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Time: 5h. Up: 130m. Down 270m.
Distance: 19km. Difficulty: easy Day 9: Keld (330m) to Reeth (190m) We escape Butt House without further incident, although Dave nearly requests a change of ingredients in the full English breakfast. Only my panicked look and a frantic gesture behind Doreen’s back avert total and permanent destruction. As soon as we are outside, Doreen closes the door firmly behind us. I don’t think she wants to have anything more to do with Dave. An easy day awaits us strolling down Swaledale. It is a beautiful but strange countryside, unlike anything I have seen before. A winding green and fertile u-shaped glacial valley, and so somewhat like many valleys in the Alps, but instead of being bounded by mountains it is bounded by flattish moorland… and thus feels (and is) more like a canyon. The weather is perfect, the walk almost all downhill, I don’t even have to think about navigation because we can hardly get lost as long as we stay in the valley, and, best of all, it is a short day. We expect to have plenty of energy left when we arrive at Reeth in the afternoon… but then we make a mistake. We start hiking at Sally’s pace. Sally, as I have mentioned earlier, is not human: she walks faster than humans do. Today we walk with Sally and by the time we are halfway there, we (Dad and I) are feeling much more tired than we should be at this point. The others are, for various reasons, less affected: Russ is used to hiking at Sally’s pace, Miles is traveling as baggage in the Sherpa van, Lurch (Ollie) chooses to walk down the other (southern) bank because that way his injured left leg will be downhill and will swing more easily, and Dave (of course) chooses to accompany Oliver so that, I assume, he won’t feel all alone. So only Dad and I suffer. By the time we arrive in Reeth it feels like it has been an eight rather than a five hour hike. We shower and ask the landlady of our B&B where she recommends we watch England playing in their next World Cup match and she says Book House on the square. Where, we ask, because we came through the square and haven’t seen a pub of that name. At the upper end she says, you can’t miss it. Funny name, we think, and set off. We look around the square… no Book House. Ah, Buck House. The accent gets us again. England loses and there is no joy in Mudville. We have a nice dinner and then retire. Despite the pall that has settled over this football mad country, it has been another lovely day. Summary:
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C2C: The Coast to Coast Hike