Via Road and Railtrack a Shocking Way to Greenhead

Day 14

At breakfast, the next morning, I was the only one sat at the transport café style arrangement of tables in a section of the bar next to the kitchen. The landlady was stood ten feet away, by the cooker, tending a frying pan. She was about to crack an egg into the smoking fat.

‘Is that for me?’ I asked

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t want an egg thanks.’

She looked at me as though nobody had ever said to her they’d not wanted one her fried eggs for breakfast before.

‘There’s no point cooking one for me if I’m not going to eat it.’ I continued

She still looked as though she couldn’t quite believe her ears but at the same time you could tell she could see the logic of it.

‘Shall we go through what you were going to cook and I’ll say whether I want it or not.’ I suggested

She seemed to enjoy this yes and no game but when she’d finished her list hadn’t included fried bread.

‘And fried bread?’ I queried

‘FRIED BREAD!’ She repeated as if I’d asked for “More” in the workhouse. ‘I sometimes get fifteen in here, I can’t do fried bread for everyone.’

She looked around the room as if imagining fifteen burly bikers gobbling down loaves and loaves of fried bread but the reality of fourteen empty places won the day.

‘Ok I’ll do you some fried bread.’ She sighed.

When I’d walked in I hadn’t seen the usual display of cereals that you get in every bed and breakfast in Britain, bar one.

‘Have you any cereals?’ I asked, thinking she must have forgotten to put them out.

‘Oh! You want some cereal?’

‘Yes please.’

So she brought me some. She didn’t bring out a selection of boxes or containers or even ask me what I preferred, she brought me a bowl of cereal with milk already added. I’d never had it before, in fact I didn’t even recognise it and still can’t identify it, never knowingly having seen a packet of it in any supermarket I’ve been to. It was a cream coloured flaky sort of thing with a polystyrene half-raspberry type fruit in it. Whatever it was it wasn’t too bad. If it had a taste at all it might have been described as beige.

Over breakfast we had a bit of a chinwag. She wasn’t unfriendly, her manner was just a bit abrupt, my wife being Chinese I’d met quite a few like her. She was from Bejing and was impressed that my wife was from Singapore.

‘Ah, they’re all rich in Singapore.’ She said wistfully. It’s true, but my wife married an Englishman.

All in all I wouldn’t say to anyone don’t stay there. The rooms have everything you need, including tv and radio alarms, though you have to have the tv on full volume to hear it. It’s centrally located, handy for the Co-op, and above all it’s cheap. But get a room on the second floor, if you can; that’s the third floor for American readers.

The town begging bowl, Alston

I booked a room at the pub in Greenhead then it was back to the Co-op for provisions. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be two or three days to Bellingham. Once I’d got over the hurdle of Cross Fell I seemed to assume I was going to make it. There was no other problem as far as the walking was concerned, apart from the idea of the last 26 mile day but I didn’t have to think about that before reaching Byrness and I couldn’t believe I’d bail out on the last day after covering so many miles. One thing I had chickened out on though was attempting the Cheviots with a 1:50,000 map with the last bit missing and knew I’d only be able to get the proper size in Alston or Bellingham. It turned out that I’d have to keep my fingers crossed until Bellingham, it was the only one everywhere I went to in Alston didn’t have. They probably had a rack full of them in the outdoor shop but I gave up waiting for it to open at 10.15 thinking I’d better get myself moving for the day.

It was back down to the bottom of the town, past the gypsy caravans. A few of them were huddled in a meeting as I went by, complaining about something. I think it was the amount of litter that was blowing into their camp from the town. The Pennine Way was still where I’d left it last night so I continued along it, over the bridge then through fields on the other side of the river. A short distance from town I went through one gate and came across a burly gypsy lad with a fine looking grey mare loose in the field chomping away hungrily. The youth was friendly but had a shifty look in his eye as though I’d caught him stealing the grass. I didn’t ask him to put it back I just made a little joke about the possibility of borrowing his horse for the day to which he smiled politely. Actually, there is no way I could have borrowed his horse, I can’t ride and am allergic to horses. The last time one sat on my lap it made me quite poorly.

After a fairly short distance the Pennine Way crosses a main road. It re-crosses it just over a mile further on so the temptation is to trot along the road, short-cutting the three other sides of the oblong. I resisted this temptation and continued on up and over the fields but I wish I hadn’t. I felt that the whole side trip was a pointless exercise in tramping up and down not very interesting farmland just for the sake of it, when I could have been getting somewhere by using what must be one the quietest A roads in England. I don’t much like walking along roads but the only reason I can see of not using a mile of this one is if your walking day is the short distance between Garrigill and Slaggyford and therefore need a bit extra to use up the time. I was really quite annoyed about it, mainly because I’d wasted too much time fruitlessly waiting for the outdoor shop to open. I’d also started using the 1:50,000 map and was not enjoying the lack of detail I’d got so used to with the explorer maps. Everywhere seemed to take me twice as long to get there

I cheered up a bit when the path re-crossed the road as the fields on that side were much more pleasant to walk through, until an odd little incident threw me off my mood for a while.

I was nearing Lintley Farm which is perched on a hillock on the other side of the disused railway line, reached by a farm road under a bridge. There was a small lorry parked on the road with the driver leaning over the fence by the side of it, looking at me. I could see something white on one of the fence posts which from a distance looked like a white acorn PW sign so I headed in that direction even though it didn’t seem quite right, I felt sure the path was nearer the rail line. As I approached the driver called out

‘Are you the farmer?’

