And on Sunday, they rested.

Having finished our Hadrian’s Wall walk, my siblings and I caught a taxi from Bowness-on-Solway back to Carlisle. It’s a weird experience to cover basically the same fourteen miles in half an hour that took a whole day, like rewinding the previous day at high speed. At Carlisle, we parted ways. Tracy, Karen and Rob were all taking the same train, which would get Karen to a meeting with husband Tim and a meeting with some of his distant relatives in Wigan, and would get Tracy and Rob to London, where they’d meet up with Tracy’s husband Tim (yeah, yeah, I have two brothers-in-law named Tim, what a world we live in), their son Dan, who has been living in London for the last two years while doing a graduate architecture and design degree, and Rob’s son Spencer, who is zipping over from his college summer program in Paris.

I, meanwhile, was on an earlier train to Skipton, the start of my walk in the Yorkshire Dales. I am walking the Dales High Way, and as the train eased along the western edge of the Dales, I got a strong reminder of what the word High is all about in that name. Yes, Hadrian’s Wall had some up and down, but the Yorkshire Dales is a vast set of high hills with huge elevation gains and losses across wild open lands. I could feel my heart race at the thought of what was ahead.

The trip was around two hours, but of course the last thirty minutes or so was all awkward anticipation. This train stops a lot in towns on the edge of the Dales, and since the announcements of upcoming stops are few and garbled (“We’ll be coming into MMrfred, Glbbrford, Grrbford, Yebblemuck, Skppduh and Shkkder” Okay…), I was using the Maps on my phone and trying to gauge when we were one stop away from Skipton.

We arrived in Skipton, with me waiting in the doorway like a dog ready to be let out, and I bolted out. As is usual in English towns, the train station is in a less than glamorous part of town, but a short walk revealed that Skipton is absolutely charming. I knew fro background reading that it has an unusually interesting castle (with continual enhancements from late Medieval through the 1700s, so it’s an incredibly layered history lesson), but had somehow scanned past the surprise of a canal.

The important thing to note about travel days between trails is that I am not using luggage hauling service between trails, so I was wearing a backpack but also carrying the big bag (though I have learned to pack light, a two week bag with computer, clothes, trail snacks, electrical cords etc. turns out to be heavy no matter how you streamline) that has been hauled by van from B&B to B&B when I am on the trail. So I lugged that thing up the hill (why is your accommodation always up a hill from wherever you are?) outside Skipton, to find another winner of a B&B. The bedroom is charming, and the bathroom is two-thirds the size of the bedroom, with a shower stall AND a bathtub!

Freed of my bags, I headed back down into town to check out the castle. I cannot recommend this castle tour highly enough. They give you a sheet with drawings that guide you through the absolutely maze-like interior.

It’s not a huge castle, and it’s not the cliched big walled enclosure with a high tower and crenellations icing every inch. Though it is large, it feels strangely intimate. And it’s fun seeing how the different parts of the place have been adapted and altered and built upon. You can see the traces within certain rooms, where the stonework will change or there’s a shadow archway suggesting that there was once a doorway. This was honestly one of the best castle tours I’ve ever done.

The place was first built in 1090 by Robert de Romille, but when his family line died out, Edward II gave the place to Robert Clifford in 1310, and it stayed in the family until Lady Anne Clifford passed away in 1676. She’s also famous for her restoration work on the property and for her work preserving medieval buildings all over York. There’s even a hiking trail that visits some of her most noted projects. Hmm, future walk?

After a great tour and a stop at the gift shop to buy my usual walking trip souvenir, a refrigerator magnet, I headed back into the town High Street, just fifty yards away, to have dinner. I went nuts and instead of offering a main dish (the menu looked fine but I didn’t want a burger or fish and chips or the chicken tikka or a steak) I ordered two appetizers, and ended up with a very nice, somewhat smaller than usual dinner (a small plate of squid, crab cake and deep-fried shrimp and a small plate of chicken liver pate and toast).

I returned to my bed and breakfast, where I discovered that my USA/UK plug adaptor had somehow been crushed in my luggage while on the train. Hence the lateness of these posts– using my remaining battery life, I researched enough to learn that the Boots in Settle, where I would be on Tuesday (that is, today as I write), had plug adaptors. I went into battery conservation mode, putting my phone in airplane mode whenever possible to save battery life.

With the bit of logistics to worry about (I wasn’t 100% sure I could trust the Boots website about that adaptor…), I crashed for the night with dreams of high rising trails and windy summits dancing in my head. Boy, did I have that part right!