Church Brough to Appleby, 10.5 miles, 600 feet of ascent

Today, to help me recall all the things that flittered through my mind like birds above a field looking for food, I kept a series of very brief voice memos on my phone, sometimes just five or six words as a reminder. So, today I present a collection of topics and observations, interspersed with slideshows to keep you from nodding off.

Trail markers, lack thereof

Today’s walk does not involve going over the top of anything. We’ve left the tight small valleys of the southern Yorkshire Dales for the Vale of Eden, a big expansive area of rolling hills south of a dramatic range that I will not, thank heavens be crossing. But this means I am closer to farmlands. Not the fields of grazing sheep from the heights, but actual farms, with the path getting more convoluted. No more two hour stretches on an open high road with a clear sense of the trail ahead (well, given my drama the other day with staying on trail, let’s take that with a grain of salt, but you know what I mean). So you’d think this would be the land of way markers all over the place, at every field transition and road crossing and meeting of multiple footpaths. You’ think that. Today, I walked for 45 minutes without seeing a single Lady Anne’s Way marker, and in that time often went a good long while without seeing even a “footpath” sign. Sometimes, it was clear because their was a path through a wooded area. Other times, I walked across a series of fields of grass and opened and closed gates with no path at all, just trusting the combination of my map and the fact that the gates weren’t locked.

Rabbits

For all my efforts to photograph various birds, you might assume I have seen little other wildlife. I have in fact seen a few deer, and once or twice field mice, but I have seen dozens and dozens of rabbits. But I can’t prove it with a slideshow of adorable rabbit photos, because the rabbits on the path are very wary of humans. When I go for a walk in Chicago at the crack of dawn, which is almost every day, I often see rabbits on people’s lawns, just hanging out. They will let you get within about eight feet of them before they move to get out of the way and escape you. They’re used to humans and know that city humans aren’t, for the most part, hunting them. For rabbits in the hills and valleys of northern England, I imagine humans have a rather different reputation. So in the last few weeks of walking, I’ve seen single rabbits or pairs or trios, and sometimes four or five on the path ahead of me, but they bolt off into any underbrush they can find while I am still forty or fifty feet away.

Appleby Horse Fair and Travellers

I have timed my walk with unplanned precision, arriving in Appleby on the very last day of the Appleby Horse Fair, a weeklong annual gathering that is one of the largest of its kind in Europe. Here’s my trail guide on Appleby:

Appleby has all amenities and makes a delightful stop-over with one reservation: for one week a year it is the centre for what is reputed to be the largest horse fair of its kind in the world. Travelling people and horse-traders gather from about seven days prior to the sale (which is held on the second Wednesday in June) and the town of Appleby is bursting at the seams….

The travelling people meet old friends and traders and set up all manner of stalls, while horse-traders conduct their business daily and can be seen washing their horses in the Rover Eden by the main bridge.

My first night staying in Appleby was in fact Tuesday. But I’ve been hearing about the fair and the travellers (and the English spelling has two l’s) for nearly a week, and the guide’s description is both coy and a bit off on the timing.

Coy, because for the locals within fifty miles, the travellers are still called gypsies, and my B&B owner at Hawes had a fair bit to say about the gypsies (he never used the word travellers, always calling them gypsies), who mostly still travel in horse-drawn covered wagons (hard top, not cloth covered like you see in westerns). Think Cher singing about being born in the wagon of a a traveling show, and being labelled “gypsies tramps and thieves.” My Hawes host echoed all that. Their B&B overlooks a field next to the Dales Countryside Museum, and when I was there over Saturday and Sunday, I had come just after the travellers came through town the week before on their way to the fair. He talked about what a problem it is, because the travellers leave trash and make a mess and steal things. His neighbor, so he said, had lost two blue Delft flower pots from in front of their door. Various towns have tried all sorts of things to discourage travellers from camping, including putting in bollards at the entrance to public lands that the travellers like to use to stop for the night. According to my host, the gypsies just take them down, or stop somewhere nearby. He was trying to be sympathetic, and said “that’s just their way,” and noted that the smart move was from a town (I forget which one) that had given up on bollards and policing to try to stop travellerd from camping, and had instead made a deal with the traveller community (it’s not just sigle isloated wagons with one family; though a family might not travel as part of a whole caravan, travellers really do have communities on the move). The deal was simple: instead of trying to ticket or obstruct, the town provided trash bags and some other things to make camping easier and just asked that the travellers clean up and leave the trash bags in a single pile for pickup.

I even saw one of these horse-drawn wagons making its way down a country rode, while riding in the taxi to get from Outhgill to Kirkby Stephen.

According to the locals I’ve talked to, either the timing has changed a bit on the busiest part of the fair, or the guide just gets it wrong. The high point of the Appleby Horse Fair was on Sunday, when I was still in Hawes. After that, my host at Kirkby Stephen said, people start to disperse, so that though the fair technically ended yesterday, it was really over after the weekend. And my timing was perfect, because if I’d been here three or four days earlier, there would have been no place to stay in Appleby: the horse traders and tourists would have all the rooms in the area.

Edges and middles

Walking on public footpaths in the United Kingdom means walking across private property a not of the time. The laws and general concept of private property are a bit different here. You can own private property, but because this is an old culture in which people had to walk to get places for centuries and centuries, there remains the concept of public right of way. If a path has been shown to be in use, which means somebody has walked it in the last year, you cannot obstruct the path. It is a right of way and gates must not be locked, and stiles should be maintained. Now, you’ve seen some of my stile pictures and you know that of all the various ways to get over or through a wall, many stiles don’t require much maintenance, because they are just tight gaps with a few stones in the wall set so they create steps. Other stiles are more elaborate (see the fancy one in the slideshow above). But the paths often try to skirt around someone’s private land, and in a field where someone is pasturing animals, they want the path to run at the edge of the field. So the walking often involves walking next to a stone wall or wire fence at the edge of something. This is punctuated, as it was a lot today in the wet grass, by areas where you head diagonally across a field, through crops or pastures where cow gangs might decide to give you a bit of the business and extort you before letting you pass.

