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Time: 5h. Up: 335m. Down 395m.
Distance: 16.5km. Difficulty: easy Day 10: Reeth (190m) to Richmond (130m) Miles is still ill and will take the Sherpa van again. The rest of us shrug on our packs and set off on a short walk through beautiful lower Swaledale to the medieval citadel of Richmond. It is a lovely day, sunny and the warmest so far, and time and distance rush by. It becomes a day for conversations, mostly in pairs, sometimes in larger groups. I engage Sally in one of our favorite pastimes – asking each other questions about The Lord of the Rings – and am appalled to find that she has forgotten much that she once knew, without remembering much that she had once forgotten. She tries to excuse herself by explaining that she has not read the book in several years because of the films. “Is this perhaps the unkindest cut of all from Peter Jackson?”, I think. Not content with debasing every noble character, leaving out various important scenes while making up others, and generally introducing countless unnecessary changes, is now the film becoming the canonical work while the original book dissolves in the mists of memory even of those who have read it thirteen times? Sally promises to read the book next year on the H2H. I can only hope…. I am so discomfited by this experience that I lose track of where we are, thereby adding some 1.5km (1 mile) to the day. Fellow C2C hikers: I trust you now know who to blame. We wander into Richmond in the middle of the afternoon, find our B&B – a lovely old place whose only flaw is that it is at the bottom of the hill on which the town center stands – shower and climb back up to town for a drink and dinner in an Indian restaurant before turning in for an early night. Tomorrow we must away at dawn (or more realistically, by 7:45AM) for the longest hike of the C2C. Summary:
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C2C: The Coast to Coast Hike