Thursday, May 30, 2013

Day 6: Gilsland to Steel Rigg (nominally) (9 miles, 8.5 hours, including stop at Roman Army Museum)

[Note: photo organizing, and perhaps text revisions, to come]

Cold and grey and windy again today. Mostly climbing up through sheep pastures, often quite steep, with a whipping wind in our faces. Didn't need many signposts today, as the line of the Wall has become much more evident--sometimes one or more of the ditches is visible, sometimes the Wall itself--sometimes disguised as a jumble of moss-covered stones, sometimes as a lumpy earthen dike, sometimes massive and squared and imposing, even in its time-shortened height (the eastern section was reportedly 16-20 feet high in Roman times). Today we should have reached the highest point of the Wall along the Winshield Crags (345 meters/1132 feet), but Pop had had it with climbing up and down the crags before we got to the top. It looked on the map like there was a more-or-less parallel path that might avoid the rocks and heights, so I suggested he go that way while I continue up along the crags and the Wall. After my first really steep climb I decided I was worried about him and headed south a bit to see if I could see how he was managing--I didn't see him, so I phoned him (5 bars even though no cell towers or houses in sight). He had run into a mire, had had to back track up the hillside. and then had run into a chest-high stone wall with barbed wire. He could see the road, about half a mile in the distance, and thought he'd walk down to it and along it to the crossroads I was to come down. I could see the road too, and our hiking instructions warned that it was a busy and high speed road, so I wasn't too comfortable with him walking all that distance alone with me up on the crags and unable to help if he had a problem, so I followed the stonewall down until I located him, and we squished the rest of the way down the lee of the crag through thick marsh grasses and cow-churned mud. Of course there was no stile over the stone and barbed wire to get out of the field and onto the road, but there was a gate (with a frozen latch) leading into the next field. So we climbed over the gate and along the next field until we found a gate onto the highway--no shoulder, just a lumpy verge and steep, marshy ditch dotted with nettle patches. The cars whizzed by, but none hit us, and we arrived at the next B&B intact. No fierce guinea pig here, but four hens guarding the doormat.

Quite close to our B&B there is a camping barn. As we walked past, an ice cream truck whizzed past and turned up the camping barn's driveway, playing music not much different from our neighborhood ice cream truck at home. Maybe 50 degrees; grey and windy and verging on foggy; the camp ground held one van and one adult with parka and hood wrestling with a billowing lime green tent. Not the best of ice cream weather nor the most promising of marketing opportunities. Perhaps the barn itself was full of ravenous young campers with change in their pockets, but none were immediately evident.











































































Dinner at the pub down the road--a very attractive and busy place with pretty good food and music to start a bit later in the evening. It was getting pretty crowded, so we shared a table with a family from south of London--the parents originally from Moscow plus their British-born teenage son. They had lived a number of years in Salt Lake City as well,and have hiked in many of the areas of Britain and Wales we are planning to visit, so we exchanged travel notes.

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