And sometimes, the way is simply not honored. This morning I had to use a slight detour on paved roads (the detour was even marked on my map with a dotted line) when came to a very clearly locked gate in the vividly named Warcop.

Farm sounds

Since I am now in farm country, with working farms in sight for much of the day, there is a whole array of farm sounds. Sometimes it’s a rhythmic thumping of some piece of machinery. Thud-ud-ud-ud-ud. Sometimes there’s the sound of metal twisting, like a roof heating and expanding in the sun. Sometimes it’s a single loud boom; these have not sounded to me like gunfire of a shotgun going after those rabbits, more basso, and I have no idea what that boom is.

Flies

Though I have been around sheep and cows for weeks, that’s mostly been in open fields higher up. Today has been near farms with their extra special manure smell, and, really for the first time this trip, flies hovering around me for much of the day. Do flies have territories, and they follow me for only fifteen feet before giving up? Do they know the flies the next territory over? Do they greet each other in mid-air while hovering around my ears? “Morning, Ralph.” “Morning, George.” Like the wolf and the sheep dog in an old Warner Brothers cartoon?

The justification for walking in long pants

I walk in shorts. Always have. I get hot, and also I just find long pants for a hike sort of, I don’t know, constricting? But if there is a solid justification for wearing long pants, it is stinging nettles. I have become convinced that some passive-aggressive farmers, who can’t close off their property from walkers but don’t like the walkers, cultivate stinging nettles at gates and stiles so that you have to walk through them.

What’s pith for?

One advantage men have when hiking is that it is much easier for us to relieve ourselves along the way Just make sure no one is around on this stretch of trail, step off a bit, and you can piss anywhere. I do this at least twice a day, because I drink a lot of water to stay hydrated. Today, I recalled something from high school that amuses me. In high school biology class, our teacher Miss Hurt was teaching us about plant biology, and came to discussing pith, the stuff soft tissue in plant stems. “What’s pith for?” she asked. Not missing a beat, someone (was it you, CJ?) replied “Relief.” Miss Hurt was good-natured enough to find it amusing. Now, this story may be utterly apocryphal, or I may have refined it and sanded it down to its smoothest form. CJ, if you’re reading, you may be my only hope of confirming, revising or debunking this story.

River walking

After going over rolling hills and through various little bits of woodland, I got closer to the River Eden. I could tell I was getting close to real town civilization, not just farms, when I saw a stile with a sliding doggy door next to it, a feature useful where people take their dogs out for walks.

And the trail, winding through woods about thirty or forty feet above the river for a long way, had decorative but unexplained markers.

And finally, for the last few miles before reaching Appleby, I was walking along the river, first still in the woods, and then in open fields. I was close enough to the river bank that every so often I would hear the distinctive ‘bloop’ of a big fish rising to the surface and catching an insect on the river’s surface.

Punctuation of the day, good and not so good

And finally I came to town, by way of the massive walls around Appleby Castle. Though I was tired, the whole day had been planned with time at the end to walk around the castle. And as I circled around the huge area enclosed by outer castle walls that have been rebuilt and rebuilt over centuries, I saw a taxi driving past on the road, and the driver honked and waved. I realized it was my dirver, the guy who has picked me up and dropped me off four times now. We’d had nice chats during the rides, and I like to think he was happy to see I’d made it in such good time, just five hours fur 10.5 miles.

And then I got to Appleby Castle.

The gate was open, and there was a little hut about fifteen yards in where you were clearly supposed to stop and pay to enter. But no one there. There was a QR code for paying online. Okay, I thought, fair enough. I’ll pay my 10 pounds online. Scanned and tried to enter my info to pay, and a screen popped up saying “Appleby Castle is closed to the public on Wednesday June 11.” Why leave the gate open then? I guess this castle, still occupied and available for weddings and galas and whatnot, was closed for an event, and the gate was open to allow access to some function. Well, shit. I will have to wait for the last castle of the walk, in Penrith, to do a proper tour.

Notes on Equipment

This is my backpack.

I’ve had several over the years. This one my mom bought me for Christmas, and I know she was delighted to give me a gift she was sure I would really use. It’s been with me on a number of hikes now.

In my pack, I carry CamelBak water with its handy sucking tube so you can sip while you walk, a first aid kit with bandages and neosporin and a few other bits, my rain jacket and fleece for shifting weather, a pair of gaiters for really wet weather (which I honestly don’t like and have almost never used and should get rid of), and in the upper pocket, which I can reach and open while the pack is on my back, my wallet, a compass (also rarely used, but it makes me feel like a real adventurer to have a compass, even though my phone has a compass built in), a snack (usually a Luna or Clif bar) and my glasses case, since I switch from regular glasses to sunglasses depending on the weather.

My pack has a lot of ingenious features and complex adjustable straps, many that I never do anything with at all. I can tighten the shoulder straps to pull the pack higher up or loosen them to let it sit lower on my back. The waist strap has a clever little zippered pocket on each side, where one could, I suppose, store something small like a snack. I have never used mine, and at this point the zippers don’t even open anymore. So much good pack design wasted on me. Oh well.