Day 21 - Cocklawfoot to Kirk Yetholm

The final day of the walk.

You might have noticed that I didn't mention in yesterday's post where we stayed last night. That's because, slightly embarrassingly, it was in Kirk Yetholm, where the Pennine Way ends, so we'd already been to the destination. Not our choice, rather the way that Discovery Travel had booked the B&Bs. I wish they had taken us back to Byrness instead, which a couple of other walkers had done, but that didn't seem to be an option for us. Anyway, last night we deliberately went into the Plough Inn in Town Yetholm, on the other side of the river, so we wouldn't see the finish line, and wouldn't be showing our faces a day early at the Border Inn in Kirk Yetholm.

So the final day started with the Kirk Yetholm B&B owners taking us back to Cocklawfoot where we finished yesterday's walk. A bit of a tense start to the day as the previous day we'd noticed a large hand-written sign saying "KEEP OUT - LAMBING SEASON - NO WALKERS THROUGH HERE", and the B&B owner said that the farmer had been harassing walkers recently. However, we managed to creep through the farmyard and back onto Clennell Street, the footpath/byway that leads back to the Pennine Way, apparently without being spotted, until the noise of the gate set the farm dogs barking. Heads down we strode on up the hill and were out of sight within a couple of minutes with no confrontation. Not much of an anecdote, is it?

We weren't looking forward to the ascent back to the Pennine Way ridge. It's about 2.5 miles and over 200m of climb, which took us 40 minutes on the way down, so first thing in the morning it wasn't a tempting prospect. However, probably because of our desire to get out of sight of Cocklawfoot, we barely paused on the way up, and were back on the Pennine Way within 45 minutes. That's about 3.3 miles per hour going uphill.

Top of Clennell Street

The weather started out very calm, and quite mild. I don't think the temperature can have dropped below zero last night, and the pools in the peat bogs were mirror calm.

Peat bog abstract

The walk along the continuation of the ridge between Windy Gyle and Kings Seat is easy going, being mostly level flagstones laid over boggy moorland. I suspect we were managing close to 4 miles an hour until the start of the ascent towards Cairn Hill and The Cheviot. At that point the path turned to loose peat and it started snowing. At first the snow was rather welcome as it's hot work going up some of these hills, but we got a bit tired of the snow when it was still going 4 hours later.

Snowy ascent to Cairn Hill

Actually the first high peak (743m) which the Pennine Way reaches doesn't seem to have a name on the OS map, but it's significant because this is where the Pennine Way splits in two. The main route continues left toward Kirk Yetholm, and the optional excursion up to the highest peak in the area, The Cheviot, heads off right. Since we were still early in the day and had plenty of time and energy, of course we had to continue to The Cheviot. There's still snow sitting on the ground here, presumably from the same blizzard which had left its mark on Kinder Scout back at the start of our walk.

Snow on The Cheviot

I expect that the snow will remain for some time, since the temperature is at most only a couple of degrees above zero at the moment, and it's still snowing up here in May. If you click on the below picture of the cairn at The Cheviot summit, you can see the snow falling.

Snow falling on The Cheviot

As has so often been the case with our Pennine Way walk there was no view from the summit, what with all the snow. Walking back down to the junction with the main Pennine Way I noticed something out of place about 20m away from the path. It looked like some twisted aluminium from an aircraft or motorcycle. It's difficult to see the scale in the picture, but the circular holes in the left piece are about 6" (15cm) in diameter. Doing a bit of Googling I suspect that this is wreckage from a Vickers Warwick which crashed here in 1946. It's mentioned in this person's blog, along with a message from someone living in New Zealand who was amongst the first to find the wreckage, along with the bodies of three airmen.

Wreckage of the Vickers Warwick

Back on the main Pennine Way path we imagined that we might have seen the last of the ascents for the day, but there are several more, each a little lower than the last, but each enough to require the customary shedding of layers during the climb. However, first there's a steep descent from the great mass of The Cheviot, dropping from its west side by Auchope Cairn. Actually this is the first time in the Cheviots that we've really seen steep rock faces rather than rolling hillsides. You can see the next looming summit, The Shill (or Shil as some maps would have it), which is the rounded lump in the centre with some rocky bits on top.

