Ilkley to Burnsall, Burnsall to Grassington

Our first day walking, Ilkley to Burnsall, was a sunny warm Saturday, that made up for the length of the day – roughly 13 miles. It was mostly easy walking, either by the river or across the sheep fields, and not too muddy. We both wore running shoes (trainers) instead of our hiking boots.

When we first arrived at the (ugly) B&B in Ilkley, our landlady told us the trail was right in the backyard, and we could see three bridges from it. When we walked a bit that first night, we walked toward town and saw two of the bridges, and finally saw this third bridge in the morning on our way to the actual trailhead of Dales Way.

Very quickly there were sheep, also see overleaf.

And the first stile

A churchyard

Easy walking by the river

Mark says that these parts of the walk, where you’re going along on soft grass, is how they hook you into doing the other wet, muddy, stony, root-y, slippery, generally less pleasant parts.

And stone walls

And pretty soon we came to Bolton Abbey.

First there was another stone bridge. We did NOT do the stepping stones, though we watched others take them.

My pics are really only the outskirts of Bolton Abbey, there’s a huge medieval ruin. I was also trying to take small views and cut out all the people who were there on a sunny Saturday during an abnormally hot October.

We walked for a very long way by Bolton Abbey, and Strib Woods. There were lots of people, because there were several large car parks and fairly easy trail, although pretty steep, within a mile or two of the car parks.  They’d also put in a bunch of attractions for kids like swings and tunnels for them to crawl through. So there were lots of family groups with strollers, what the Brits call push chairs, and multigenerational, with oldsters with canes and other assistive devices.

Eventually we got past Bolton Abbey and Strib Woods, and it was more walking through fields and then finally down a very steep hill and across a bridge into Burnsall.

When we were walking into Burnsall, Saturday afternoon, this white house set on a hill above the village looked wavy to me, like the roof was saggy. Somehow it straightened out by morning when I looked back at it to take this picture.

We met up with an older woman and her dog on part of the walk when we getting quite close to Burnsall. I felt pretty outclassed by her, actually. She was just strolling in regular shoes and a skirt and her dog, and seemed more surefooted and mostly faster than me. Of course, I was on something like hour 6 of walking for the day and she probably had just left her house (or car). 

In Burnsall, we stayed at the Red Lion Inn, and even though it was only our 2nd B&B night, Red Lion remained one of our favorite rooms, even after experiencing many more rooms the rest of the trip.

Dinner at the Red Lion was good – I had a massive serving of fish and chips, can’t quite recall what Mark had, though. The breakfast was also good, in a nice bright room. British B&B breakfasts always have a buffet of cereal and juices and toast to tide you over till you oreder your cooked food. Red Lion had homemade yogurt that was quite tasty with granola. I had oatmeal (porridge) and Mark had eggs of some type, then we headed off to start our short day’s walk to Grassington. We hadn’t wanted two really long days in a row, so asked to only go as far as Grassington on day 2, and that meant we were only going about 3 1/2 miles.

There were two ways to get into Grassington, and since we had time, after we did one – via the car park and the National Park Centre, we looped back and went the other way, via Linton Falls. Even though we had so much time, I took very few pictures.

In Grassington we hung around in cafes, one that was a combined cafe/bookshop, the Stripey Badger, until it was time to check in at the B&B, the Devonshire Inn. We’re pretty sure we got the same room, the Helen Anderson, named after the veterinarian’s wife Helen, in All Creatures Great and Small. Grassington plays up their All Creatures association. We got scones and coffee and tea, and I tried to convert Mark to a jam first kinda guy. This is someone else’s picture but similar, although I also am a proponent of breaking off smaller piece of the scone and jamming and creaming them individually, rather than splitting and trying to cover the whole thing. Smaller pieces = maximum jam and cream.

We wandered more, and checked at the Devonshire – which was loud with the Sunday lunch and drinking crowd – and they said the room wouldn’t be ready till 4:00. We went to yet another cafe, Cobblestones Cafe, which really turned out to be our favorite. We were there right at closing, but they were happy to let us sit and eat the last scone. And chat with the proprietor, Gary, who like me is a professional cook, a really good cook who did not go to culinary school, and does what I call “fine home cooking” rather than super elevated restaurant food. Besides Gary, the cafe employees were two women, one a little younger, and several conversations going with other people and dogs. There was a funny exchange where somebody stuck their head in the door looking for a man with a small dog, and Gary sent them off after a man and dog who’d left by the front, but the older woman cafe worker informed him the right man with a small dog had left through the back (where the very clean bathrooms were). Joking about “well, maybe they’ll prefer the one who left from the front” ensued.

Gary also recommended that we not get dinner at the Devonshire and after eating there two years ago we were up for suggestions. I though maybe we could go to the more shishi place, Grassington House, that had grouse and all kinds of fancy food, but eat off the pub and terrace menu, but Gary, and Mark, didn’t think that would work. Instead we went to the Black Horse Morral (feedbag). Mark got a burger and I got a chicken burger and it was all good, although we couldn’t finish any of it.

Sorry again for so few pics of Grassington. It’s very tourist-y though, so you can check out the Google maps links on your own. In Grassington Mark started feeling like he had a cold, so in the morning, after confirming with our breakfast waiter that the pharmacy we had seen wasn’t just a place to get prescriptions and your jabs, and did have regular over the counter drugs, we stopped there for cold tablets. Sadly Cobblestones wasn’t open so we stopped at a different cafe, CoffeECO, got a scone and takeaway coffee, and headed off for Buckden.