mutteringhousewife

We had the table on an angle this morning in our historic B&B, but it did not detract from our enjoyment of our breakfast. The breakfasts have been outstanding on the trip, I’m going to have to work hard at convincing my stomach to go back down to a couple of pieces of toast and Vegemite when we finish this. The Commander has been having full English plus porridge, at Richmond I was having cereal and yoghurt plus smoked salmon on toast. The coffee has been pretty uniformly filter though, which gets the job done but is not delicious.

Heading out of Richmond we stopped into the old railway station which has a bit of a mix of things going on in it, a cinema, a dance studio, a microbrewery, an art gallery, one of those shops with soaps and silver jewellery and blankets in it. Most of the floor space was given over to a cafe though, and that’s where we got a much better coffee. It was a Wednesday morning and the place was jumping, full of mothers groups, older ladies having just finished some form of exercise class, older gentleman in flat hats shooting the breeze. Delightful.

Tearing ourselves away, for we had a bit of a distance to cover though, as Wainwright disdainfully noted, no chance of climbing anything today. We headed along the peat coloured Swale for ages.

We did take a half accidental detour to the magnificent ruins of Easby Abbey. We saw it in the distance, and were magnetically attracted to it, realising it was going to add some kilometres but it was so worth it. It looked like it must have been a big community, it provided religious succour to the inhabitants of the castle at Richmond and surrounds. There’s a lot of the outline left, and we had a lot of trouble not spending the entire morning there.

The adjoining church of St Agatha is still in operation, and there’s something very beguiling about the idea of worshipping in an edifice that had adherents in its very pews a thousand years ago.

Adding to the church theme, it seems most villages in these parts have a Norman church, like St Mary’s at Bolton-on-Swale and they are all different. Some have rediscovered paintwork in them that has been lovingly restored by local artists, this one had paintwork done by a nineteenth century single lady ‘in the style of’ which I won’t bore you with. It also had enclosed pews, and a monument to an allegedly 169 year old man.

The rest of the day was fairly bucolic, passing through some fields but mainly tiny country roads which are a bit tedious to describe, a tiny bit monotonous to walk for a long time which we did today, and a bit hard on the feet. Anyway, here are some of our bucolic photos.

There was a little bit of walking through fields using public right-of-way paths. We have noticed that not all farmers are particularly happy about this. Some have just been a bit passive aggressive, putting up signs like ‘Bull in field’, corralling walkers into a narrow track between a barbed wire fence and a stream, putting up electric fences, that kind of thing. But today we had someone set the dogs on us. Well, just didn’t stop them slipping under the fence and running in circles around us barking their heads off. Admittedly they were a Labrador and some kind of terrier, but if you were scared of dogs it would be pretty intimidating.

The stop for tonight is Danby Wiske, a town so small that Coast to Coast walkers who cannot be accommodated at the White Swan are billeted in the houses of locals. We’re with Anne and I didn’t catch her partner’s name, in a very comfortable bedroom a stone’s throw from the pub. There is a town WhatsApp group, and they find out how many walkers are staying and that many tables get booked at the pub. When you drag yourselves into town after walking 25 kilometres, you must first present yourself at the pub and tell Steve what you want for dinner. If you foolishly first present yourself at Anne’s house, she allows you to change out of your boots and then shoos you down to the pub, because don’t start me on Steve.

When you re-arrive at the pub for dinner, you sit down at 6:30 and wait your turn. I had a superb chicken pie which was too much for me, and the Commander had an equally toothsome steak pie. The pub meals have been really excellent and usually feature local produce. Again, have been eating about three times as much as I normally would and will have to go onto some kind of salad regime once I return home.