Day 14: Blakey Ridge to Grosmont

Weather: Mostly sunny with mild Westerley wind

Distance covered today: 21.8km (13.5mi)

Last night's B&B: White Horse Farm Inn

% Complete: Cumulative distance: 92.4%: 292.3km

Total Ascent/Total Descent: 226m/609m

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 14 (click!)

The end is nigh, and though strictly I should wait for the denouement, I don’t think the final stage tomorrow will alter my opinion, so I might as well get on with it.  I want to do a great big turn-around on an issue on which I have already reversed my opinion. (If I keep this up, I might qualify as a politician!)

The more long-suffering of you will have registered my disapproval of Wainwright’s theory of the walk on the first day. My feeling was that the walk was traversing a path for which there was no alternative, and therefore pretending that alternatives existed by not way-marking the path seemed daft.  Once I entered Lakeland, I changed my opinion, because I finally got to understand Wainwright’s vision of people selecting their own routes through that wonderful playground.  Not only did he recommend a number of alternatives himself, but he also insisted that there were many more to be had and all that was needed was an OS map, a compass and some imagination.

In the personal notes attached to his guide he pours scorn on the idea of a national trail. He says “The first of them, the Pennine Way, has already been so much used that it is fast losing its original appeal as a wilderness walk and becoming a too popular parade. There are blazed tracks and litter where once there were neither. Some paths are so badly eroded that diversions have been necessary….”  He then goes on to promote his alternative approach, and suggests his actual route is just one of many.  He lambastes “the inexperienced who cannot read a map and the complete nogs who have never seen one”.

As with all long-distance routes, different authorities are responsible for the way-marking and maintenance of the trails in different geographies, and in my experience they apply quite different principles. In the case of National Trails, there are certain constraints, but essentially the same is true.

As far as I have observed, this differing approach very much applies to the Coast-to-coast.  The Lakeland authority, very much influenced no doubt by Wainwright’s love of the fells, his many books about them and his wishes in his Coast-to-coast guide, is at pains neither to improve nor waymark any particular route.  As I previously pointed out, the C2C waymarks in Lakeland are there simply to prevent walkers from straying onto private land and they are anyway few and far between.  However once Lakeland has been left behind and other authorities take over, a different approach is clearly apparent.  Although by no means ubiquitous, C2C waymarks are much more evident and the walk takes on the very definite route originally defined by Wainwright himself, altered only where the authorities have negotiated specific permissive paths with landowners to allow walkers legally to proceed. On reaching the Cleveland Way, we are very definitely on a National Trail with all the prepared paths, stairs, flagstones and waymarks that go with it.

What the authorities, especially the Lakeland authorities, have failed to notice is that the Coast-to-coast has become a de facto National Trail. As I said yesterday, the C2C is now the most popular long-distance trail in the world.  The people coming to use it come partly because it is so famous; they come with all sorts of skills and experience, often with none at all, because they feel assured that such an international phenomenon will be properly husbanded.  Very few of the many walkers I have met have had any idea about Wainwright’s philosophy.  Mostly they think the lack of waymarking is a budgetary issue.

The excruciating irony of all this is that by far the most dangerous part of the route is the walk through Lakeland, the very area with the least waymarking. On day two, when I was scrabbling up the rocky climb on the edge of Ennerdale Water, I had no idea that a woman had been killed there just days earlier. Just beyond the top of Kidsty Pike where the path switches back through 300 degrees, there is no sign, and many of the people I have spoken to kept on going over the top in the very poor weather we were experiencing. This is fun for the experts; it is quite clearly potentially calamitous for the unwary and inexperienced.

The result of course is that people walk all over the place trying to find their way and trying to avoid the bogs. This tramples the vegetation and destroys the sensitive bogs leaving an unsightly, muddy mess and a lot of unhappy walkers, up to their knees in mud. This is exactly what Wainwright was complaining about in his derogatory references to the Pennine Way.

Once out of Lakeland, the path is now fairly universally waymarked (though there are some curious and potentially misleading exceptions), and there are very few alternative routes even if one wanted them. Once the Cleveland Way is reached, the benefits of proper path maintenance and waymarking to the immediate environment and to the experience of the walker are immediately apparent.

Meanwhile, improvements on the Pennine Way, and a drastic reduction in the number of people using it, mean that the eyesore that Wainwright decried is much improved.  In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, the argument has been turned on its head. If Wainwright was around today, he would be amazed that his C2C has in Lakeland, of all places, turned into exactly the sort of walk he really didn't enjoy.

If I were making the decisions, I would make the C2C the premier National Trail in Britain. I would improve the footpaths using all the skills developed on the other National Trails and I would waymark it with the acorns of the National Trails. I would negotiate hard with the local landowners to turn permissive paths into permanent rights-of-way.  Given that all this would horrify the purists, I would simultaneously promote alternative routes, just as Wainwright suggested, both in and outside Lakeland, but preface all reference to these routes as requiring certain minimums of experience and skills. I would then promote all of Britain’s National Trails not only in the English-speaking world, but throughout Europe and in the developing world. 

There are very few places on earth which can provide the same extraordinary wilderness with the assurance of a shower, a pint, a dinner and a warm bed every evening.  Surely such a scarce resource should properly be protected.

This cross is incongruously called Young Ralph. There is another cross in the vicinity called Old Ralph

And this is Fat Betty. She is close to another menhir called Margery Bradley. It is said that when Betty, Margery and the two Ralphs meet at night, as they are said to do, a wedding invariably follows!

This excellent name, redolent of a good English breakfast, originally meant the remote valley (hop in old English) of the Norse God Freya. It refers to the beautiful valley of Fryupdale, and developed in the same way that the name of many pubs in England, called "Elephant and Castle" refer to Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, "Infanta de Castile"

At last, a clear view of the North Sea

Fryupdale appears on the left

There are no shortage of Coast-to-coast walkers. This was a slightly disheartened bunch of National Geographic tourists. Better to accelerate past them!

A bridge in Glaisdale

Stichwort amongst the bluebells

The River Esk makes my acquaintance

This path is known as a trod, with the stones worn down in medieval times by pannier-ponies, trading between villages and monastic settlements 

Spring colours

That's me weaving unsteadily along the road!

A live steam-engine in Grosmont; just shutting down for the night

With brasses gleaming!  Only in England!

And the station in its 50's glory!

The day's elevation profile. A down day!