Yorkshire Walking Trip in more detail

So, like I said, the first day, Skipton to Grassington, took a lot longer than we thought it would. The guidebook said it’d be 7 hours and we took 9. We got briefly lost in a hay field, but we’re sure that didn’t lose us much time. Mostly I think it was a bit rougher walking than we were expecting, cutting across often boggy sheep fields and climbing stiles over stone walls. And I thought there’d be more places to stop – towns with pubs and public toilets and maybe cafes. Especially I longed for more public toilets. There were hours where I looked out over the (exceptionally beautiful) view, with nothing but more sheep and more walls to cross.

The second day, Grassington to Buckden, was only supposed to be 12 miles, but there was some really steep climbing followed by steep downhills, that I actually find almost harder than up because going down really hurts my feet and knees. Especially when it’s a stony, rutted downhill. Especially when it seems like the sheep are laughing at me, as they did when we went down hill into Kettlewell. I mean I’m sure they could see that they are far more suited to that terrain than I am.

Kettlewell is a “honeypot” or tourist attraction town with (blessed) public toilets and a nice cafe where we had coffee and cakes. And Mark figured out the first of our short cuts. That was rather than climbing back up to the higher elevations to stay on Lady Anne, we walked on the Dales Way trail that stuck to the side of the River Wharfe. It was probably only a mile and a half or so shorter but got us into Buckden where we were spending the night at 4:15 and we would’ve just beat the rain but we had to do a bit of noodling to find our cottage. There hadn’t been room for us at the larger Buck Inn, so we stayed at a smaller B&B next door, but it wasn’t well marked and the directions we got at the Buck confused us and we wandered around a bit before we found it. But we did get a dinner reservation for what is so far my favorite dinner of the trip. We split a Sunday roast with pork with crispy fat around the edges and roasted potatoes and mashed potatoes with carrots and Yorkshire pudding, and a roast cod that came with roasted new potatoes. Three kinds of potatoes in one dinner.

The 3rd day was Buckden to Hawes. Supposed to be 18 miles. We decided to go as far as a place called Worton where we could get a bus to Hawes, and cut off a huge loop back through the fields the wrong direction. In between Worton and Hawes there’s a bigger town called Askrigg that was used for some locations in All Creatures Great and Small – we were able to see it across the river valley before we descended into Worton. Once we had located the bus stop in Worton, I was ready to park myself there and wait, but there really wasn’t much to do there – not even a bench. Mark wanted to walk down to the river and see what was up, and once we were down there we found it was only a 1/2 mile into Askrigg on a well-marked path across a sunny field, with time for coffee and cakes and scones across the street from where the bus to Hawes would get us. And even taking the bus, we still walked 13 miles.

Monday night in Hawes on the advice of our BnB landlord, we got remarkably good Indian food for dinner.

In the morning we had BnB brekkie and then took our laundry in to be washed and visited Gromit, a.k.a. the Wensleydale Cheese Creamery.

Our Hawes landlord also advised us that some of the pubs recommended by the tour service had been bought by a larger chain and didn’t really cook anymore, just reheated. The one that had remained had good food but was a little spendy, so we went there and had roast chicken and fish pie. Quite good.

Wednesday was rainy and cold and the walk was Hawes to Pendragon Castle where we’d get picked up at 5:00 by a taxi to take us to our BnB in Kirkby-Stephen. Coming out of a place called Appersett that’s only a mile from Hawes by the road but farther for us walking across the fields, we went wrong and walked straight up with the wind blasting us until we discovered we’d gone way off Lady Anne on a different trail, the Pennine. We decided we’d best back track to Appersett, so we did that and got back down there about 2:30. We knew we’d never get to Pendragon Castle by 5:00, so we called the taxi and made a plan for them to get us at the White Hart back in Hawes, where we could be in 20 minutes walking on the road. The taxi had also been booked to take us back to Pendragon Castle in the morning so we’d continue our walk from there, but we cancelled that part (so we’d just start from Kirkby-Stephen) and the driver called it even. And we drove past Pendragon Castle. And even though we got picked up only a mile from where we started we still walked 10 or 11 miles that day and I bet 90% was straight up. Into the wind.

In Kirkby-Stephen we stayed at the Old Croft House where we really liked our hosts Rachel & Nick. They recommended the Chinese place, so that was dinner, a nice change from the pubs. There were 3 tables in the dining room for breakfast and Mark got conversation going by asking people where they were walking. There was an English couple and an Australian woman by herself doing Coast to Coast. We heard a lot about bog to the waist in the Lake Country. Our walk was Kirkby-Stephen to Brough,  a short day of about 9 miles, so we tourist-ed a bit in the morning.

We even found a bench in a place called Brough Sowerby to eat the sandwiches we’d bought in Hawes the day before, cheese and pickle and ham and tomato.

When we got to Brough, we stopped at Brough Castle, one that Lady Anne restored.

One last view along the way from Kirkby-Stephen to Brough, and that’s enough for now.