I suppose there may possibly be a farmer somewhere that goes about his business wearing walking gear but I bet there isn’t one with a trekking pole and rucksack.

‘Only there’s a lamb trapped under the cattle grid.’ He enticed me to have a look and sure enough there was a teenage sized lamb looking plaintively up from the deeper than normal space under the rather oddly shaped grid.

‘It’ll belong to that farm’ I said pointing to the top of the hill. ‘Why don’t you drive up and tell them.’ But he was already getting into his cab to drive away.

‘I left a note’ he pointed to the white piece of paper wedged into a crack in the wooden post, the bit of white I’d mistaken for a sign, and off he went. Now he’d told me he’d passed on all the responsibility he’d felt for doing something as well. I was now “it” and he’d run off to the other side of the playground. The bastard!

I didn’t want to spend time or energy climbing up to the farmhouse and tried to go on my way but after a few yards, imagining the farmer driving back and forth over the grid, missing the note, which had blown to the floor while the lamb slowly died of thirst and hunger below I had to turn back. I cursed the lorry driver all the way up to the line of boots at the back door of the farmhouse. There was obviously someone in but the owners of these several pairs of boots were either deaf to or chose to ignore my banging for some time. Eventually, I resorted to writing a note and sure enough, as soon as I’d finished the farmer came to the door. Apparently it was quite a regular occurrence. Perhaps he ought to revert to the traditional linear style of cattle grid instead of experimenting with fancy designs.

At Slaggyford I joined the cycle track, converted from the old rail line. At Burnstones I diverted the quarter of mile to the pub at Knarsdale. It was another very warm day and I had a thirst for a J2O and I also wanted to make sure the track continued all the way to Lambley. I’m not too keen on railway line cycle tracks. They are extremely dull to walk along, though this one was brightened by a few wood sculptures, but you can cover the ground much more quickly and I needed to, it was already two o’ clock and I’d only done a third of the distance to Greenhead. The landlord kindly gave me the advice of leaving the track by a road before going all the way into Lambley village, which saved me some time when I got there. Going this way had the added advantage of not now needing to think of a witty line, all of which will have been done before, about the Maiden Way, which I missed.

It'll be great when it's finished

After Lambley it was fields from then on, and big fields they are too in this part of the world. I stopped for a picnic at Hartley Burn and then got electrocuted at Batey Shield. I’d again been led astray by a white marker which I thought might have been the acorn sign. Coming back out of a field I shouldn’t have been in I touched an electric fence. The jolt didn’t hurt but I automatically shouted OUCH! and I’m sure I heard a laugh from an open window in the nearby farmhouse.

Lambley station (disused)

Soon afterwards I came across the bus in the garden, which I’d seen photos of in several other accounts on the net then you venture into a field which is bigger than some countries. This is Hartleyburn Common and another place where the path disappears. I’d probably have had no problem with the larger scale map but the 1:50,000 doesn’t have field boundaries on it so I wasn’t sure where to turn right. I ended up following sheep tracks for a while until the binoculars managed to find the stile for the way out. If it had been wet and foggy I might well have spent the night wandering around in circles.

After an unpleasant but short walk down the side of the busy, dirty, smelly and very loud A69 I reached the pub at Greenhead about seven thirty. The bar was pretty busy with England on the telly again as they still had a couple more hours of kicking the ball around before being told to go home. The twin room I was allocated was pleasant enough, the bathroom was excellent, but there was no tv or radio in the room and the only bin was the one in the bathroom usually reserved for “women’s things”. There were a few other niggling complaints with the room as well and it made me think, not for the first time this trip, that if the owners themselves stayed a night in the rooms they let out they might make them a lot more comfortable. A couple of vacant double rooms were left with their doors open, they were much bigger and had a telly. I’m certain I was the only guest and checking in at 7.30 it was unlikely they’d have a sudden influx but they had the all too common mentality of rather than give a single person the best room available they’d shove him in the worst room they had.

Despite this the woman was very friendly though the landlord was a bit odd. He fancied himself as a ‘Mine genial host’ but it didn’t come across quite right. While I was waiting in the bar to be called through to the restaurant, where it was non smoking, he was wandering from table to table allowing his customers the pleasure of his banter. There was the female half of an American family sat at the next table to me: little girl, her mother and granny. When he let them speak they told him that they were doing the Hadrian’s Wall Walk and grandma was 67 next birthday.

‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ he said. ‘We had a women in last week who was 75 and she was walking the whole of the Pennine Way, and that’s over three hundred miles long.’

I bet that was just what they wanted to hear. They probably called off the whole trip the following morning, as a waste of time, and went home. The nerve of them, coming over here then only walking Hadrian’s Wall!

I thought the meal ok but a soupcon pretentious and when I went to pay the landlord asked me to also settle up for the room that night rather than in the morning. He obviously was not a gentleman and totally ruined my plan for running off without paying after breakfast.

Back in my room I listened to the trains rattling the floorboards as they trundled past my window (there weren’t enough of them to be particularly disturbing) and dug into my medicine chest for the deep heat. My legs were still o.k. my feet were only having a general moan now but the backs of my heels had found a voice of their own, so I applied a good dollop. So that was me trapped for the night. You don’t get anywhere on the dance floor smelling of that stuff.