June 17, 2006: Burneside to Bowness

Just as I was exiting from my cab at Euston, shortly after 7:00 on the morning of Saturday, June 17, I spotted the Lees and Marge Rogers exiting from the vehicle right behind me. We were foregathering here to begin another Lakeland expedition – though a rather unique one. In five days of walking we expected to complete the last day of the Dales Way, broken off two years earlier when Harold suffered his great fall, and to finish, as well, the Westmorland Way – the first half of which we had walked in 2005. Finishing two walks on one trip would be a first.

I had spent much time in planning this venture and in other trip preparations, and Harold and I had met on June 2 at Paddington to renew our Senior Rail cards and get seat reservations for our trip north. Today was to be one of those intricate planning spectacles that I so enjoy, and part of my plans today required an early departure – I had therefore chosen a Saturday so that we could travel before the mid-morning hour when our rail cards traditionally kick in on weekdays. While we waited to board our 7:35 train I went in search of a top-up voucher for Dorothy’s Nokia mobile phone. Disappointed at W.H. Smith, I had better luck at a nearby food store and soon I was tapping in the requisite number as we took our seats in car E. We were able to board this carriage early and here we drank our cappuccinos and ate our pastries while waiting for departure. Tosh complained that we didn’t have a table between our seats, which were spread across an aisle.

The journey went smoothly enough. I did a puzzle while the Lees read their papers. But I could see that we were falling just slightly behind schedule and I began to fret that we might miss our connection in Preston. Only seven minutes remained to us as we dashed off our first train at 10:23 – and I spoke immediately to a train dispatcher about which platform to use for our next connection, the 10:30 for Windermere. Fortunately we didn’t have to move at all and soon we had abandoned platform 6 to begin our shuttle service to Lakeland. We passed through Carnforth station (which, I had recently learned, had been utilized for the filming of Brief Encounter), Oxenholme, Kendal, Burneside and Stavely. While we travelled I made two telephone calls on the mobile phone, first to B-Line taxis requesting a cab to meet us at Windermere and then to our hotel in Troutbeck – advising them to look out for our bags.

Once again our train seemed to slow down and it was close to 11:30 when we pulled in at Windermere. I marshalled our troops so that they could follow me quickly to the parking lot – where our lady taxi driver stowed our bags in her boot. She charged £8.00 to ferry our bags to Troutbeck (Tosh handled all money matters on this trip) but we did not jump in ourselves, returning instead, with our daypacks, to the very same train we had just vacated. Within five minutes (so tightly was this strategy organized) we were chugging back two stops to Burneside. Harold wanted to know if there was time to use the loo. I thought not but he was desperate and he had just emerged from this spot when, at 11:48, we pulled up to the same halt where Tosh, Margie and I had concluded our Dales Way walk two years earlier.

On the platform people fussed with their packs as we looked down on a crowded bowling green. I took off my green sweatshirt, as it was quite warm, and stowed it in my pack, adding the pages I had prepared from earlier guidebooks to my map case. On this day I also had xeroxed the pages for this section of the route directly from Burton’s book – since they also contained renditions of the Ordnance Survey maps. At 11:50 we were ready to begin our 9.5 mile trek to Bowness – and the end of the Dales Way route.

I led us out to the station road and we passed through a portion of the village, heading in a northeasterly direction. Two men were discussing the hosepipe ban in other parts of England, congratulating themselves on having escaped such strictures in the North. There was a convenient paved walkway along the verge of our road and I left it only once to find a place for a quiet pee in some woodland. After ten minutes or so we had reached the village of Bowston, where we joined the Dales Way itself after its initial stages along the River Kent.

A telephone call box was our key to turn off the highway and approach the river ourselves. All of this was very pleasant and there was often shade as we climbed stiles and pushed through gates in gently rolling countryside. We exited onto a road at Cowen Head and here our way was blocked by a curious Miniature Schnauzer who was named Milly (because she had been born on the first day of the Millenium). Cowen Head itself was another of those tarted-up housing developments utilizing some earlier buildings on this spot, including the towers of former mills All was done quite tastefully and those with apartments facing north had a veritable lake as their view.

