Villages and Moors plus Nottingham

                                                

                                                                 

We then drove out to Sinnington to start our walking in the villages and on the moors. Dinner on the first night was superb for a little ex-coach inn (The Fox and Hounds) in the country, so we grabbed a bottle of St Emilion wine which added another dimension - we stayed in St Emilion last time we were in Europe and it’s nice to revisit it this way. Both agreed it will be a lesser meal tonight. Breakfast is great for 18 km walks, egg, tomato, bacon, mushrooms, sausage, fried bread and black pudding and that’s after  the cereal and yoghurt.

Lunch on the walk was a bit lighter, a shared ploughman’s platter with local Yorkshire cheese and produce, all washed down by a pint of bitter for me and half a pint of San Miguel for Ann.

 

The walk took us through woods of ash, elm, oak and beech, and lanes lined with hawthorn and elder, all heavy in autumn berry. In fact the berries were a real feature of the walks, not much holly in berry yet, but plenty of other sorts. Ann was sorely tempted to try a blackberry.

 

  We walked initially along the River Seven, and then through fields of harvested wheat and barley, very picturesque villages and up onto Spaunton Moor.

The scenery is lovely, some wildlife, heaps of pheasants, squirrels and some unfamiliar-looking breeds of sheep.

The villages of Lastingham, Appleton Le Moors and Hutton Le Hole are all very quaint and, they tell us, quintessentially English. They say that the church should be on one side of the road and the pub on the other, so to gather all the people! We survived the first day's 18 km pretty well, no niggles at all.

                                                                

A new approach to dinner tonight, a shared entrée, a main each then a shared dessert. Still too much food, but the slow-roasted venison was superb, very ‘melt in the mouth’.

The walk for today was a bit shorter, 15km but we added another 3km to look at the remnants of Rome’s northernmost outpost in the UK. They did manage to control the local natives, the brigantes, but the Picts and the Scots were never beaten into submission. The independence vote is I guess a bit of that old spirit still prevailing. However it staggers me that the vote polling is so close when there will be some tough times for Scotland if it goes ahead. The ‘yes’ vote people don’t seem to pay much heed to things like currency (if they have sterling, an independent Scotland will have no influence or control on it, they can’t have the Euro without joining the EU and that is unlikely to be achievable). The vote is not far away so we’ll see what happens soon. After a few days of listening to the reporting and interviews on this, it's apparent that the main protagonists for the independence vote are the socialists who want a local socialist state, and no more Tory government in Westminster that "we didn't vote for". Shades of MMP, from the view point that whatever happens, it will have been achieved by a very small minority of the populace. Current polling 51% no, 49% yes they say. I think they've even given 16 year olds the vote which is interesting. The chief ‘Yes’ for independence man is on record for congratulating Putin on restoring Russian pride; you’d hope that was before MH 17 happened! Walking obviously gives too much thinking time!

 

We stopped for a chat with one of the local farmers as we walked around his home and feedlot area. He farms 600 bulls and steers, plus 600 acres mostly planted in crops. The bulls were mainly Friesian, killed at between 16 and 18 months at a hooks weight of 330 kg. Interestingly the hind quarters went to Marks and Spencer and Sainsburys and the front quarters to McDonalds. He wasn’t really seen as a local, having lived on the farm for 45 years, it’s a long apprenticeship in these parts.

Nice to see brown trout in some of the streams, but none downstream of a paddock that had about 20 resident 700kg bulls with full access to the waterway. Seems a good enough reason to fence off waterways.

 

More woods today, more villages, Roman ruins, more crops, pheasant farms and a very good ramble. We were provided a packed lunch today which was quite adequate.

We arrived at our digs in Pickering, The Old Manse, at around three and went for a town walk to check out the train timetable for tomorrow’s walk.

Our luggage arrived having been driven across as part of the trip, InnTravel provide a taxi voucher to get us back to Sinnington to get our car on Monday morning. As we’d left some of our stuff there I modified the itinerary and taxied back tonight to pick the car up, mainly to access the laptop. We weren’t expecting WiFi in the Old Manse, but, as it’s here I can blog again.

Tomorrow is a 25 km walk with lots of ups and downs. We train out to Goathland and then walk back. The train was supposed to be a steam train but they are having a weekend diesel celebration on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway; it will be a fun trip anyway. We were sure that a 25 km walk tomorrow could justify a three course meal tonight. No, we have to admit that we were again defeated by the meal. Yorkshire servings are huge, as we are slowly learning.

 

We set off on the NYMR at about 9.30 on a one way trip to Goathland, about 45 minutes ride away. The station master was very proud of his role and quite the gramarian: " Indeed you can take my photo, but Yes, you may take it!"  Weather was cloudy and the 40% chance of rain didn’t excite us. Fortunately the forecast was wrong and we had a cloudy but very pleasant walking day, temperature around 17 degrees. We walked up onto the moor and ambled south with views across to Whitby, but with one sector of the skyline dominated by the Early Warning radar set up at Fylingdales RAF base, pointing at the Russians I guess. The village at Goathland was home to the Heartbeat TV series (don’t ask me!) and also the station was the Hogwarts station in some of the Harry Potter films. We did spot a car that was obviously a prop for Heartbeat.

