks to be up!”
I place an order for cream tea. I haven’t done many “official” teas on this trip, what with the B&B and hostelling, and I’ve been hankering for one.
Elaine gives me a slightly worried look. “It’s homemade jam—is that OK?”
“Is that OK! I won’t have my jam any other way if I can help it!”
A lovely breeze crosses through the room. The tea is hot, the scone fragrant from the oven, and the raspberry jam juicy. I am on my last bites of jammy-creamy scone when I spot Marv come over the hill and continue on the trail in the distance. I consider running out to call him in, then decide I prefer the solitude today. Perhaps we’ll meet up in Richmond.I buy a bag of crisps and a bottled water from the refrigerator in the tearoom to supplement my sack lunch, and take a few minutes more to chat with Elaine before she directs me to where the trail picks up straight across her field and over her stone wall.
Cell reception is finally available now that I’m up over the hill from the river, and as I walk I discover yesterday’s voicemail from Michael to take the low road to Reeth. It’s good to hear his voice on my phone. I reach them on David’s mobile to check in. They’re on their way to Danby Wiske today (my own stop tomorrow) and doing well.
Wild raspberries grow along the way in the forests and along roadsides. They are tiny and sweet, although just starting the season. I reach the next town, Marske, near lunchtime. I’ve been five miles on trail so far. The fact that I covered that mileage in two hours, which included a 40-minute tea break, attests to the ease of today’s walking.
I sit on a stile beyond Marske to eat my crisps and take a rest to enjoy the view of the Yorkshire dales. As I leave the stile, I see another group coming behind me. I wave, some wave back, and I expect that they will catch up as I work my way across Paddy’s Bridge over Clapgate Beck and up a hillside, but they don’t. (Turns out that Marv had joined that group for a bit; they had some children who slowed the pace.)I eventually leave them behind past a huge cairn that’s painted a ghastly white and wend my way through faded paths across the land of the Applegarths—Applegarth Scar, Applegarth Low Wood, West Applegarth farm, Low Applegarth farm, High Applegarth barn, and East Applegarth farm. Who the heck are these people?
The path follows the base of Whitcliffe Scar (a limestone embankment whose primary claim to fame is that a fellow named Robert Willance and his horse fell off it in 1606—he survived, the horse didn’t) and enters a lush and shady Whitcliffe Wood. Just out of the woods, I meet a lady and her Lakeland Terrier—a cute little dog bred to go after foxes in their holes in order to flush them out for the hunt. She is meeting her husband and daughter later for dinner in Marske. They are taking the high road over the hills while she does the more restful forest walk. They’re all going to Connecticut in October for the fall color, and she’s very excited about it.
I express how beautiful I think this region of the UK is, and she waves a hand as if to shush me. “We locals keep the Yorkshire Dales a secret from those in southern England,” she says like a conspirator. “Don’t want everyone coming up here, you see. The weather is a lot drier because of the Pennines. But the northern storms don’t go around you, they go through you. You get cold right to your bones.” Hmmm. I might reconsider moving here, then.
I arrive at Richmond at two o’clock, my earliest day yet on the trail. My feet and ankles feel like they’ve walked a lot more than eleven miles, however.
The Old Brewery Pub and Hotel where I’m staying is at the bottom of the hill at the west end of Richmond. It has great access for the trail tomorrow—the path practically begins right outside my door—but the location also means two more miles round trip to eat in town with John and Elaine as we’d planned. My end-of-walk routine is, well, routine by now, so I take care of my check-in, change shoes and clothes, freshen up, and head back up the hill.
Richmond is a regular city, feeling larger than Kirkby Stephen and Shap and Grasmere combined, and a lot busier. They have a huge co-op, which I shop at for a snack, and lots of traffic. I check out the library for Internet, but it has just closed—drat, another missed opportunity.
I am walking to Elaine and John’s B&B at the far end of French Gate when I pause at the beginning of the street to photograph it. This row reminds me of Bath. I hear my name called. It’s Marv, hailing me from the B&B I am standing in front of. We visit in the front room for a bit, then he jumps up from the sofa pointing to the window: “There are Elaine and John!”Sit in one place long enough and the world passes you by.
We all agree to meet in two hours to go to dinner. John and Elaine will scope out Richmond, Marv will rest and get cleaned up for the evening, and I decide to sit in the aging leather wingback chair in the cozy front room of Marv’s B&B and write in my journal for two hours.
I have been struck today by how the path was often faint, yet I could always follow it because of some far-off fingerpost or offbeat C2C way-marker. I followed painted yellow dots on stiles, yellow buckets overturned on posts, and poles wrapped in plastic yellow grain bags. I could usually see only a short stretch of the path at a time, but every time I needed another marker it was there. And any time I felt worried about being off track, there was always a local on an ATV, an old man sitting on a bench, or a farmer in his yard to talk with for directions.
I knew the basic direction—thataway, east—and the rest took care of itself one field crossing at a time.
My life ahead can be like that. A faint path here, a rocky road there, an occasional hill or scramble. But always the ready signposts, the sufficient resources, the unexpected rest stops, the welcome support and lodgings along the way. My life can be a continuous coast to coast walk if I let it.Trail miles: 11; actual miles walked: 13+
