June 25, 1999: Orton to Kirkby Stephen
Sunbiggin Tarn
We were greeted by bright sunshine on the second day of our walk. At 8:30 we took seats in the breakfast room of the George Hotel, having already tagged our packs for the Packhorse people; they charged £3.50 a bag and I left £10.50 for them in a little brown envelope. My breakfast routine never varied on this trip: scrambled eggs on toast, preceded by fruit juice and corn flakes. The Lees, too, stuck to poached eggs on toast. No fried bread, no fried tomatoes, no bacon or sausage – the bacon, especially, tends to make me thirsty and one could tell already that liquid could be a problem on such a warm day. The other walkers were coming in for their morning repast as well; two ladies on our floor had the ski poles for walkers that I had first seen in use on the Appalachian Trail.
While Tosh, our finance director, was paying up and collecting our lunches, Harold and I walked down the street a block or so and made some purchases in the shop cum post office. I bought a bottle of Sprite and a candy bar (I always travel with a supply of snacks – none of which get eaten until I am at home). Harold bought some sun-blocker. Locals were genuine in their morning greetings as we lofted our daypacks and set out at 9:30.
The route followed tarmac for much of the morning, but there was not much traffic. We walked for a mile and a half in an easterly direction, enjoying the comfort of the shade trees that lined the road. The walking was mostly level – though there was an occasional rise and fall and a cooling breeze that made the transit a pleasant one. Tosh stopped to talk to a farm worker who had penned twenty sheep at the roadside; he intended to shear them all in an hour. I didn’t believe this was possible.
At Raisbeck, an attractive hamlet, we left our leafy lane for a more exposed country track to Sunbiggin. Here we encountered the full force of the bright sun; I envied Harold his shorts, for I was quite warm and I could see that we were heading into territory that would offer only the rarest relief from the bright skies. At Stoneyhead Hall we had a sit down in a driveway in the last of the shade provided by some trees above. I had lathered up my face, my arms, and the back of my neck, but I neglected to treat the tops of my ears; these had no protection now from hair or my UCLA baseball cap and they did get sunburned on this day.
Just as we reached a stile onto the open moorland a gang of walkers caught up with us and we let them pass. They included a father and teenage son from Rugby (Bob and Chris Hawkins), a couple from Chorley, Ian and Monique, and several other faces that would become familiar over the next few days. We followed them across Tarn Moor on a thin but recognizable track that finally gave us a view of distant Sunbiggin Tarn. It was quite warm but not unpleasant and we were making good time over a stretch of the route I had always imagined walking in the rain. We seemed to stay on a moorland path longer than I expected because by the time we intersected the Asby road it was almost time to turn from east to south and follow tarmac to the farmstead at Mazon Wath. This turned out to be, I later figured, Harold’s 1700th mile.
It was just 12:00, but Tosh was worried that we were about to encounter the last tree for miles so we sat on the grass among the sheep droppings and ate the sandwiches that had been prepared at the George. Then we continued south past Fell Head Farm and rose, still on tarmac, to a cattle grid that signaled an eastern turn again – on field paths that accompanied a stone wall on our left. There was a brief detour around the spongy surface of Ewefell Mire and a bit of a struggle with a gate next to an isolated barn. The Lees, who managed most of the gates for me (and indeed, often took camera and walking stick from me so that I could more easily manage the stiles) were frustrated by this obstacle, which just required a little elevation to free the locking mechanism. “It takes a man with a broken arm to get this open,” I said.
The descent to the railway cottage above Scandal Beck
We then continued forward on a rutted track, pulled opposite Bents Farm, the stone fence now on our right, passed through a second gate on Crosby Garrett Fell, and then used a stile to get to the other side of the wall. We were in the territory of the prehistoric Severals Village settlement, but there was not much evidence on this surface of the grassy mounds that formed hut enclosures. Soon we were descending the hillside toward the valley of Scandal Beck, with double gates over an abandoned railway line and a steep scramble down to the Smardale Bridge and its beds of yellow wildflowers.
It was very warm now and we had been in the sun for some time so I suggested we look for a little shade. The best we could do was to lean up against the abutment of the bridge itself, our feet still in the sun. I had a flashback to a similar posture adopted against a similar surface on the Great Wall of China, fifteen months earlier. Dr Foale says I had probably suffered a mild heart attack then; I certainly had pneumonia. On this day I felt just fine, though flushed from the heat which was producing a salty perspiration rime on the front of my blue cap.
The descent of Limekiln Hill
We now faced the one serious climb of the day, up Smardale Fell. The gradients were not severe and we had the company of stone walls to serve as our guideposts for most of the ascent. Eventually we reached more level ground and began a descent of Limekiln Hill. A final stile put us out onto tarmac, where we turned right, then left on a second road – escaping this in a valley bottom to wander through a field of cows and pass beneath the bridge bearing the Settle-Carlisle line (whose two-car trains we had seen heading north just a few minutes before).
On the other side of the tracks the path petered out but but we spotted the stiles needed to keep us moving downhill through a series of meadows. Just before reaching Green Riggs Farm we encountered two exhausted chaps who had come all the way from Shap – a 22 mile day. (Several other walkers had done this and all of them said they wouldn’t recommend it.)
The Coast-to-Coast Path makes its way through the farmyard and then takes to a track heading in a northeasterly direction; there was even a small hill to surmount, and this seemed like insult added to injury after a long day on the trail. At the bottom of the track, however, we encountered the first houses of our goal, the Cumbrian town of Kirkby Stephen. Tosh asked a local lady how to get to South Road, the main north-south artery of the place, and we had only a hundred yards or so to go to reach the whizzing traffic. Number 46, Lyndhurst, was just a few doors away, and so at 5:00, after 13 miles, we reached the end of the day’s walk.
Mrs. Jane Bell, our b&b landlady, showed us to our rooms (I helped her move a cot out of mine) and then insisted on driving us the short distance into town center in order for us to retrieve our backpacks at the Kirkby Stephen Youth Hostel. The Rugby pair were just checking in here and directed us around to the bike shed at the rear of the establishment. Back at Lyndhurst we had the use of two bathrooms (the couple with the baby hadn’t arrived yet) and I had a nice shower in one of them.
Shortly before 7:00 we walked back into town center in search of an evening meal. Tosh wanted to try a continental bistro but I was deeply suspicious. (I should have followed her lead.) We settled instead on the King’s Arms Hotel but as we sat down with our lagers a huge mob of ramblers, members of a walking club, began to clog up the place. They were there in the dining room too but the proprietors put us in a relatively quiet corner. I had a second pint here to accompany my jumbo haddock and chips. The Lees denounced the ice cream but I had a yummy apple crumble and custard for dessert.
Outside I made two phone calls on the mobile phone, standing in the insalubrious precincts of the town loos, one to Dorothy, and one to Mr. Bowman, the Packhorse man. I asked him when our bags would arrive in Keld and received the mocking reply: “Long before you do.” The Lees and I then had a tour of the village including the churchyard and, as the shadows lengthened, we retuned to Lyndhurst. The other guests had arrived and nobody paid any attention to us – just as well since we were quite tired by now. I think I finished the second half of the article I had started the night before but I was again asleep by 10:00.
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