 

                                                               

Lots of purple heather across the moor, and a few grazing sheep around the edges. Ground conditions were dry, which we were thankful for, today's walk would have been decidedly unpleasant in the wet, or after a wet spell.

 

After an hour or so we descended down through plantation forest on a very steep escarpment. That took us down to Newtondale Halt on the rail line, and put the first 8 km behind us.

 

A steep climb up to the next moor and then a walk around the rim of The Hole of Horcum, which is a big valley eroded out of the moor, quite a striking feature. The other view on its formation is that a local giant named Wade, scooped up the soil to throw at his wife during an argument. His throw missed her and the earth he threw now forms a hill to the east called Blakey Topping. I’m going with the giant.

                                                                   

The moors are quite lovely, but you could easily form the view that it is a fairly godforsaken, windswept and barren sort of place, because it is. Despite this there are signs of human habitation from both Bronze Age and Iron Age. People lived up there and farmed, living in small fortified family sized clusters, and with defined farming areas. There has to be better and easier places to farm.

The next village was Levisham, again on the rail line but we did another sequence of down dale and then uphill and then across some farmed areas. Some properties look quite subsistence and run down and others have a good prosperous air, and mountains of bailed crop residue and silage, with all the associated machinery. There were pheasants everywhere feasting on remnant harvest.

 

We completed the walk around 5.00 pm and then freshened up and walked back into town for a well-deserved pint (and a half).

We’ve walked 61 km in the three days, and are very pleased to have done it. It’s given us a really good feel for the area and its history.

The drive down to Nottingham was successfully orchestrated by TomTom,;we came past the Newark Power station, one of the largest coal-fired stations in the world. It was rather hazy on the way down but I think there is more involved in that than one little power station. Arrived in the city centre, with very good instructions from mine host on parking, and we were all installed by 4 30 pm.  Our apartment was  on the top floor of a corner triangular building - with no lift!

              

We had a good amble around the city centre and then had a quiet evening in our apartment, with a home cooked meal and NZ size portions. We are doing our own thing here for meals so breakfast of cereal and fruit, lunch a bread roll and pate, and a steak and salad for tea have done us very well. Yorkshire portions are a thing of the past, thank goodness. We are appreciating things like a fridge and a washing machine!

On the way into the city we’d had a couple of mares trying to locate the Winfield addresses, but we regrouped on that on the first night. Google Maps is vastly superior to Tom Tom in locating addresses and points of interest. I’m surprised but it’s a fact. My IPhone with Google Maps locates more stuff. Corporations Oaks is now a walkway which my IPhone could find but Tom Tom could not. So that all sorted tonight we set sail in the VW at peak traffic, I might add, in search of Ann's great grandparents. We initially met with no success as Ben Winfield’s address has been subsumed in new development. However after a few circuits, we located an address for Elizabeth Beardsley, Ann’s great grandmother, at 2 Corporation Oaks.  The Corporation Oaks address is very flash, a neighbour told us the lace barons lived here. Good to have had another hit on the Heritage Tour.

 

We then drove back across the city to St Mary’s Wollaton, where Ben Winfield married Elizabeth Beardsley in 26 September, 1876! Ann felt quite emotional about the finds and I can relate to that after the Sundsvall experience.

Earlier in the day we had done a self-guided city walk, which touched on some of the local history and celebrities. D H Lawrence ("Lady Chatterley’s Lover", you won’t have read it), Graeme Greene  (who worked for the Nottingham Journal), Brian Clough, William Booth, Torvill and Dean, JM Barrie, and Agatha Christie's "The Mouse Trap" started right here.

 

This afternoon we visited Nottingham Castle, which really isn’t. It is the remnant of a pretty flash house on the site of the Castle, and some of the old walls. The displays on Robin Hood, the history of Nottingham, and WWI were very very good. Nottingham has a bit of a rioting history. The populace here have rioted in the streets many times, bread price riots, cheese price riots, food price riots, and the "He didn't vote for Election Reform riot". This was when the locals burnt down the mansion built by William Cavendish, the First Duke of Newcastle because the Duke's son did not vote for reform in electoral rules in the Commons. In 1831 to qualify to vote you had to own land worth at least 20 pounds. The reform was to give more men the vote, women voting was still along way off!  The war displays give quite a different perspective to the one we get in NZ, or are brought up with. Gallipoli here has a totally different slant, Anzac Cove doesn't feature at all.

 

We then were obliged to visit the oldest pub in Nottingham (for a pint and a half), with a Kiwi barman from Tauranga, and the bar dug into the sandstone under the castle.

We arrived in Nottingham with no plans, no expectations, and have had a lovely couple of days staying in the Lacemarket centre. The Lacemarket warehouse area has impressive brick buildings. The buildings were designed to have maximum frontage to impress buyers! Joseph Beardsley (Ann's great great grandfather Beardsley) and his family were lacemakers.) 

 

 

We’ve been impressed by the very friendly people, and just how much there is to do here. The Robin Hood stuff is very entertaining, but it was also really good to have caught their WWI displays (Zeppelins dropped bombs here) at the castle, and also at St Mary’s church just down the road from our digs.  Today we're taking a trip down to Abergavenny, and yes, hoping the weather is fine.