Day 8: Bampton Grange to Orton

So we couldn't get through a vacation without a real mishap, right? Here was the problem that Therese had discovered the night before: she couldn't find her money belt with 350 pounds in it. The last she remembered was drying out the money in Ennerdale Bridge (see photo from Day 3), and she clearly remembered putting it back in the money belt and then into a plastic bag to keep from getting wet again.

Peter and Therese took apart all their luggage -- to no avail. Therese thought perhaps she had left it in the Ennerdale hotel room in a drawer. So, she wrote the outfitters who booked all our rooms to ask them to contact the Ennerdale hotel and the previous B&Bs to see if someone had turned it in.

The only other possibility she could think of was that it had fallen out of her backpack at Honister mine when she dug into it to get out her rain poncho because it had started raining hard. A call into the youth hostel there told her that no one had turned in a money belt there.

At breakfast, Therese broke the bad news to Sharon and Rob. Sharon told the story of her family trip to Disney World (many years ago) and Rob hiding their travelers checks in a "secret compartment" in his new shaving kit, and then promptly forgetting that he had done so. They spent the entire trip without ever finding (and hence, using) those traveler checks. Unfortunately, Therese didn't have a secret compartment in a shaving kit to fall back on.

Our basic feeling at this point was: it's only money. We'll get over it. Let's get on with being here.

So, Rob and Sharon and we decide to walk together from Bampton Grange to Orton. They were to be our companions for the next several days.

We headed out on the public footpath, looking back at St. Patrick's Church in Bampton Grange.

A beautiful day with a whole new landscape, lusher and less mountainous, before us.

R-L: Rob (with compass), Peter (with map), and Sharon (with eyes)

We reached the ruins of Shap Abbey without incident.

But on our way back up the road to cut over to Shap, itself, we turned right about 100 yards too soon and instead of being on the well-marked C2C path, we ended up trapped in a maze of sheep pastures.

Rob had plunged ahead with his compass headings with Peter following close behind trying to find the path with his GPS.

Meanwhile, Therese and Sharon were looking around for a way out; Therese started to climb up onto the top of one of the ancient stone walls and it came tumbling down. She felt terrible, knowing that some of these walls could be many hundreds of years old. She started to try to re-stack the fallen stones, but Sharon convinced her that it was futile.

Finally, we found our way out, and were soon in Shap, one of the larger and somewhat urbanized towns we've been in so far. We thought about having lunch in a pub, but it was Sunday and the pubs seemed to be closed ("Methodists" Rob opined). So, we picked up sandwiches at the English equivalent of 7-11.

We had a bit of difficulty finding the c2c path out of town despite c2c markers here and there and pretty clear directions in the Steadman book. (Don't ask!)

After crossing a bridge over an active railroad line (here being inspected by Rob, a retired Canadian Railroad track inspector).

 ...and a major super-highway; and after walking past a rather large quarry and limestone processing plant...

... we found ourselves back in the countryside in a field full of steers (or at least we hoped that's what these guys were....

And then, suddenly, we were on our first real moors (Crosby Ravensworth Fell).

This solo boulder (a glacial erratic) was in the middle of a vast expanse of moorland without any mountains around from which it could have come. [A glacial erratic is a piece of rock that differs from the size and type of rock native to the area in which it rests. "Erratics" take their name from the Latin word errare, and are carried by glacial ice, often over distances of hundreds of kilometres.]

By consensus (after consulting Rob's compass, Peter's GPS, two different guidebooks, and our own eyes), we struck out on a direct shortcut across the moors to Orton. (Really, we did!)

We made it through the moors without mishap or mis-step...

... into a series of sheep pastures and onto the road into Orton.

We arrived in Orton at 4:30 just in time for some chocolate at the famous Orton Chocolate House. After settling into the Orton Barn House B&B and taking delicious showers, we headed out to dinner at The George Hotel & Pub where we met up with the 4 Brits, which is when they admitted that the walk from Patterdale to Shap had been a brrrutal slog.

Also at dinner at the George (the only pub in town) were many other people we'd been seeing off and on the path ever since Grasmere (Day 5), mostly Australians, but some Americans and Brits as well. Among the Americans were a pair of step-brothers, one who lives in Manhattan, the other in Sitka, Alaska, whom we had met on the trail and chatted with a bit. The guy from Manhattan looked familiar to me and it turned out that his sister-in-law worked for me at Scholastic for 5 years in the late 80s, early 90s!