More rocky surroundings produced some delightful riverside scenery amid boulders and ledges. After an hour or so of this lovely stroll we were gradually directed away from the river and across a series of fields to enter a road at Sandyhill. A right turn here brought us quickly into the village of Staveley. We had covered almost three miles and it was 1:20. I was now seeking a pub, The Eagle and Child, which I knew (because of another phone call) served food until 2:30. We had to abandon the Dales Way briefly but only now did I learn whether the pub in question was the one represented by the “Inn” or by the “PH” sign on the OS map. Fortunately it was the former – not far off now at all.

We found a table and I had my first pint of lager and an order of Cumberland sausage and mash. I had a pen with me and so I also recorded the lunchtime choices of my walking companions: Tosh ordered the brie and bacon salad, Margie the chicken Caesar and Harold the cod mornay. I reminded the others that they had to look at the pictures of the local gurning champions in the next room, gurning (in which contestants screw their faces up into the most grotesque positions possible) being a Cumbrian specialty.  For their part they came back with a garbled tale about the origin of the pub’s name. Something about one of the local lords passing his bastard child off to his own wife as a mysterious package delivered by an eagle. We had a nice relaxing first meal (possible, again, only because of our early start) and I took the legs off my hiking trousers to walk in shorts. We left Staveley at 2:30.

I used a bit of pedestrian pavement to get us back to the route, climbing over a low stone wall to reach the roadway as our turnoff arrived at Stockbridge Farm. The others followed, timing their passage to the flow of the traffic – but there was an incident. Tosh, scurrying across, had tripped and fallen on one knee – to the amazement of an approaching driver. There was a hole in her trouser leg and her knee had quite an abrasion but she seemed fine and disdained any assistance. It must have been about this time two years ago that Harold had fallen on the first day of our walk as well.

We followed a track under our railway line and turned right onto a green lane and into someone’s garden. This gave us access to another road and we were soon turning left on a second piece of tarmac to cross a bridge and to pursue a right-hand turnoff, still heading south, past a number of houses with wonderful gardens. At last we reached open country and headed uphill alongside a woods. I was wearing my Palm Springs dark glasses over my own specs and this prevented a lot of glare. We emerged onto a farm road and this led us on to a long stretch of rural tarmac, first steeply uphill (with wonderful retrospective views of Kendal) and then, as it switched from north to west, a long descent to Fell Plain Farm. The only dispiriting aspect of this descent was that we could see the road continuing back to the west – though once again on an uphill course.

The ascent was not too protracted and at the top we left tarmac for a bridleway and continued our westward trod. We reached a gate and turned right to climb through a second gate onto a grassy hillside, where we paused for a rest and some liquid. A walking party was approaching us and they too paused here, with wide panoramic views of Lakeland all around us. Then we continued around a bit of marshy ground and, without much in the way of waymarking, around a bit of woods, across a stream and up to a number of stone walls. A farm track lead us around to Crag House and then we climbed over a rocky bluff and down to a farm (described as derelict in one of our guides but clearly on the up these days), Outrun Nook.

Tarmac headed north but we soon left this for an entry into the farmyard at Hag End. There were a number of surprises here – a black woman and her child were just coming off a trampoline in surroundings that could only be described as rural squalor. A chubby little girl asked us to be sure to close the gate (she was trying to hang on to her sheepdog) and this we did, trying to make our escape, amid rusting farm machinery, as soon as possible.

Mucky footing led us up behind the farm and onto open countryside again. We followed a few footpath signs and descended to a farm track next to a fence. Some of this was a bit wet and Tosh took an improvised alternative that also deposited us at the bottom of the hill on a farm track. Here began a long trek in a southerly direction on a route shared with a lone red-clad cyclist. He thought he was doing us a favour in shouting out which direction (right or left) he intended to pass us on, but Harold, who is hard of hearing anyway, turned the wrong way just to hear what was being said, and was almost clipped. Fields of buttercups accompanied us now and as we neared Cleabarrow our surroundings became ever more elegant – we were obviously in a trendy suburb of Windermere.

