Day 16: Osmotherly to Great Broughton

The first of two days of walks up and over real moors. We started out from our inn in Osmotherly, The Golden Lion at around 8:30. The weather was fine, a bit cooler than the past few days, which was most welcome.

Peter putting on his hiking shoes and gaiters.

Rather than walk back to the c2c path where we'd left it to come over to Osmotherly, we walked up Quarry Lane and Swainsty Track to rejoin the c2c path as it entered Scarth Wood Moor, the first of 4 moors we were to traverse that day.

Looking out over Swainsty Farm

Swainsty Farm with Scarth Wood Moor ahead.

More cows for Lourdes Noone

Walking the edge of beautiful Scarth Wood

The moorland looms ahead

The heather was just beginning to bloom, apparently quite late this year.

Looking it over the moor toward to the farms north  and east of Scarth Wood Moor.

A solo sheep up on the moor with a farm just below

We descended Scarth Wood Moor on a steep track and then walked for awhile along  Lyke Wake Walk until we crossed over a small country road to the bridle path through Clain Wood, where we met up with a couple of horses being ridden.

We crossed a second road at Huthwaite Green just as it started to rain. We put on our pack covers and Peter put on his rain pants, as he didn't want to have been lugging them all trip long without ever using them.

As we made our way up on to Live Moor, we looked out to the future--- the pyrmid-like mountain in the distance, we learned, was Roseberry Topping, quite near he North Sea!

We made our way to the top of the moor on large paving stones, which we thanked our lucky stars weren't wet. We knew from prior experience that such stones are perilously slippery when wet, especially when going downhill, even slightly.

Heather just beginning to bloom

One of hundreds of red grouse we saw and heard along the moor; we also heard gunshots from a grouse hunt back toward Clain Wood.

Where moor meets farmland

Peter looking out over Carlton Moor, while standing between a boundary marker and a trig point [Trigpoints are the common name for "triangulation pillars". These are concrete pillars, about 4' tall, which were used by the Ordnance Survey in order to determine the exact shape of the country. ... This process is called "triangulation". A major project to map out the shape of Great Britain began in 1936.

Just as we came down off Carlton Moor (a continuation of Live Moor) it began to rain harder; fortunately, we were just 5 minutes from the inviting dining room of Lordstones where we stopped for tea and scones (Peter) and hot soup(Therese) while waiting out the rain with lots of other walkers.

Unfortunately, the rain didn't stop and Therese nixed the alternate low route (via public path) that Peter had proposed in light of the weather. She was afraid of getting lost on the moors if we strayed from the c2c track, but as it turned out, most of the rest of the c2c route was up and down Cringle Moor on slippery stones (placed there to preserve the moor). The down route was so treacherous that it was taking us forever to get down, so after a bit of orienteering (GPS went off-line), we headed off the moor down a farm track that led us toward Great Broughton where our B&B was located. (Before we left the U.S., Peter had actually printed out a Google Earth screen that identified this farm track.) As a result, we arrived at our B&B safe and sound at 5 PM instead of strugging over aother up and down to get to Clay Top Bank and then calling our B&B hosts to pick us up there, all of which would have taken us much longer. (Our Aussie friends did that and arrived at Clay Top Bank at 6 PM, totally exhausted.)
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The view of the valley we headed for, as we came off the moor

The farm track we took off the moor

An old cottage in Kirby, the village we came down into from the moor.