August 6, 1978: Middleton-in-Teesdale to Langdon Beck
An old tree leans over the track near Unthank Bank
A year later I was back in Teesdale, once again engaged in that compulsive behavior which must have been a form of my mid-life crisis – the quest to complete the Pennine Way. Dorothy and my M.S.U. colleague Bill Vincent had driven me to Detroit Metro on August 4; my Laker Sun Flight was just late enough (one and a half hours) to give me an anxiety attack over whether I could reach London in time to launch my seventh day of walking on schedule. After three days of PW walking with a partner (Dorothy, then Jay) I would again be alone.
The flight itself was uneventful. Across the aisle was a teenage girl from Fife who insisted on talking to me in a whisper (or so it seemed over the engine noise) and I kept having to ask her to repeat herself until she asked me if I was going deaf. No, but I was most fatigued, and after a quick passage through Gatwick passport control and a long wait for my brown knapsack to emerge from the conveyer belt, a dash for the train, and a ride opposite one of the Laker stewardesses, I actually dozed off once or twice before reaching Victoria. There I headed for the underground and was at Kings Cross an hour ahead of schedule; this enabled me to take the “125″ diesel, “the fastest and most modern train on the track” at 4:00.
The train trip was dull, and I was riding backwards, but I did manage to buy some sandwiches and a Kia-Ora at the buffet car. Then, at 6:40, came the famous walk down Darlington’s Victoria Street – the sixth time – and the last, I assumed, that I would have to cover that distance. At the bus station I phoned my hotel in Middleton to give my arrival time. Then I chatted with an old lady from Barnard Castle as we waited for the 7:05 bus.
We reached this destination at 7:53 and I discovered that I might as well have stayed in Darlington the extra hour –because this was how long I would have to wait for my connecting bus to Middleton. I should have gone into a pub, but I felt much too awkward doing this with my pack on my back – so I just wandered about in the town; rain had fallen recently but now there was a fading sunset. A chill in the air caused me to put on my jacket. At last my bus arrived and I chatted with the driver about Pennine Way walking most of the way to Middleton – which we reached at 9:43.
The staff was busy at the pub counter, but someone was detached to show me to my room in the Cleveland Arms – quite nice actually, and I began to unpack. I was thirsty so I went down to the pub for an uncomfortable standing half lager among strangers. More fussing with the pack as I decanted some Remy Martin into a hip flask that Jay had given me. I went to bed around 11:00, but at an early hour of the morning I had to get up for a pee and three Bufferin. Otherwise I slept well. Still, the jet lag hovered for some time and I felt rather tired in the morning. I don’t recommend starting a walk with so little time to get over a big time difference.
The morning, incidentally, was rainy – and so I had the prospect of a soggy overture to my walk as I ate my solitary breakfast, which turned out to be somewhat incomplete by English standards – due to the incompetence of the teenage zombie who took my order. I taped my feet and completed packing in slow motion, paid my bill to a pretty manageress (who sulked over having to make change) – and at 9:45 on Sunday, August 6, I left the hotel.
I had wanted to wander around Middleton some this morning, to take a snap of Mrs. Beech’s, for instance, but the weather worked against this. Instead I took a few pictures of the hotel and the town itself, with mist falling on my lens, and then I marched down the hill to the highway bridge over the Tees, thereby retracing those last limping steps I had completed just a year earlier. I had left County Durham for North Yorkshire again. Facing me was the steep hill descended in last year’s hazy afternoon sunshine and Kirkcarrion’s clump of trees. I entered the gate to the public footpath that headed west to parallel the Tees, mumbling under my breath Herzl’s famous phrase – “If you will it, it is no dream.” Thus, in drizzle, I began my fourth Pennine adventure.
Route finding was not difficult and the route rather level so, in spite of my weariness, I began to pick up time on my late start. Every mile or so I would stop to record what I had photographed but the problems associated with lifting the wet rain cape, looking through the rain dappled lens with the aid of the befogged viewfinder, and then writing it all down in my little blue notebook proved to be a most irksome part of the journey. In the process of yanking things in and out of the pouch in my new red sweatshirt I lost my handkerchief altogether (it thus joined in this category the pen I must have lost leaning over to examine the token the busdriver had flipped at me the previous night); near Low Force I was shoving my Wainwright back into my pouch when I noticed the blue notebook floating in a muddy pool at my feet!
There was, of course, water everywhere. Streams which did not appear in Wainwright bubbled along merrily in the direction of the swollen river and rain blew into my face. After about two miles I felt I needed a rest so I threw myself down on some likely looking rocks beneath a tree and gasped for breath. A dog, hunting for something in the steep bank below me, was spooked by my presence, turned tail, and leaped with great speed over the stile I had just laboriously climbed.
