Wolsingham
Diane and I had a wonderful day yesterday. Paul had been invited over to his friend Austin’s house for the day. Austin, who is an American with a father crazy enough (like me) to drag his family halfway across the world so he can earn a PhD in a non-lucrative subject (his being archeaology), is one of Paul’s friends from school. They’re a good group of kids and I’ve come to realize that there’s a certain parental pride when one’s child shows signs of picking excellent friends.
As it is uncommon for Diane and I to have a day together we decided to do what any couple in love with each other would want to do with that time…go slogging through the mud.
If you don’t live in England then you have never really encountered mud. What we call mud in America is what they call ‘dry ground’ here in England. Mud isn’t mud unless your feet sink down into it and you find yourself sliding as much as walking. At least in the autumn and winter, the ground here is permanently saturated: after a week without rain, one still can’t walk across a field without getting muddy. I now know the inspiration for this song.
All of this is just by way of introduction to my account of a long stroll we took through the hills to the south of Wolsingham (pictured above), a small town that welcomes people to the lovely and not much known Weardale. The poor Weardale is the neglected northernmost sister to the much more visited Wensleydale, Swaledale, Teesdale, and the other dales of the North. Certainly, some of the towns of Weardale have a more industrial air to them than those to the south (there was once a burgeoning industry of quarrying and lead mining there), but the countryside is every bit as breathtaking and, more importantly, its less than a half hour from Durham!
We parked up the hill a short ways from the Wear and started down a gravel drive that leads to Ashes Farm, one of a number of small stone farms that dot the countryside. The picture above was taken about five minutes into the walk. The day was lovely–hardly a cloud in the sky despite the BBC’s forecast of heavy rain!–and the temperature by recent standards remarkably mild (45 degrees F). We followed the drive a short ways to Ashes Farm, walked through the farmyard, paying our respect to a proudly strutting rooster, and hit our first of many difficulties.
In his Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson waxes eloquently about the Ordinance Survey Maps. And they are things of marvel, showing everything from the location of buildings in towns down to the positioning of sheep dips in fields. As Bryson points out, though, that detail is also their weakness because you can fool yourself into thinking that a clump of trees ahead must be the bit of green forest marked on the map or something of the like. In our case, we were presented with three different paths, none of which seemed to go in quite the direction shown on the map. We made a wild guess only to discover that it had been a trick question all along: the right path turned out to be the fourth choice we had never noticed. Fortunately, our choice was close enough and, after slogging through our first bit of muddy ground, we discovered the path leading on into the hills.
West towards the upper Weardale
After this we strolled along the fields, paid our respects to various flocks of sheep, and stopped periodically to drink in the surroundings. One of the aspects of England that I can’t get used to is how green everything remains in the winter. In America, most of the grass turns a dull khaki in the winter and that with the leafless trees gives the countryside a washed-out appearance. Not so here.
The path took us slowly uphill towards the distant high moors to the south. We crossed through a couple of gates and then did something bold: we struck out on our own. We knew from the start that we wouldn’t have the time to follow the entire circular route marked out in my small book. But the map showed a multitude of footpaths that would allow us to cut off about 4 miles of the entire trip. And so, off we went.
Almost immediately, we discovered this wasn’t going to be so easy. The path was supposed to fork but it didn’t, or at
Taken from where the path should have forked!
least it didn’t in any discernible way. We needed to take the left prong westward; only the southeasterly path was visible. Fortunately, I could tell from the terrain markings on the map the direction we needed to go and so, after some discussion, we struck out across the field and through a small bog. That’s when we discovered that a barbed wire fence had been erected since the map was published. We managed to scramble over this (thanks to a stone wall) and reach another gate in the midst of thick mud (mixed, of course, with copious amounts of sheep poop!). This took us across more fields down hill towards an eerie looking wood of oaks and hawthorn…and a bog!
Slosh, slosh, slosh we went no longer searching for our path but for any path. Because the ground was so saturated, the mud at the gates was even deeper and by now my boots were hardly visible beneath a thick layer of mud. I suspect in all the world only England has managed to combine bogs with hills, two types of terrain one would think mutually exclusive. Despite all this, we were having a great time: the sun and the surroundings couldn’t help but elate the spirits.
Eventually, we jumped over a stream and headed back up a hill and away from the particularly waterlogged lowlands. This put us
Sunnyside Farm from a distance
near a farm marked on the map as Sunnyside Farm through which a footpath ran. We approached this renovated old farm, where a young woman was exercising her horse, and came in sight of an older gentleman waving us towards him. It turned out he had been enjoying himself watching us meander across the fields. ‘You missed the blue gate,’ he said sagely, as though this were the solution to the world’s problems. ‘Everybody does. Even the people who came out to survey the footpaths missed it.’ I must say that made me feel a bit better. It turned out that the man was a retired businessman who had also taught in the business school at Durham. He kindly showed us on our way.
A short while later we stopped for lunch. During the past hour we had walked maybe a mile and a half, though it felt like five. Fortunately, the remainder of the trip was uneventful with many more spectacular scenes of Weardale. We encountered only two other things worth mentioning. The first was rather strange: a fence lined with about a dozen hanging mole carcasses. I don’t know if this was intended to be a warning to all the other moles out there or what as we didn’t hang around to ask the owners. The second was a little piece of quintessential England. To get back to the road next to which we had parked, we had to pass through a long field. The beginning of the field contained the largest and deepest patch of mud we had yet encountered. There was no alternative but to slosh across this with the sheep watching on with amusement. When we were halfway through this field of mud, I heard the sound of splattering behind me. I turned to see a young man in shorts, t-shirt, and running shoes out for a jog through the mud as though this were a perfectly normal thing to do. He ran on, splattering mud all over himself, with only a polite nod of greeting to me. I love England!
So, all in all, it was a great adventure, if a muddy one. I’m looking forward to doing it all again, though I think we’ll take a different route next time. With that, I’ll leave you with a final picture: think of it as the local denizens saying farewell…
Goodbaa & farewool!
Changes and Chances 