The Travelling Buncebury's

The Bridge of Lune So we finished our second long-distance path with virtually no rain, settled down in unusually warm (for England) beautiful evening sunshine with a bottle of wine the end of the Dales Way and some nibbles and enjoyed the views of the shadows lengthening across the landscape at the edge of the Lake District.    We were near Kendal and that night it poured down. looking towards the Lake District from near the end of the walk Near us was a young woman called Pearl who had a further day’s walking to finish The Dales Way but was nursing two feet of blisters and lots of aches.   She’d been covering twenty miles a day carrying everything including a tent.   Now that really doesn’t sound like fun to me.   Heather gave her a lift back to the path in the morning, saving her a mile or so of road walking but leaving her with ten miles or so of lovely countryside to walk through, assuming she could see it.   the perfect lunch spot In our las

Over The Pennines A typical Dales Way landscape Hubberholme Church Today is the day we start to climb up and over the Pennines and due to the scarcity of roads we do a lot of shuffling back and forth to get a vehicle in position for our expected finish - over two hours of driving along some exceedingly narrow roads and with some very thick mist on the top.     When we finally get walking, in sunshine, we reach Hubberholme, whose church was J B Priestley’s favourite.   It’s a squat, wide building and very appealing inside with the sun streaming through the eastern window.   For anyone who has never heard of J B P, he’s on the internet. The upper River Wharfe - drought struck A short while after leaving Buckden, we’re still alongside the River Wharfe, but in this drought it is now just a sheeted limestone dry riverbed.   What water is here has fled underground and so any fish or water creatures have died.   Now we don’t even expect to see Kingfishers an

  some of that wide open South Downs sky - looking east from near Beacon Hill and looking north from near Buriton The South Downs Way is the only National Trail in the country which just happens to be a bridleway (apart from the Pennine Bridleway) and therefore bikes and horses are allowed to use it alongside us walkers.   Unfortunately, at weekends it is wildly overused for charity bike rides.   The first one we encountered had bikes ridden furiously down hills past us for half a day in their Winchester to Beachy Head 100 mile ride.   In five hours on a baking hot day we saw no marshals, no water points, no signs at main roads to warn drivers and no one ‘sweeping up’ the stragglers.   Near the end of our walk we came across one rider pushing his bike and he was really in a state of collapse.   We stopped him, checked he had some water and he was just out on his feet.   So we phoned the so-called organisers to call for help, to be told there was an aid vehicle n