The last stages of our road were on tarmac and we soon reached a major artery, where we turned right, soon leaving the traffic and the Windermere Golf Course behind us. A lane lead us to a cross-country series of gates and stiles as shadows lengthened and the sun began to disappear behind clouds. There was a little pond at the next road junction and a bit of woodland walking. More stretches of farmland and gates and stiles lead us ever further toward the wooded hillsides of Bowness. Tracks offered easy passage for our tired feet, and, with our first glimpse of Windermere itself, we began a descent to a stone seat on the hillside overlooking Bowness. Here a plinth had been dedicated “For those who walk the Dales Way” – our walk was officially over. I told Harold that he was now in the unique position of having walked the first and the last day of this route, but not the five stages between these two extremes. He now took pictures of the three conquerors and we drank some water before heading downhill under grey skies into Bowness itself.

After a steep descent past houses and gardens we reached the tourist-inflected streets of Windermere’s southern neighbour and, after waiting a long time for the girls to reach me, I suggested that we could probably find a good spot to wait for a taxi at the ferry landing around the corner. It was 6:00.

Sure enough there was a taxi rank at the very spot where Tosh and I had lead our teenagers in the first hour of our first Alternatives walk twenty-two years earlier and after a quarrel with his dispatcher, the first driver agreed to take us to our bags, which had been resting in the lobby of the Mortal Man in Troutbeck for the last six hours. The speedy journey took only ten minutes and before we went inside our 1689 establishment I arranged for a pickup the next morning. Tosh now attempted to undo (with my blessing) the physical arrangements I had made in making our reservations. I had had such bad luck in getting a place In Windermere itself – either they wouldn’t have us for just one weekend night or they didn’t have three rooms) that I had booked just two twins for the two nights we planned to stay in Troutbeck. Tosh now divined that they had a third room – and that it would cost Margie and me only £15 extra to occupy our remaining twins independently.

We retrieved our bags and headed upstairs to bathe, unpack and relax a bit before descending at 7:30 to the bar – where the crowded premises yielded only one little table under the distant dartboard. Here I was given a present – a cap with a neck flap (one that made me look like a Japanese prison guard, according to Dorothy) and a glass of expensive Scotch. The occasion for this celebration was the completion, today, of day 365 in my career on British footpaths – a year in boots.

At 8:00 we repaired to the dining room where we had a fancy meal. I had a tower of something with several somethings on the side and then the fish. Tosh denounced the vegetables, many of which we could not identify in their kitchenside transformations – swede, squash, petrified asparagus, deep fried cauliflower. Under any circumstances the Queen of Iowa hates both mange tout and baby corn – seeing them as poor substitutes for the peas and corn of her youth. Nevertheless we had a jolly time and then most of us had a pudding – which is the hardest part of a British hotel meal to ruin.

The task was now to see if I could stay awake until 10:00 – even though I was perched above the late-drinking revellers in the pub below. I phoned Dorothy with an account of our very successful last day on the Dales Way but, having nodded off several times before the magic hour, I turned off the lights at 9:55.

Footpath Index:

England: A Chilterns Hundred | The Chiltern Way | The Cleveland Way | The Coast-to-Coast Path | The Coleridge Way | The Cotswold Way | The Cumberland Way | The Cumbria Way | The Dales Way | The Furness Way | The Green London Way | The Greensand Way | The Isle of Wight Coast Path | The London Countryway | The London Outer Orbital Path | The Norfolk Coast Path | The North Downs Way | The Northumberland Coast Path | The Peddars Way | The Pennine Way | The Ridgeway Path | The Roman Way | The Saxon Shore Way | The South Downs Way | The South West Coast Path | The Thames Path | The Two Moors Way | The Vanguard Way | The Wealdway | The Westmorland Way | The White Peak Way | The Yorkshire Wolds Way