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 perf...

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...

  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 ...

Southease Church The gaps in the South Downs ridge run roughly north/south and contain the villages although they’re generally a mile or so north or south of the actual path.  Many of these villages are classic English country style collections of thatch and flint and cobble set about with climbing roses and tumbling overplanted gardens.  There are many beautiful cottages but not ones I’d want to live in because they generally have tiny windows.   Some of the churches are interesting to see though, for instance the lovely little one at Southease has a round tower and unusually is not dedicated to any saint.  From the tops of these huge whale-backed chalk hills there are distant views.  To the north we look over the patchwork of what looks like a well wooded landscape with more hills in the distant haze.  To the south ten miles or so away, we’re accompanied by the Brighton, Hove, Worthing conurbation with hundreds of thousands of people living i...

Tarr Steps - Exmoor After a few days in The New Forest we we nded our way to mid Devon with the aim of finally finishing off walking The Two Moors Way, which runs from the English Channel, across Dartmoor and Exmoor to meet The Bristol C hannel at Lynmouth.    Central Devon, which we’ve rarely visited was lovely and so was bleak Exmoor, what we could see of it and where by experience we learnt it rains every day.   Drizzly aerosol rain steadily increasing in intensity, mist and wind for the morning and clearing by lunchtime.   One such morning on a featureless, pathless and wrongly signposted section we were reduced to the use of my trusty compass to get us across the moor.   So we eventually finished the 115 miles in 11 walking days spread over nearly three years due to my various gout and knee problems.   The highlight of this session had to be Exmoor’s Tarr Steps and the walk north along the River Barle in an unexpectedly fine sunny spell for E...