Day 10: Reeth to Brompton-on-Swale

Weather: Partly cloudy with gentle Westerley

Distance covered today: 26.5km (16.5mi)

Last night's B&B: The Buck Hotel

% Complete: Cumulative distance: 65.7%:  205.8km

Total Ascent/Total Descent: 580m/ 752m

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 10 (click!)

It is apparent that most of us are now counting down the days to Robin Hood’s Bay.  As the walk has progressed, so a band of fellow travellers has steadily coalesced.  Of those who set out from St Bees, the “racers” have long gone; those walkers insistent on doing the whole walk in some implausibly short period of time. I heard tell of one walker, actually he must have been a runner, intent on doing the whole thing in three days!  Then there are those who hopelessly underestimated the demands and didn’t make it past the first few days. There are also those who never intended to do the whole thing in one go, who mostly left the trail in Kirkby Stephen.  The rest of us though are getting to know each other reasonably well, because we keep bumping into each other, both on the trail itself and in the B&Bs at the end of the day.  There is a real camaraderie developing which is quite surprising given how little we really know of each other, but quite clearly born of a shared, demanding ambition. Already I hear talk of a celebration in Wainwright’s Bar in the Robin Hood’s Bay hotel.

All this begs lots of questions. Most importantly, why count down the days?  There is something in the collective perception that suggests success is to reach the end and therefore contemplating the finishing line is a spur to achievement. There is a desire for the pain to subside.  There is also a reluctance to fail in full view.  This seems to be the effect of being in a group, and as we visibly integrate more strongly, so the competitive element emerges.  For me though it has always been a matter of principle not to count down the days: it seems such a waste of the journey!  This is therefore an isolating experience for me personally. Is this because I have more experience of long-distance walking than most of my fellow-travellers, or is it because in my ornery old age, I am just a grumpy loner?  Probably both are true.

More fundamentally, though, it invites a review of the reasons for walking at all, especially on Wainwright’s Coast-to-coast.  Long-suffering readers of these interminable blogs may just recall me waxing lyrical on Henry Thoreau and his essay on walking.  Just in case you need a refresher, click here, but in essence Thoreau introduced the idea of the saunterer.  He says:“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land, till the children- exclaimed, ‘There goes a SainteTerrer,’ Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean….”

Elsewhere, he says, “When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle south-west, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle”.

For me, all this implies that it is the process, not the destination which was vital for him, albeit that he did distinguish very clearly between “the wild” (so much more dramatic than “the wilderness”!) and the tedious reality of everyday civilised geographical reality.

All this contrasts strongly with Wainwright’s much more prosaic motivations for walking. In the introduction to his guide to the Coast-to-coast, he says, “One should always have a definite objective in a walk, as in life – it is much more satisfying to reach a target by personal effort than to wander aimlessly.  An objective is an ambition and life without ambition is ….. well, aimless wandering.”

I am confused by these ideas.  I tend to enjoy walking for its own sake, and although I do agree with the ideas behind “Ambulandum solvitur” (literally, “it is solved by walking”), I find this only rarely to be true.  On the other hand, the happiest people I have seen on this walk have been those enjoying a day on the fells as part of a regular exercise routine; not those earnestly pursuing Wainwright’s walk through gritted teeth and painful limbs. I’m not sure even Wainwright himself would have approved. Although the walk was intended to be testing, he seemed much more insistent that he had devised it to be enjoyed, not just finished….

So I resist the temptation to count down the days, and surprisingly for me, I resist the temptation to lecture my fellow-travellers on the reasons not to do so. It wouldn’t help anyway; they think me sufficiently strange without having to listen to me adding abstruse theory to their simple ambition.

Tomorrow’s walk is the longest of the trip, 29km (18mi).  After all this, will I ever be able to look myself in the face again if I find myself looking forward to the end of it???!!!

What is left of Marrick Abbey after Henry VIII, now a youth outdoor centre

Two Aussie women, Sue and Judy climbing the stairs

Cow Parsley next to the moss and lichen-covered dry-stone wall

More industrial revolution environmental destruction

I introduced these two Canadian women, Jane and Marilyn to each other. Not surprising as they live 5,300 km apart!

Perfect forest walk

Yeah?  Got that!

This is more like it!  Wish I'd been there in 1927! (Sign on a wall in Richmond)

Richmond town square: a slightly seedy genuflection to past glories

The remains of the magnificent Richmond Castle

High-status houses on the ridge in Richmond

Another of Henry's victims; Easby Abbey

Better flowers, though still not great: Red campion, forget-me-nots, bluebells, stichwort and wild garlic

Looking across the rape to my next objective, the North York Moors

Even the waymarks celebrate AW; Alfred Wainwright

The A1, eastern equivalent to the M6. Tomorrow I cross the East Coast Railway. The full set!

Catterick Racecourse

Day's profile; still going down!