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Day 6 on the Pennine Way: Malham to Horton-in-Ribblesdale, 16-miles

December 19, 2018

My sixth day of walking on the Pennine Way started with a solid breakfast in the YHA hostel. Toast and eggs and sausage and lots of coffee. I ate with Margaret, the northern Californian woman I’d met four days before (at this point it felt like weeks before!), the one who had told me that she also went very off route on that first day of walking.

Margaret was planning to walk to Horton that day, and we looked at our maps and guidebooks together.

“This is going to be a really long day,” she said, pointing a finger at the elevation profile.

There would be two rather tough climbs- one to Fountain Fells, the other up Pen-y-Ghent- as well as a series of 421 steps up to Malham Cove, a challenge we’d encounter first thing in the morning

I slurped down a last sip of coffee and tied the laces of my shoes, and, after picking up the packed lunch I ordered the night before, was the first one out of the hostel. I’d gotten to breakfast as soon as they started serving food (here’s a pro tip for walkers who want to leave as early as possible but also take advantage of your lodging’s breakfast: arrive at breakfast about 10 minutes early, and often someone will come out and bring you coffee or tea, and get you started on toast. I’d found that breakfast could be a rather long, drawn-out affair if you let it, and sometimes that’s nice, but on long days I often wanted to get going as soon as possible).

It was another gorgeous morning. I walked away from the quaint village and almost immediately headed towards Malham Cove, a fantastic limestone amphitheater (and now home to peregrine falcons!). The light was soft and golden, the grass seemed to shine a beautiful green, white fluffy sheep wandered slowly through the fields and I was the only one around. What a feeling of peace! And for the first time, I noticed that my feet didn’t feel quite as bad. There was still a little pain from one of my blisters, but this was a noticeable change from the past several days. The realization put a grin on my face. Despite the difficulty of the day ahead, I might actually enjoy the walking!

And then came the stairs. 421 of them. The stairs were endless! This is when my counting trick began (and really, it’s not a trick at all, just something I started doing on the Pennine Way to help me continue to move forward). I’d count my steps, 1-10, and as soon as I got to 10 I’d start back over at 1. The idea was that I couldn’t stop to rest or to catch my breath until I got to ’10’, but often when I arrived at ’10’ I decided to keep going for another 10. I certainly stopped- multiple times- as I climbed all of those stairs, but something about the marching repetition of the numbers pushed me forward. It became almost like a game.

Before too long I was at the top, at the top of a field of limestone, large rocks that were smoothed and polished and shining in the sun. I hopped around the rocks for a bit, admired the views, and then looked around for the path. Where in the world was I supposed to go? When walking through fields, or the moors, the path is rather obvious. Sometimes it’s just barely visible, but if you stare at the ground long enough, you can usually find a path. But up here in the limestone any trace of a path was gone. There weren’t any signs, or arrows, and my guidebook was hopeless.

Well, the guidebook referred to a path that was the wrong one, and indicated that I was to turn right at the top of the steps, but of course I somehow managed to think the wrong path was the right one and I climbed halfway up a rather steep hill before realizing that I must be going the wrong way.

But, have no fear, I eventually figured things out, and breathed a small sigh of relief when I found a signpost. The path led through a narrow valley and I felt like I was the only person on earth (well, me and the sheep), and then there were another 150 stairs to climb to get out of the valley (of course there were), and then I arrived at a sign that pointed back to Malham, which was 1.5 miles away.

All of that effort for a mile and a half! I adjusted my pack, settling it more firmly against my back, and continued on.

The rest of the day followed a similar pattern to those first few hours of my day: climbing, counting to ten with each step, expansive views, sheep and green fields and sunshine, more climbing, more counting steps, more beautiful views.

The last climb of the day was up Pen-y-Ghent, and as I stood at the base of the mountain, looking up at the little peak that I would have to pull myself over, I felt tired. It had been a really good day but, in hindsight, I think I was still getting my walking legs under me. I felt like I could keep walking on a flat path for miles and miles, but the 600 feet I would have to climb that was looming over me? That was a different story.

I took a deep breath, and started. Before long I passed a man coming down in the opposite direction. He stopped and we chatted for a moment, and he reassured me that the climb wasn’t nearly as hard as it looked. “You’ll be up at the top in no time!” he said, and with a wave, he was off.

I used the old 1-10 counting trick to keep me moving up the mountain, and I stopped several times to take a video (it appears that most of the videos I took on the Pennine Way were when I was struggling. Hmm, maybe I needed something to distract myself with? A way to laugh at myself a little bit?).

