mutteringhousewife

We’re out of the Lakes District now, and that means no more mountain climbing (well for a bit anyway, I haven’t read very far ahead). And that meant that today, even though we ended up walking about eighteen kilometres, we ended up at our hotel a touch after 3pm with joints intact.

Most of the morning was walking over farmland, which meant the most luscious green grass you’ve ever seen, not a tree in sight, still dodging bogs, and an array of cows and sheep.

We crossed over the A6 on a high footbridge, Wainwright notes that this signifies a third of the walk done. We skirted around a giant limestone quarry. We’re on limestone country now, and a lot of the time you feel like the limestone bones of the country are sticking up out of the grass you’re walking on. There was the odd diversion suggested from one of the apps. A Neolithic stone circle was first up, just sitting in the middle of a field, no sign or anything. We couldn’t distinguish it from other chunks of limestone sticking out of the field until we were right upon it.

The app had details of the type of stones represented, there must be lots of this kind of thing all over the place, just existing in fields as they’ve lain for thousands of years after their people disappeared. Another item on the map app was Robin Hood’s grave. The app notes that it absolutely isn’t Robin Hood’s grave, but doesn’t suggest whose it actually is. Again, no signs to it, no information, just a cairn existing in a tiny valley.

The farmland gradually gave way to a spot of heather covered moor for a bit, still almost no trees.

Wainwright suggests pushing through from Shap to Kirkby Stephen, but as that is a distance of about thirty kilometres on top of the taxing previous day, people are starting to cut that in half by stopping off at Orton. Orton is a bit of a way off the Coast to Coast track, and the accommodation we’ve been booked into was further still. So the Commander, who comes out in hives if he has to retrace his tracks, decided to take a shortcut down to Orton, followed by a devious route through to Tebay where our hotel is, so that tomorrow we can walk back up the route the travel agent suggested to rejoin the track without the horror of seeing the same grass twice. Orton is a tiny village with a lovely little church and an outstanding chocolate shop and cafe, where we lunched on scones and crumpets.

The hotel at Tebay, on the other hand, is behind a service centre on the M6. The hotel itself is that kind of plushy corporate style which is very comfortable and you can’t see the motorway, but I have been enjoying the madly quirky accommodation of previous nights. It is attached to a farm shop that is in the service centre which is insanely fantastic and makes me even more resentful of the filthy soulless nightmare that is the Taree service centre on the Pacific Highway in NSW. It had a diner serving food made with local ingredients, a butcher, a deli, the most incredible range of snacks and drinks, local crafts, walking gear, a full range of wines and beers, fresh baked goods. I’ve noticed in England that if you have a dog, you can take it pretty much anywhere and this place had a range of dog clothes, dog snacks, and an enormous dog walking area behind it that was basically a wood. The hotel welcomes dogs too, there’s a section of the restaurant for guests with their dogs.

The one thing none of the accommodation seems to have is a washing machine. There were a stack of bags in the lobby when we checked in, so a lot of people doing the Coast to Coast in the same way we are – with our bags mysteriously disappearing in the morning and materialising at our next place of rest – and we turn up covered in mud. Does nobody think that perhaps we’d like to wash our clothes in a machine at some point rather than clog up their bathroom sinks with dirt and grass seeds?