Have I told you about my membership of an exclusive walking club known as the Geriatric Blunderers?
We were founded, with four members, some ten years ago. The membership remains at four, plus a president, Betty Wainwright, the widow of AW, of guide book fame.
The membership is widespread, from Cockermouth (Stan) to Southport (Colin), taking in Burton-in-Lonsdale (Bob) and Giggleswick (myself). Each year we have a major expedition, when we take on a mental age of 11 and occasionally descend to the level of daftness associated with the television series Last of the Summer Wine.
We have blundered from Coast to Coast, through midge-ridden areas of Scotland, around Derbyshire and along Hadrian's Wall. This coming May, we plan to tackle the Cleveland Way, in north-east Yorkshire, filling our lungs with moorland and sea breezes.
Our most recent walk was a moderate nine miles, beginning and ending at Helwith Bridge and sharing the summit of Pen-y-ghent with a large party of schoolchildren from Meanwood, Leeds.
I had arranged for us to park our cars near the Helwith Bridge Hotel, which would be useful when we hobbled in, with tongues like sandpaper, at the end of the walk.
The walk began with one of my favourite tracts of dale-country, along a green road heading towards the nose-end of Pen-y-ghent. This is Long Lane, an eastern continuation of Thwaite Lane at Clapham and Austwick.
Initially we passed a small waterworks installation that operates by solar power. Then, on a gentle gradient, we headed for the mountain. Our route offered panoramic views of North Ribblesdale, and especially of Moughton Fell, which has been re-shaped and terraced by quarrying.
The reported bird call turned out to be the "beep, beep, beep" of a lorry reversing at a quarry but later what must surely be the first of the year's skylarks filled the air with its warbling song while hovering like a feathered helicopter.
What Arthur Raistrick used to call "the blunt pyramid" of Pen-y-ghent, when seen from the south, seemed to fill half the sky as Long Lane lost its flanking walls and, on reaching the open fell, joined the Pennine Way. Up the well-used path from Brackenbottom came a score of brightly-clad city youngsters.
We recalled climbing the "pyramid" on unstable scree slopes, but now we had the use of a staircase composed of local stones, this being an effort to combat erosion by concentrating visitors on a particular route.
I paused at the belt of limestone where, towards the end of March, you can see the purple saxifrage flowers. Once I was closely examining a patch in a snowy setting when the first bumble bee of the year arrived to rob the flower of nectar.
The stairway led up the darker rocks to the summit, with its impervious layer of millstone grit. W A Poucher, mountain photographer of the 1930s, was fond of recalling an ascent of Pen-y-ghent in 1912 when he "found an armchair depression in the towering wall of gritstone" that "afforded me a comfortable seat in which to eat my lunch".
We had the usual photo-call at the trig-point, 2,273ft/694m above sea level. Colin used the stone column as a seat. The Leeds schoolchildren jostled excitedly around the summit and used the wall stiles as seats.
Penyghent is said to be a Celtic name meaning "hill of the winds". Pen is certainly "hill" but the rest could imply a boundary.
We admired what must be the finest panoramic view of any northern hill, taking in Morecambe Bay, Lakeland peaks some 50 miles away, the top of Wild Boar Fell and snow-capped fells in the vicinity of Swaledale. Back o' Pen-y-ghent lay Fountains Fell and, at its foot, Rainscar Farm, on its little knoll.
We entered the final phase of the walk at Horton-in-Ribblesdale, using a squeeze-stile to gain access to the riverbank, which here is part of the Ribble Way.
The only sign of avian life was a plump dipper. A Class 37 locomotive clattered along the Settle-Carlisle line, which hereabouts is actually level for a mile or two.
The final stage of the walk had been described by Bob as "abominably wet", and so it was -- a green track which lay partly under water.
Bob deduced that a rumbling sound was not from someone's stomach but marked the approach of a goods train. He stood in a classic spot for Settle-Carlisle photography - facing the Ribble, here spanned by a low railway bridge, with a backdrop of Pen-y-ghent, the hill now resembling a lion in recline.
There passed, at no more than 40 miles an hour, an EWS loco (No 66011) with a rake of laden coal trucks. The loco gleamed in the cold winter sunlight.
Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.
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