The man was right- the climb wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed, all except for the bit of scrambling at the top. I’m not a big fan of needing to use my hands and arms to pull myself up over rocks when I’m hiking, though the scrambling at the top of Pen-y-Ghent was minimal and really not too difficult. I think the hardest part was the fact that I had a heavy pack strapped to my back, threatening, at times, to pull me backwards.

But I made it! I was dripping with sweat and my face was beet red and as soon as I found a place to sit I threw down my pack and took off my shoes and peeled off my socks and gulped down as much water as I could (bonus points! Drinking water makes your pack lighter!). I sat on the summit for awhile, watching as people arrived at the top and took photos at the trig point. Everyone sprawled out on the grass, people and sheep mingled together in the bright sunlight. I didn’t recognize anyone up here; most, if not all, were day hikers, and were here to climb Pen-y-Ghent, rather than walk the whole Pennine Way.

The rest of the way, to Horton-in-Ribblesdale, was all downhill, and it was mostly enjoyable walking, though under a very hot sun. I arrived in town tired but rather triumphant. Aside from the unexpected challenges of Day One, this was the most physically challenging day yet, and I’d done it! I headed straight for the “famed” Pen-y-Ghent café, a place that my guidebook describes in great and glorious detail. In addition to drinks and snacks, the café doubles as a tourist information center and sells camping gear and maps and generally provides a great service to Pennine Way walkers. There are volumes upon volumes of “guestbooks” that Pennine Way walkers have been signing for years, and I was excited to add my name to the register. Unfortunately, the café was closed when I arrived! I’d made it in time- well before the 5:30 posted closing time- but it appeared that it had been closed all day.

I peered through the dark windows for a minute, and then continued down the road to my lodging for the night, the bunk room of the Golden Lion Hotel. I checked in at the pub of the hotel and was given a tour of the bunkhouse, which I would have all to myself. There were triple bunks but by now the novelty has faded a bit, and instead of climbing uncertainly to the very top, I unrolled my sleeping bag on one of the bottom bunks.

After I took a shower and rinsed out my clothes from the day, I headed out of the bunkhouse to see about getting a drink in the pub. But as soon as I walked out the door of the bunkhouse I ran straight into David, my friend from the first day of the walk! We stared at each other and started to laugh. “What are you doing here?” I asked, a great smile on my face.

David was staying in the hotel that night, along with his nephew, who had driven out to meet him for the evening. The three of us gathered in the pub for a drink and stayed through a long and lingering dinner, talking about the last few days. David had several adventures since I’d last seen him- wild camping at the base of Stoodley Pike, wandering off route for miles around one of the reservoirs- and he was behind schedule.

“I haven’t walked this last section yet,” he said, referring to the day’s walk I’d just done. “But since I had plans to meet my nephew here, I took a cab and tomorrow morning I’m going to get dropped off back at Malham, and continue from there.”

I told him all about Pen-y-Ghent, and advised that he take more water than he thought he would need for the day’s walk. We talked and talked, and it felt so good to have a friend who could understand the journey that I was on, because he was on a very similar journey of his own. His nephew asked lots of questions and we ordered another round of beer. Just as we were winding down, who shows up in the pub but Margaret! We ushered her over to our table and she sat down with shaky legs. I glanced at the clock on the wall- it was after 8:30pm. “Margaret,” we asked, “Have you just arrived?”

She looked at us with wide eyes. “That walk took longer, much, much longer, than I thought it would.” David bought her a drink and we told more stories and for what I suspected might be the last time, I sat around a table in a pub with my little Pennine Way family. They were people I’d only known for a few days, but who had nearly instantly become friends, comrades of sorts. I truly love undertaking these walks alone, and continuing to walk alone. The sense of isolation and solitude and freedom give me such an expansive, open feeling; I feel a deep sense of myself, my truest self, when I am out alone on the moors, or on a hillside, or scrambling up a mountain.

I love being alone, but there’s also something about this: a tableful of people who cheer for me and support me and understand what it means to be on this particular journey. I know that their footsteps are ahead of me or just behind me, and that knowledge brings me such comfort. Charlie was out there somewhere, and so were Nigel and Judy. That night I would say goodbye to David and Margaret and I wouldn’t see either of them again, but it was okay. We were all part of the same walk.

Up in my room I crawled into my bunk and read a few chapters of Jane Eyre and ate ginger biscuits, wiping the crumbs from the mattress. The bunkroom was empty, but I didn’t feel alone. I doubted that I would ever feel truly alone on this journey.

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Men in the hills and bulls in the field; Day 5 on the Pennine Way, Haworth to Malham (with a train ride… 6 or 7 miles of walking)

November 28, 2018

Day 5 was the day that I skipped part of the Pennine Way.

