Day: 034
Date: Monday, 04 July 2022
Start: Horton in Ribblesdale
Finish: Gargrave
Daily Kilometres: 33
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 988
Weather: Cold and very windy with showers in the morning; milder and partly sunny in the afternoon.
Accommodation: Hotel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Cereal
Lunch: Egg mayonnaise sandwich/Chicken mayonnaise sandwich
Dinner: Fish & chips/Chicken nuggets & chips
Aches: Dave - a few niggles. Julie - nothing to report
Highlight: The last 10 kilometres of the day, from Malham to Gargrave, were very pleasant. Easy walking alongside the picturesque River Aire or over rolling green hills in warmer temperatures, less wind and occasional sunshine.
Lowlight: The pub we stayed in last night was a bit quirky (and very pricey). They were originally unwilling to provide us with an early “continental” breakfast, even though they had a sign up saying they would for early starters (the cooked breakfast wasn’t served until after 8:30am, which was later than we want when we have a long day’s hiking ahead). Anyway, in the end they agreed to give us an early breakfast which turned out to be a jug of milk left out overnight on a table with a selection of cereals and that was it.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We left our hotel to start walking at 7:30am after a rather unsatisfactory breakfast (see above). It was a dreary morning with a low overcast and had been raining. We wore our full raingear in anticipation of more rain to come and decided not to follow the Pennine Way over Pen-Y-Ghent peak, which was cloud-covered, and instead take a short-cut. It proved to be a wise decision because the wind was cold and fierce, there were occasional rainshowers, and the peak remained cloud-covered most of the time.
The detour avoided one cloud-covered mountain but not the next, Fountains Fell, which was very bleak on top. We were buffeted by the strong wind, occasionally lashed by rain, and hidden in the cloud at the very top, but things got better as we descended towards Malham Tarn, with good views over the fells and farmland. On the way down we encountered some small groups of high school children, obviously on some kind of expedition, heading up towards the bad weather.
Malham Tarn was a large windswept lake, home to many waterbirds, and obviously a popular tourist destination as we began to see a lot more walkers, many underdressed by our standards. There followed a technical and slow descent via a stony trail through a ravine to the overlook to the spectacular Malham Cove surrounded by vertical limestone cliffs. After a steep descent on a long stairway, we had a look at the Cove from groundlevel and then walked to the very picturesque, but also very touristy, village of Malham. We found a cafe where we bought sandwiches for a late lunch and ate it on a bench outside. A lot of students were wandering around town with clipboards, obviously on some kind of excursion.
From Malham, we had a pleasant walk (see above), mostly downstream along the River Aire, reaching Gargrave around 5:00pm after another good day. The forecasters say the weather is going to improve, and we’re looking forward to that.
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