Vole Explosion

THE MIDWAY POINT

Monday 12^th September 2022

Tan Hill Inn to Middleton-in-Teesdale

Best night’s sleep so far, for all the reasons already stated. My shin is still painful and now very swollen. If anything makes me quit it could well be this.

Breakfast is included and it’s here that I realise just how many other PW walkers there are. With no other food or accommodation options nearby, the Tan Hill Inn is a kind of bottleneck that concentrates all the Wayfarers in one place. Just like the Cambridge Spies, I even discover the identity of our mysterious Fourth Man.

It feels unusual to start the day’s walk downhill rather than climbing up out of a village. Yesterday I, and many others, were warned by a local guy on Great Shunner Fell not to follow the official PW across Sleightholme Moor due to waterlogged conditions, but instead to take the road for a couple of miles and re-join the trail later. In the best horror movie tradition I fail to heed the warnings of the locals and stray out onto the moors anyway. The purist in me would not have allowed it any other way. It is indeed a bit of a quagmire but nothing too impassable. A few pools have to be waded through, but none deep enough to do a full Dawn French.

At some point here I cross from Yorkshire to County Durham.

Some grouse beaters are working their way across a nearby hillside waving flags, followed some minutes later by the sound of the guns.

Further on I catch up with The Tall Guy at a bridge over Frumming Beck. He is with a friend who has joined him for three days of hiking. Concerned about my swollen leg, he gives me a professional examination. I assume he must be a doctor, but it turns out he’s a vet. Fortunately I don’t have to be put down and I’m free to continue walking. It doesn’t hurt so much going uphill, but it does going downhill, with occasional sharp stabs of excruciating pain for no apparent reason. I’m already slow on the climbs and now I can’t even make up time on the descents.

After midday I reach the Bowes Loop, a pointless alternative route intended to allow lightweights to break the day into two with an accommodation stop, but which otherwise adds four miles to the route. I disappoint my inner masochist and choose to go the shorter official route, which at least satisfies my inner purist again. Sometimes it’s hard to keep them both happy.

Meet up with the other two again at 2pm when we eat lunch in a grouse shooters’ hut that is left open for hikers to use. It’s well timed because the morning’s light drizzle has just morphed into fairly heavy rain. The rain stops just before I leave the hut at 2.30pm.

Somewhere near here I pass the halfway point of the PW but I don’t notice it.

The sun has come out now and a Brown Hare is seen sprinting across Hannah Hauxwell’s Meadow.

I meet The Tall Guy and his friend for the final time today about two miles outside Middleton-in-Teesdale. We sit by an honesty box tuck shop in a farm and have cold drinks and snacks before walking the final stretch into town together.

At the campsite we run into The Dutch Guy who is already pitched up and just coming out of the shower. The rest of the site is deserted – no staff and no customers. We have to put £5 through a letterbox for the camping fee. Rather than pitch his tent in the tent field, The Dutch Guy has pitched on a grassy area belonging to one of the many static caravans. He has even unpacked their garden furniture from winter storage and is using it to dry his clothes. I join him there, while the other two pitch in the correct place like actual grown-ups.

In town there are two pubs – one is fully booked and the other isn’t serving food, so The Dutch Guy and I buy stuff from the Co-op and eat it in a park. We then go to The Teesdale Hotel and meet the other two, who have also failed to get food service. We have a bit of a drinking session instead and, yes, I’ll admit it, I had fun. There, I’ve said it now.

The local accent is, all of a sudden, distinctly North-eastern now.

At night a Tawny Owl hoots so close by that for a moment I think it might be inside my tent.

16.5 miles; 26.5 km; 9 hours