August 3, 1984: Bampton Grange to Shap
I get ready for the last day of our expedition –
standing in front of the church in Bampton Grange
Packing for the last time – I even allowed myself the luxury of dumping half of the water I usually carry, plus a good deal of the garbage accumulated in a week’s worth of walking. It did not look as though water was going to be a problem, as it was already raining – again – and thus both Wainwright and the OS map went into the waterproof map case. The former provided some bulk, but the pages of this volume had a tendency to flip together (when the case’s string wasn’t throttling me).
Mr. Bruin had agreed to serve us breakfast at 8:00 – for once again I wanted an early start. Thus we were able to complete a most enjoyable stay at this simple but congenial establishment. We left at 8:50.
We now had about a mile of road walking to reach the Coast-to-Coast Path at the Burn Stones road. I was trying to get to the end of a roll of film, but it was not easy to shoot in the rain and the poor light. Dorothy found wild raspberries on our exit from the village – just as she had found gooseberries on our entry.
I could have taken a more direct road route to Shap and saved perhaps as much as an hour but, with my disappointment over yesterday’s cancellation still rankling, I was determined to complete Wainwright’s plans for this section. He warns his readers that route finding is this farming country is not easy, so this placed a good deal of strain on me; we needed to complete this six miles on time or risk missing bus and train connections.
The lane from Thornthwaite
We found an entry to the field behind the barn on the Haweswater road. This pasture was free of animals so Bertie was unleashed. His high spirits and boundless energy, after six days of walking and an early drenching, were never better demonstrated as he capered about in circles, a stick in his mouth, as we approached the lane from Thornthwaite Hall. A slippery stone stile on the fence at the end of the meadow had to be very carefully surmounted. Then we crossed Park Bridge and followed a track along Haweswater Beck until it was time to head uphill toward High Park barn. Some yellow arrows on stiles and posts were useful in confirming our position, but I was finding it easy to follow Wainwright’s instructions.
We continued our line to Rawhead Farm, no longer unoccupied as Wainwright had indicated – indeed the farmer drove out to have a peek at us – perhaps reassuring himself that his sheep were safe from our well reigned-in dog. Tosh had this responsibility again today: I found it impossible to concentrate on complicated route finding tasks and maneuver the dog at the same time. Maybe I should blame Tosh for a momentary lapse in concentration at this stage because as we neared the common above Rosgill bridge she passed around the bottle of gin. At any rate I got so preoccupied with getting us down to and over the bridge that I failed to notice that we weren’t supposed to be on the far side of the river Lowther at all!
We had gotten uphill on the opposite bank before I had to admit, “Sorry about that,” and march us back across the bridge to a turnoff onto a farm track (no longer marked Good Croft). We even followed this lane a little too long here and had to descend a hill steeply – with Dorothy hanging onto my pack again – in order to get over a high stile and onto a path to a packhorse bridge, an ancient unvisited work of rough and tumble engineering whose far side was much higher, in its leap over Swindale beck, than its near side.
Here Harold and I paused to pee while the girls, after I had first taken a compass bearing for them, climbed steeply uphill. We were beleaguered by flies when we rejoined the women for an ascent scarred by ditches newly dug for clay pipes. We scrambled over a wall near a ruin and moved along a tarmac road for a short bit, then through fields on a second approach to the Lowther. The path disappeared on the grassy hillside and I aimed too near the far corner, missing the appropriate stile. We had to regain some of our elevation to reach it but now we could follow a path to Abbey Bridge. The final stages were precipitous, slippery and blocked by dead rats suspended from barbed wire. Shap Abbey was up the road to our right but we had neither the time nor the energy for an extended visit. Indeed we were only about an hour from the end and I felt we should press on – much to the annoyance of the sodden and tired women. In the few minutes we remained at Abbey Bridge I attempted to change pages in Wainwright and re-fold the OS map in its transparent case – but some water got inside during this process.
Shap Abbey
Then it was up our last hill, Dorothy cursing at this last insult and the injury of a sore toe. She had Bertie on lead here – and the whizzing traffic on a tarmac road whose drivers made no concession to weather or pedestrians, proved particularly irksome to her. I tried my rational act, trying to look at this stretch of roadway from the driver’s point of view, but she wasn’t buying it and continued to shout “Slow down!” at cars for the next mile – an easy one that brought us into Shap at noon.
Tosh, who had disdained her rain pants on this trip (and repeatedly paid the price) asked several passersby for instructions to our bus stop. She and Dorothy were tempted by a fish and chip shop but we pressed on, finding a bus stop in front of the school at 12:10. This gave us time to visit the Crown across the street (though they made us leave our packs on the front porch). We drank whiskies and tried to dry off. The back of my head was soaking. After a few minutes we pulled on our wet gear and packs one last time and crossed the street, standing in the rain for a few minutes. At 12:42 the Kendal bus pulled up and we climbed aboard, but this vehicle continued south for only five minutes. At the Shap granite works we were transferred to a second bus – occupying the rear seats for half an hour as the bus sped toward Kendal.
Dorothy took off her rain gear and even changed her shoes in the aisle of this swaying contraption. Once again rain had gotten into her deficient boots and carried with it enough polish and dubbing to soak her white socks pink. She wanted to throw the boots out of the window but I persuaded her to hang on to them until she had purchased their replacement, and so she tied them onto the back of her pack.
The driver let us off opposite the Kendal rail station, but it took us a while to find an entrance and when we did we were surprised to discover no office and only a single track on this Windermere line. Nevertheless a train to Oxenholme was due in about 25 minutes, so we retreated down the steps and the girls went to look for a local chippie; they found it, but it was closed. I took a picture of Wainwright’s home town from the platform just before we climbed into the two car shuttle at 1:53. “Machine’s jammed,” the conductor told us when we tried to buy tickets to Oxenholme. Thus we travelled for the next five minutes for free.
There was a huge mob at Oxenholme but here there was a ticket office and so we waited in a short queue to purchase our tickets to London. The ticket agent actually sold us returns – at this time of day at this time of week, he said, they were actually cheaper than singles!
As the time neared for our train to arrive we edged along the platform, past a group of shrieking schoolboys, looking for a spot that wouldn’t have quite so many contenders for seats. When the train pulled in we jumped into a car whose unoccupied seats were all reserved, so we continued backward and eventually found two sets of forward facing seats, one behind the next. Naturally, as we were at last finished with our walking, it stopped raining. As we moved south (amid dire warnings that the buffet car would be closed after Crewe because of staff shortages) the sun came out and the sky became bluer and bluer. Not only that, but new staff showed up and the buffet car remained open after all! The journey was tedious, but not as long or tiring as the trip north. We arrived at Euston at 6:13. All of London was pressing forward against our exit, trying to get out of the city for the weekend.
We said goodbye to the Lees, who had proved excellent walking companions (as they would so prove again and again on many an overnight expedition after this), and Bertie gave Tosh a big kiss. We three went downstairs to get a cab and by 6:45 we were home. As I walked over to West Kilburn to get that long desired order of fish and chips I reflected on the great success of this venture, Dorothy’s surprising performance especially, and Bertie’s gratifying one, and I tried to figure our why the sunlight in the sky seemed so strange after a week in Lakeland. Finally it came to me – I was at last looking at a sky without a cloud.
To continue with our next stage you need: