Lady Anne's Way 2015 Day 4

Tuesday 13^th October 2015

It was a slightly later start, leaving the bunkhouse in Hardraw at 8:45 to walk the roads to a point where I could rejoin the Way.  At one point that morning, I was followed by a large flock of sheep through a field.  Later, after a steep ascent, I saw a farmer on a quad bike dressed for the bitterest of winter weather, who stopped his machine close to me and said, “Aren’t you cold?”  I was wearing just shorts and a short-sleeved top but was overheated from the climb and striding along at a reasonable pace.  I just responded that I was actually too warm, which probably confused him.  There was some tricky navigation toward the end of the day, but I recall when I redid the walk in 2019 (using a GPS mapping app on my phone) that I had no trouble.

Pendragon castle was on private land, so I could only get views of it from outside of the field.

For some reason I had not found any reasonably priced accommodation in Kirkby Stephen that year, and had booked at a farm B&B in a place called Soulby, 4 km further along a fairly busy road.  As there was no pub in Soulby the farmer’s wife, Elaine, included me in the dinner she made.  I recall having a conversation with the couple about how I spent my teenage years living on a farm, and the farmer, Jon, lent me a book by Amanda Owen, called “The Yorkshire Shepherdess” that I read about 80 pages of before going to sleep.  Interestingly, the next day I bought a copy of that book online for my father, who enjoyed reading it, and I eventually walked through Ravenseat, Amanda and Clive’s farm, in 2019 when I walked Wainwright’s Coast to Coast.

Day 5