Day 16 - Garigill to Greenhead

Groan. That was a long day. Since we had needed a second go at Cross Fell yesterday we had to combine two days' walking into one in order to keep up with the timetable. The guide book says Garigill to Slaggyford is 10 miles, and Slaggyford is 11 miles, and that seems to be about right. With a couple of minor diversions from the route the GPS measured it as 22 miles, but it was much more tiring than we'd thought it would be from the maps, which make it look largely like a combination of riverside paths and some moorland. In practice the riverside paths were slippery, the path often diverted uphill across a field then dropped back again through the next field for no obvious reason, and the moorland sections were mostly very wet and boggy with no path markers. All in all this wasn't a very exciting walking day with no real high points, and the second half, after Slaggyford, is less interesting than the first. At least the rain held off for the day, and the strange cloud formations coming off Cross Fell made for interesting skies.

The Pennine Way section just north of Garigill is pretty enough, but not really as exciting as the upper Tees riverside walks that took in Low and High Fell, or the Cauldron Snout section. Leaving Garigill the path follows the River South Tyne, heading north. It's a fast flowing, shallow, small river, lined with trees most of the way. I imagine this is a salmon or trout fishing river in some of the slower, deeper sections, although I didn't see any angling club signs anywhere.

South Tyne near Garigill

It's nice to see a variety of plants here . Lots of ramsons (wild garlic) which are at least a month behind those in Cornwall, not even having any flower buds yet. I thought that the below flower was Coltsfoot, although now I'm not sure.
Thank you to Philippa - Butterbur it is ! There were no leaves present, just the flower spikes.

Butterbur by the South Tyne

Only a mile or two up the river from Garigill we saw our first red squirrel, something that neither of us had ever seen in the wild, so something of a thrill. Unfortunately it hopped up a tree and disappeared before there was any chance of taking a picture. It looks like this is a red-only zone, since there were anti-grey posters attached to footpath signs all along the river.

Red or Dead

As I mentioned before we had some spectacular cloud action going on today. I don't know whether this is the result of the Helm Wind (the only named wind in the British Isles) coming off Cross Fell, but certainly it seemed to be coming from that direction. Much of the day it appeared as if there was some enormous mountain range behind the cloud.

Foothills of the pretend Andes

Just 4 miles out of Garigill we reached Alston, not quite a thriving metropolis, but large enough to have a cash machine and an outdoors shop (owned by cousin of last night's taxi driver) where Jonathan could get some replacement gaiters. The mysterious cloud formations again provided a wonderful backdrop.

Alston . Yes, the sky really did look like that.

A couple of miles north of Alston the Pennine Way skirts around Whitley Castle, a Roman Fort lying about 20 miles south of Hadrian's Wall, and as yet almost unexcavated. The area occupied by this fort looks quite substantial, and I can imagine that in years to come it might well be added to the Hadrian's Wall tourist trail if excavations unearth any substantial artefacts.

Whitley Castle

I wish I could identify more breeds of sheep, as now we're seeing quite a variety. Must try to memorise what I'm looking at in the sheep judging tent at the Royal Cornwall Show next year.

Not so horny anymore

After a couple more muddy miles mostly along the South Tyne banks the Pennine Way reaches Slaggyford, a small village notable for a) A very ugly static caravan by the river. Painting caravans green does not make them blend in, and b) A large percentage of houses having "for sale" signs. I wonder if there's some connection between a) and b). Slaggyford is where we would have ended today's walk if we hadn't decided to combine today's & tomorrow's walks. Since we there by 1pm that would have been a very short day.

Near a large well-tended house at Burnstones, which looked like a hunting lodge, the barbed wire fence sported 5 dried out mole carcases. I remember my father pointing hanging moles out to me many years ago, and it seems to be a northern thing (I've never seen this done in Cornwall). I think the principle is that since moles have a keen sense of smell it deters other would-be invaders if they smell the decaying corpses of other moles. Seems unlikely though since the wind would have to be blowing in the right direction.

Pour encourager les autres

North of Slaggyford the walking deteriorates, and much of this section of the walk is boggy moorland, not quite as bad as Sleightholme Moor in the current drier weather, but still hard work to negotiate. Particularly at the northern end of this section, on Blenkinsopp Common, the land seems very degraded. I know that this is Open Access, wild moorland, but the lack of variety of plant species is notable. Other than sphagnum moss, and tussocky grass, there's really very little. Surprising that there's no heathers, ferns, orchids, or any of the other plants that we saw last week. Here's a typical view across the featureless Blenkinsopp Common.

Move along please, nothing to see here

Something I haven't commented on previously is that on the Pennine Way the two most common path markers are either the official wooden fingerposts or just "PW" carved or scrawled on any stone or piece of wood that's to hand. I must put together a collection of "PW" marker pictures in a later posting, as they're often quite imaginative.

PW not RIP

Eventually the Pennine Way comes off Blenkinsopp Common and heads eastwards toward Greenhead, which is where we are tonight, in the Greenhead Hotel. It's been a long tiring day and we'll be glad of tomorrow's mere 7 miles, albeit on the roller coaster of Hadrian's Wall.

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