Coast to Coast - Day 13

Day 13: Blakey Ridge to Grosmont (14 miles)

At the start of the walk, there seemed a lot of miles to cover, but now they are disappearing fast. It's only 30 miles to the end and, after today, we'll have just 16 miles to complete on our final day.

The Lion, I have discovered, is the fourth highest pub in Britain, but coming out of the comfort of its warm bar into a light drizzle, we still had to climb gently upwards for a mile before our path turned downwards towards Eskdale and the sea. I thought this would be our last day on boggy moors (it turned out not to be so) and I was delighted to see several curlews as we tramped through the murk. These are big birds and they make a lot of strange noises.

The Coast to Coast walk has a number of traditions along the way and one of them (apparently) is to leave a snack or sweet on Fat Betty, a large, flat, whitewashed rock just off the path. I've no idea where the tradition started; I'd suggested to David that he might want to deposit the Aldi oat biscuits he'd been offering me since we left St Bees, but he was all for hanging onto those. In fact, we didn't leave Fat Betty an offering - the rain was blowing across, so any offering would have been blown off and thoroughly wetted so we would just have been littering the moors.Incidentally, Fat Betty rock stands above Great Fryup Dale, but I can’t say if there’s any connection.

On the way down, the landscape greens and softens, as we've seen at other stages of the walk and we got views of the North Sea through the lowering hills. It was still a long way off.

A tiny glimpse of sea through the hills

Arriving in the upper reaches of Eskdale, we are also on the last two pages of the map, which makes the end feel much closer.

Eskdale is very pretty and was used to film a TV show called Heartbeat, which I've never seen, but was a popular Sunday night soap-cum-drama. The first village we came to was Glaisdale and, just as the track becomes a metalled road, an enterprising local has opened a tearoom from a shed in her garden. There was no fruit cake, but a cup of tea was very welcome.

Glaisdale is an attractive village, built on the steep slopes of the high dale and was originally a settlement of iron ore miners’ cottages. We were now following the River Esk downstream towards Egton Bridge and Grosmont, where we would spend the night. The route takes you through East Arncliff Wood along an ancient path laid from large stones. Building this path would have been a major undertaking and the stones have been worn into a dish shape from years of feet and hooves. It’s part of an ancient pannier-way, but sadly, it's in a state, with lots of the stones displaced and fallen. Here's another case where some careful restoration is desperately needed.

From Egton Bridge to Grosmont, the path follows an old toll route, which was nice easy walking. Grosmont is a small place, another settlement established to service the iron industry and there was once a large smelting works in the middle of the village. No sign of that now, just a pretty little settlement alongside the River Esk and the home of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, a short stretch of track saved after the Beeching cuts and now running steam trains. It's a major draw for tourists and was used for shooting some Hogwarts Express scenes in the Harry Potter films (which I also haven't seen).

Our B&B was excellent, with a nice lounge overlooking the river. There was limited choice for pubs - just the one next to the station and called, with no imagination at all, the Station Tavern. It was an odd place and we arrived thirsty at 5pm with an hour to kill before they started serving food. No Black Sheep, but other beers were available. The landlord arrived about 5.45, puffing an e-cigarette and blowing vapour everywhere. He seemed more interested in his petition that serving people; apparently his eight-year-old daughter wanted to shave her head to raise money for her friend who was suffering from leukaemia, but her school had said she would be suspended because she'd have an extreme hair-style. I suspect dad had suggested the whole thing, I can't imagine an eight-year-old thinking of that.

I've been tree watching on the walk. The one on the left is an ash and the
one on the right an oak. The oak is fully in leaf, the ash only just coming.
They say: oak before ash, we're in for a splash; ash before oak, we're in for
a soak. On that basis we're either going to have a dry summer or the ash
tree is suffering from ash dieback disease which is decimating these fine trees.