I must say that there are portions of the Pennine Way which would not be missed if they were obscured by bad weather, but this stretch of the Tees is not one of them. What I could see was most beautiful and exciting, but particularly when the rain was blowing in my face I found I had to strain my neck to look forward under the dripping overhang of my rain hood. I did have an excellent view of my feet dodging the puddles in the path. Curiously I did not encounter any other genuine PW walkers. At Low Force I did meet a father and son, but they and a few other tourists seemed to be day-trippers. Anyway I begged the assistance of the father in readjusting my cape over the hump of my backpack – things were always getting twisted because of the uneven load and the camera bulging on my right side. By the time I reached Holwick Head Bridge I had pulled just about even with the E.T.A.s I had added to Wainwright and since I had a short day – only a little over four miles left to go – I decided to cross to the Durham side and head for the pub at the High Force Hotel. The crossing was not easy because a farmer was making repairs to the bridge and had parked the ubiquitous land rover in the middle and it was hard for me to squeeze myself and my pack through the narrow gap. I trudged up the tarmac to the hotel, with cars whizzing by as I tried to find space in the verge.
The hotel was crowded with trippers and walkers but I managed to find a seat in the pub and to down a pint. My rain cape was hung on a doorknob and I had a chance to discover how wet I was – damp more from perspiration than rain but damp nonetheless. Perhaps it was in trying to wipe my face that I discovered the loss of the aforementioned handkerchief. At the next table a sullen teenage girl, emphatically not enjoying her holiday with the family, was being made to write a postcard to grandma, complaining all the while that she didn’t know what to write. Eventually the text had to be dictated by dad – “Say that the groom was away and you helped with the horses…Now in big letters say you miss her.” By this time the author of the card was in tears and her sister had grown impatient and barked at her. Also in the bar were a number of Open University students on a geology field trip. Things were really getting crowded by the time I finished my drink. I went to use the facilities, momentarily forgetting my camera in the men’s loo, and re-entering the pub for my pack and cape. Someone helped me get the latter over the former and I headed back down the hill and over the bridge to the Yorkshire side once again.
High Force
High Force was in magnificent spate but I didn’t get the best views, not wishing to climb out onto the wet cliffs with my pack on. Above the falls the trail was supplied with duck board – slatted wooden walkways – an aid to the walker who might not have want to get his feet muddy in the marshy footing underneath. I trod forward past the Dine Holm Quarry and Bleagate Force toward Bracken Rigg and High Crag. The way was a little less obvious here, the contours steeper (I remember one particularly unpleasant descent) and the rain increased in velocity: thus the last three miles or so proved to be most unpleasant and arduous – though beautiful at the same time.
I left Yorkshire behind at the Cronkley Bridge, where someone was trying to fish while the rest of his family sat huddled in the car, and continued upriver past the junction of the Tees with Langdon Beck. The latter seemed to be as swollen as the former and there was a mighty confluence over pebbly beds of dark rock in an amphitheater of green field and somber hill beneath troubled skies. I left the PW at Saur Hill Bridge, where some motorists asked me for directions to Cauldron Snout, and walked up the highway. There was a telephone kiosk opposite the youth hostel in which, I later learned, two enterprising campers had set up a stove, somewhat protected from the elements, and served tea to passersby. I trudged up the tarmac for another fifteen minutes, seeing ahead at last the welcome sight of the whitewashed Langdon Beck Hotel.
Langdon Beck joins the Tees
There seemed to be no one about when I arrived at 3:30, but Mrs. Bainbridge soon emerged from the kitchen and took from me, for drying purposes, a number of items which eventually included rain cape and rain pants, sweatshirt, trousers and boots. I was offered a number of rooms on the first floor and eventually selected one at the rear of the hotel, away from the sounds of the road. I had a shot from the brandy flask and took a nice hot bath, unfortunately taking off a bit of skin from one heel and one toe as I removed the adhesive tape.
For a while I lay in my bed, shivering from fatigue, completing the only section of my travel journal actually written in England. Then I went down to the sitting room where I intended to dry my Wainwright and my camera case over the heater. In this room were two other walkers, Chris and Tony, who had abandoned their camping ambitions for the night following a watery disaster in Middleton the previous evening. We three proved to be the only hotel residents (and I the only one with a reservation) and we were soon in lively conversation about our PW adventures – a chat that continued over dinner. I thus escaped, for once, the little solitary table that had been set up for me. The lads were from Sheffield, Tony being the employee of one of the steel companies there, and Chris, a ginger-haired dental student at Liverpool University. They were connoisseurs of beer and fans of Sheffield Wednesday and they were somewhat taken aback when, at the pub after dinner, I drank only half a lager – not wanting to be up all night getting rid of liquid. We had lamb and nice vegetables for dinner, yellow vanilla ice cream and fruit for dessert. I smoked a cigar in the tiny pub that served as an annex of the hotel and here we also met two other walkers, Lawrence and Steven, who were staying at the youth hostel down the road. After agreeing to share the trail with Chris and Tony the next day – only a little daunted by Chris’s suggestions about pace – I excused myself and went to bed.
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