When people ask about my summer travels or I talk about walks that I’ve done, I always say that I walked the Pennine Way. I don’t say that I skipped part of it or that I didn’t walk the whole thing; I say that I walked it, that I walked it all.

Some may disagree with me and I suppose at one time- during my first Camino on the Frances- I was a bit of a purist. If I was going to do a walk, I wanted to start at the start and end at the end and walk every step of it in between. It wasn’t that I considered it “cheating” if I didn’t walk all of it, but I think my thought was that I would do everything in my power to walk every step.

And, now that I think about it, I maintained that view through my next two Caminos: the Norte and the San Salvador. In fact, on the Camino de San Salvador, I walked when I was very sick and absolutely should have just hopped on a train and skipped the last 30km of the walk. Maybe it was because the route was a shorter distance, maybe it was because I wanted to arrive at my destination on foot, or maybe it was just that sort of purist view that if you’re going to walk a long-distance walk, you should try your best to walk the whole thing.

To that I now say… nonsense!

If I’m able to, if I have the time and my body is in good shape, I still love starting at the start, ending at the end, and walking every step in between. But sickness on the San Salvador taught me my lesson, and now I have (almost) no hesitations about skipping a section of a long walk if it’s in my best interest. I don’t want to skip a section if it’s hard, I don’t want to skip a section if I’m bored, and I even hesitate to skip a section if there’s bad weather (unless it makes the walking dangerous), but if I’m sick or hurting or if I’m falling short on time, I’ll hop on a bus or train or hail a taxi and skip those miles.

I put this into practice during my second sojourn on the Norte and even at the end of last summer’s Le Puy adventure, and you know, nothing bad happened. No one shook their finger at me because I didn’t walk all the stages in my guidebook, and honestly I didn’t feel any differently. A little disappointed, maybe, that I couldn’t quite fit in all that I had set out to do, but at the end of the journey I felt accomplished, and proud, and very, very much like a pilgrim.

So after four days on the Pennine Way, with four blisters on my feet and a 26-mile day looming ahead of me, I thought and I thought and then finally the answer was just so clear and obvious, like a great voice booming overhead: “Nadine,” the voice said. “Take the bloody train.”

I was in Haworth, after all, and there was a train station just down the hill from where I was staying.

So after a truly splendid full English breakfast, I hoisted up my heavy pack and walked down to the station and the whole experience was just the best. A little luxury on a pilgrimage or a long trek is something I could get used to! (Though, to be fair, some people camp and cook their dinners on stoves every night during their walks; with my beds and my glasses of wine/pints of beer, some may consider my walking adventures quite luxurious!).

In any case, I bought a ticket on a steam engine train that took me from Haworth to Keighley- who knew I’d get to ride on a steam engine??

From Keighley I took another train to Gargrave, which was where I picked up the Pennine Way, skipping over about 20-miles of walking that I’d originally planned to do.

Did I miss the walking? A little bit. But honestly, the blisters were such a bother that it was really nice to sit back on the train and watch the countryside whiz past. Gargrave is a quaint town that sits across from the River Aire; I got off the train and headed straight to the wonderful Dalesman Café, where I ordered a packed sandwich and bag of chips to stash in my pack for a little later in the afternoon. Because I only had 6-miles to walk and it was still late in the morning, I sat for awhile on the banks of the river with my feet stretched out in the sun, giving my blisters as much time to heal as I possibly could.

Eventually, I put my shoes back on and started walking and the blisters still hurt, but maybe not quite as much as the day before. Soon enough I was out of Gargrave and into the rolling countryside and fields of Eshton Moor. It was fairly easy walking and I mostly had the open fields all to myself, not another soul around for miles except for the cows and the sheep. Not another soul until I heard a sound behind me, and turned to see a young man walking briskly- nearly running- on the path behind me. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and carried a small day pack and the muscles of his legs reminded me a bit of a racehorse.

“Hi,” he called to me as he approached. “Are you walking the Pennine Way?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Are you?”

“Yeah, sort of,” he laughed. “I’m doing the Spine Race actually, crazy fool that I am.”

I’d heard about the Spine Race sometime in the days before; to quote the website, it’s a “non-stop, 7-day, 168 hour race from Edale to Kirk Yetholm.” Edale to Kirk Yetholm is the entirety of the Pennine Way, and to try to complete the trail in 7 days is, indeed, rather foolish. And a bit insane.

“When did you start?” I asked, as the man moved past me.

“Yesterday morning!” He was ahead of me now, and turning his head back he smiled. “Good luck with your walk, it’s a lot harder with a bigger pack like yours.”