Descent from Auchope Cairn

Thankfully there's another mountain shelter, Auchope Refuge, where we could have lunch out of the snow before starting on the Shill. As we've found many times now, the ascent up The Shill was actually much quicker than we'd imagined. Only about 10 minutes climbing up from the saddle and we were up on the rocky outcrop at the summit. Not much to see up here, but we were duty bound to clamber up on top of the highest rocks. Actually the view back to The Shill is a bit more photogenic.

View back to The Shill

Note that the fingerpost in the above photograph is the first time we've seen Kirk Yetholm mentioned. Only 4½ miles to the finish line now, which would be no more than 1½ hours in Cornwall, and if we hadn't already been walking for 5 hours or course. Here there are yet more, albeit slightly smaller, summits to come, the next highest one being White Law. I rather like the clear sheep tracks, seen as dark zig-zagging horizontal lines covering the opposite slope (Saughieside Hill). [Click the picture to zoom in]

Sheep tracks from White Law

Now we're just 2½ miles from Kirk Yetholm, and the Pennine Way starts to descend to a country lane leading to the town itself. One more hill, and one last chance to do the good deed of reuniting a lamb with its mother, who had somehow managed to get into the road. I dashed uphill in the field, out of sight of the sheep, while Jonathan opened a gate back into the field, then I jumped over the wall onto the road and shepherded the ewe down the road in an improvised pincer movement.

The first glimpse of Kirk Yetholm only came when we were about half a mile away. Yes, really, it was our first glimpse; we avoided the town in favour of Town Yetholm last night.

First sighting of Kirk Yetholm

The approved procedure for finishing the Pennine Way is to go to the Border Inn pub, which is the official endpoint (the Nag's Head in Edale being the start). However, just before we got there I noticed our car from Cornwall, with Joanne and Bella (our first whippet) in it. Bella saw me through the window and alerted Joanne to our imminent arrival, and after kisses from both Joanne and Bella we went into the Border Inn.

I thought that there was a free pint for everyone finishing the Pennine Way, but clearly these are hard times and now it's a free half-pint. Even so the barman initially appeared suspicious when I told him that we'd just finished the Pennine Way, and asked me to prove it. The threat of boring him to death with hundreds of my pictures did the trick, along with the fact that I was paying to top up each half to a pint.

We'd only being sitting down for 10 minutes when the barman came over holding a phone and asked "are you Philip and Jonathan?". He then wandered back to the bar and continued his furtive conversation with the mystery caller. Actually we'd already suspected that this must be Sean, who had very accurately estimated our arrival time. When the barman returned he was carrying an ice bucket and a bottle of champagne, and three glasses. Thank you, thank you, Sean, what a generous man.

The barman also returned later with two signed certificates commemorating our completion of the Pennine Way. Sean had been given something similar at Edale stating the starting date, and we thought we'd missed the chance, but it seems there's a second chance. Also now we can pretend that we walked it in 10 days or something (joke).

Me and Bella and Jonathan and certificates

Should we have done the last 27 mile section in one day ? I'm really not sure. Yesterday we left the Pennine Way at Clennell Street at about 3:45pm. Today we walked for about 6 hours 45 minutes, but 45 minutes of that was the initial climb back up Clennell Street, and we spent about an hour on the optional return trip to The Cheviot, and probably another half hour on lunch. So we can deduct about 2 hours 15 from today's walking time, making it more like 4 hours 30 minutes of unavoidable walking. Adding that to yesterday's finish time would mean we might have finished yesterday at about 8:15pm, which is an hour before sunset. However, we would have been exhausted, so it would probably have taken longer really, plus we'd have missed out on The Cheviot. So it would almost certainly have been possible to finish yesterday, even with our 9:30 start time, but it have been for the sake of it, not for pleasure.

I'll write some follow up blog entries with actual measured GPS milages and musings on the walk.

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