August 16, 2017: Goodmanham to Millington
All Saints, Londesborough. Gavan attended a coffee morning here.
In lovely sunshine again Gavan and I were driven back to Goodmanham in our landlady’s red car for our fourth day on the trail. She let us off at the church, across the street from yesterday’s pub, and this was a good spot – for the YWW leaves town along a little lane on the east side of this building. It was a later start for us than usual – 9:25 – but we had three fewer miles today and so this was not a problem.
Our village street soon turned into a track and passed beneath a railway underpass. I was using Dillon’s guidebook and, though text and segments of the OS map were not perfectly aligned in its pages, I could almost always predict our progress by observing the green swatches of color – signifying even slivers of woodland. What I was much poorer at detecting was the shape of the land to come. Gavan could always tell me that we faced uphill or down but the contour intervals on my map represented only a mystery to me.
After a left turn and then a right we approached the busy A614. Here we edged around the embowered Towthorpe Corner picnic site and continued in a northerly direction, even encountering some rare lakelets, as we headed for the tree-filled environs of Londesborough Park. After a bit of uphill we arrived at a suburban outpost in the village of Londesborough itself. (A five-mile post also marked a reunion with the route from Market Weighton.)
I paused for a rest on a bench adjacent to All Saints Church. As he often does at such moments Gavan went inside the church and actually joined a coffee morning briefly, returning with a biscuit-bar for me. In the meantime I had a chat with a lady who was filling the boot of her car across the street. “You never realize how much stuff you have until you move,” she said. (In fact, it was her daughter, resident in a nearby cottage, who was on the move.)
Hay circles decorate the harvested fields.
Many of the fields hereabouts had already been harvested; I certainly enjoyed the joyous symmetry of all those bound circles of hay. A viewfinder, pointing out all the landmarks of the expanse to the west (including several power stations) was passed as we headed on a mostly level path up to the next highway. A jog to the right here brought us to the access road for the Partridge Hall Farm – where big yellow arrows had been added by the proprietor as a way of making sure that walkers didn’t stray off their course. We crossed atop Thorns Wood on our left and began a descent to the village of Nunburnholme. I could see Gavan investigating the foliage at one side of the village stream but when I got down the hill I could see why. There had been a lot of rain in the previous week and the track we had been using was submerged by a shallow pool. I don’t know how Gavan made this crossing but I just waded across in my faithful Timberlands and managed to get through without getting my socks wet.
At noontime we enjoyed a lunch stop at the church in Nunburnholme.
Near_Nunburnholme’s church we found a bench and here we paused for our tuna mayo sandwiches. After lunch we crossed more fields and then used a road to reach the bottom of a steep track – the steepest stretch today – up through Bratt Wood. At such moments I always picked out some object, thirty or forty yards ahead, and made this my goal …. that yellow flower, that overhanging branch, that clump of nettles or brambles … before pausing just a few seconds and choosing another objective. On more level ground we could now make our way toward Wold Farm where, after several short turns, we could continue on to a crossing of the B1246. Our journey to the Warrendale Farm was marked by another five-mile post and we began a descent that brought us to another road junctionThe YWW continues along the hillside at a higher altitude here but many walkers will, as we did, abandon the heights for a journey on tarmac – which makes a rolling advance on the village of Millington, where our night’s accommodation had been booked. I was really looking forward to that pint in the Gait Inn – after a day in the sun – and at last we pulled up to its front door at 3:20. We had walked nine miles and the pub was closed! It was closed and it did not appear that it was likely to open for another three hours or so. There were lots of other disappointed people conferring on this issue but there was nothing for us to do but continue on just a short distance to Laburnum Cottage.
Our landlady, Maureen, welcomed us and asked us if we had made a dinner reservation at the pub – well not exactly was our response. She said she would do this for us and offered tea and scones by way of recompense. Then we repaired to our rooms – which overlooked a lovely back garden – and had a nice rest. (I always looked forward to a little nap and such moments but this never happened.)
We got cleaned up and headed back to the Gait Inn, where a little table had been set aside for us near the front entrance. The pub soon filled up and as we continued with our meal members of a running club, a dozen or so perspiring men, also crowded in – pushing up to the bar in an attempt to undo all the good work that this afternoon’s exercise had provided.
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