I marveled at what he was attempting to do, and watched as he began to jog lightly through the grass. I thought about how he must have walked through the night, pausing only to sleep for an hour, maybe two. And then I thought about my own night and morning: a room of my own in a cozy B&B, a breakfast of eggs and toast and bacon and tomatoes and beans, and then a pleasant train ride on a steam engine. A sandwich in my pack, waiting to be eaten under the shade of a tree, perhaps along a babbling creek with my bare feet in the grass.

We all walk our own walk, I thought, smiling to myself.

But about 10 minutes later I’d caught up to him. I’d just approached a closed wooden gate when I saw the man on the other side of the field, backing slowly away from a large group of young cows who were advancing on him.

I carefully reached up and unlocked the gate, the swung it back towards me so the man could come back into my field. We shut the gate, the cows (or, possibly, bulls, according to the Spine Race Man) crowding against the wooden fence.

“I got worried when they start to advance on me,” he said.

We stared at the bulls, they stared back at us, pushing and shoving against each other so they could all get closer. They seemed friendly enough, but now that they were blocking the gate I couldn’t see how we would even be able to enter the field at all.

“Let’s hop over the wall here,” the Spine Race Man said, “it looks like this other field runs parallel to the path, and we can cross over again once we get away from the bulls.”

The man hopped the wall easily enough, but it was another story for me. I had to take off my pack and shove it over the wall to Spine Race Man, who was waiting to catch it. I attempted to effortlessly climb over the wall but who are we kidding? Once on top of the wall I needed the man’s help to get down onto the other side, and he was gracious enough to wait and help me, and even picked up my pack and helped me get it back on.

I figured he would take off- him being in a race and all- but he walked with me down through the field until we found a safe spot to climb back over the wall and get back onto the Pennine Way, well away from the bulls.

“Good luck with the rest of your way,” he said, and then he was off, running this time, off through the fields and away into the hills and after awhile I wondered if he was just a figment of my imagination, a man in a race over the mountains who helped me scale a wall and escape a herd of bulls.

The rest of my walk was beautiful and fairly easy. But then another funny thing happened, when I was about a mile away from Malham, my destination for the night. Walking towards me and coming from the opposite direction were three people, as they drew closer I saw a younger couple and a older woman. We all smiled at each other and I was about to move past them when the younger girl said, “Excuse me, but you aren’t Nadine, are you?”

I blinked. I was about 75-miles into a long walk through England and currently in the middle of a nondescript grassy field, and here was a group of people who were all looking at me and smiling and knowing exactly who I was.

I nodded, a bit hesitantly, and the girl beamed at me. “I’m Charlie’s sister!” she exclaimed. “This is our mother,” she pointed to the woman at her side. “We were just with Charlie last night and she and Dad went ahead to do the next stage, we’re going to take a car and meet up with them later.”

I laughed then, so happy to have run into these strangers who could give me news of Charlie, my friend from the day I walked into Hebden Bridge. I had last seen Charlie just two days before but already it felt like an entirety, as though I had been walking alone for a really long time.

Her family encouraged me, saying that Malham wasn’t much further and that the walking would be easy, and with big smiles and waves we said goodbye and I continued on. I thought about Charlie as I walked, how she was just a day ahead of me. The thought warmed me, as though I had some invisible guide on my journey, someone who was walking just miles ahead: checking the path, making sure the route was okay, leaving her trace by her footprints in the mud.

I arrived in Malham by mid-afternoon, and first walked in a circle through the tiny, charming village. There were several pubs and restaurants, a couple B&Bs, a small general store and an ice cream stand, all surrounding the River Aire. Families and hikers were seated at the outdoor tables and spread across the grass and with the bright sunlight filtering through the trees, I couldn’t think of a much more idyllic spot.

My hostel (Malham YHA Hostel) was just at the corner of town, and I stopped inside to deposit my bag and change my shoes and then went back into town to kill time until I could check into my dorm room. I added myself to the beautiful tableau before me: armed with an ice cream cone and Jane Eyre, I found a bench in the sun and whiled away a peaceful hour, reading and writing and people watching.

Later, over a hearty dinner in the pub, I thought about how I had given myself all the things I’d needed that day; how I had moved slowly and skipped those miles and met the Spine Race Man and Charlie’s family, how my feet were finally starting to feel better and how, after 5 days of walking, I was starting to feel like I was on the Pennine Way, really on it. I was settled and more sure of myself, I’d picked up a set of maps and an extra stake for my tent and several more blister patches (just in case!) and I had a belly full of food and a heavy copy of Jane Eyre and a forecast that showed nothing but sunshine.

I was ready for the rest of the way. Ready, and excited.

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