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.
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| Christmas Lunch |
When we got there, the festivities started, Paul had cooked the turkey legs this year, followed by Mince pies and custard which I have brought, washed down with wine from Peter. Peter had also brought 2 crackers each. Whilst we were eating lunch it started to snow. Around 12.30 we started walking again, crossed over the bridge and took the higher path towards Crackpot Lodge. I hadn’t took this path on the previous walks we had done around here. The path climbed higher at first and around the corner was the ruins of what we assumed was Crackpot Lodge and then we started to drop down the valley again. Just around the corner was another ruin ( not sure which one was Crackpot Lodge), we then scrambled down the hill back to the road. This route seemed much quicker than previous times we had done this and a little easier. We crossed the stream lower down where there were stepping stones and a bridge.
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| Stream crossing lower down the valley |
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| Paul stood on the bridge for a photo opportunity whilst we pelted him with snowballs |
The path dropped lower into the valley and we could now see the damage caused by the flooding earlier this week. At one point the path had completely disappeared and was replaced by a massive landslide of rocks and parts of trees.
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| 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.
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