At a recent Walkers night out we decided to have our Christmas walk this weekend and as we needed to be home early, we chose the Yorkshire Dales walk we have done a few times before.  I picked Peter up at 7.30 and then drove back down to Hartlepool for Paul, arriving at his house around 8.00 am.  It was a cold, crisp morning, the car temperature gauge hovering around zero.  We arrived at Gunnerside, a small village about 6 miles past Reeth, around 9.15 and set off walking about 9.30.  The walk starts out of the village on a road which was quite icy.  As we were driving in we had also noticed the damage caused by the floods and high winds earlier this week in Swaledale.  Added to this the tops were covered in snow so we knew we were in for  a cold, snowy walk.

After about a half mile on the road we took a sharp right and start walking up the hill.  As soon as we started on this road we were walking on snow, initially just an inch or so but getting deeper as we got higher.  This path climbed gently around the hill to the highest point of the walk.  The snow was 6 or 7 inches deep at this point.  As we started to drop back down the other side we crossed a stream and walked down the right hand side of the stream.  Nobody had been out this morning so the path was not clear and at times our feet were sinking knee deep in the fresh snow.  We were heading towards the ruined building at the bottom of the valley to have our Christmas lunch.

Christmas Lunch

Stream crossing lower down the valley

Paul stood on the bridge for a photo opportunity whilst we pelted him with snowballs

These 2 photos show the damage caused by floods in Swaledale this week.

The path back to the car was long and slow, much longer than I remembered.  Paul had kept a shotgun cartridge he found the last time he was on this walk and kicked all the way back to the car (coincidentally we had found a cartridge the following year when I did the walk and kicked it back to the car) so we played football with the cartridge all the way down the path back to the car.  We got back to the car just after 3.

So that’s its for 2011, we will be back in 2012 in the Lakes.

Merry Christmas to walkers everywhere and a happy and healthy 2012.