Just Esk and we'll follow

All three of us are venturing out again on the Coast to Coast meets Walking with Uncles odyssey and it's the penultimate day of our 17. As we pass the Church of the English Martyrs, Paddy remarks, 'I'm now beginning to regard myself as one of them.' Of course, he's not, he's doing really well, particularly with the muesli and fresh fruit regime I've got him on every morning. Just look at the muscles coming on in those legs.

Our route today follows the Esk and it's a lush and leafy contrast to the moorland of the past few days. We follow a centuries-old 'paved pannier' trail, created specifically for packhorses and their muleteers. The stones are worn down with hundreds of years of tramping.

It brings us out at Egton Bridge, the village the Reformation missed, and the birthplace of the Blessed Nicholas Postgate. He was a 17th century Catholic priest who carried on Masses and religious rites in secret, on the moors, and who was eventually betrayed and executed, aged 82. There are relics in the church here and this wonderful window, too.

The route takes in lots of points of social and historical interest, from an old Toll House by the Esk, to this donkey sanctuary with a donation box on the gate. 'If my friend Hilary were here she'd put a fiver in that box,' I say.

In Grosmont we find steam trains, a toytown-style station and trainspotters galore. We have a momentary lapse in the world of simple sedentary pleasures at the Old School cafe – lemon drizzle cake, lattes and views of the North York Moors Railway's steam trains chugging by.

It's just as well, for the next leg is the Coast to Coast's 'ultimate' hill (yesterday we had its penultimate), and it's a tough trek up an endless 33 degree tarmac road. I pass the time by checking emails on my phone.

Then it's over the final moor for me and the Bog Cotton Boys, along a busy road with views of Whitby Abbey (just above the car in the picture below) and we arrive in Littlebeck, typical of the villages in the valleys here. 

But no pub, sadly, so we say cheerio to Hauke and head back to Whitby. I think it'll be an Italian tonight. We need plenty of ballast for the final day.  

Stoned with Betty and Ralph

Uncles and niece all together again today – Mick having rested his wounded limbs – and here we are leaving our hostel (no, really).

We start off at the Lion Inn this morning and we're back to our gang of four, as Hauke appears out of the pub enthusing over the fabulous food he'd eaten there the night before and the 15th century bedrooms. We're feeling none too chipper after our evening of sloppy hostel cooking and a night of seven-in-a-room sleeping. 

This route is waymarked by stone crosses that may date back as far as the 11th century when Christianity first became widespread. They all have names. This one's called Fat Betty and you're supposed to leave a sweet, and take one. Nothing on offer looks particularly appetising and all I have is a Malteser, but I leave it anyway.

This is one of the rare ones that still has a cross on top. It's called Ralph.

We arrive at an isolated hut, Trough House it's called on the map, with a stone bench on one side and guess what time it is… 11am. So coffee and biscuits are taken to the sound of hammering inside. Closer investigation reveals a couple zhushing up the interior with ceiling drapes, so that the Scarborough landowner's grouse shooting guests don't have to look at anything so uncouth as a bare barn roof. We should have known from the preponderance of grouse butts. 'Could be worse places to be,' says the man on the job. 'Looking out on t'moor on a sunny day.'

It's six miles to the end of this section along the old Whitby Road that runs along the top of the Rigg (ridge) above Glaisdale and Fryup valleys (yes, I kid you not, though the name probably has more to do with friars than a full English).
'You know, if you'd said a few weeks ago that I had to walk another six miles, it would have seemed impossible,' declares Paddy. 'Now I think, is that all?'
As Mick and I are succumbing to aches and pains (my bunions are giving my gyp and I can't walk without a pad, or a knee bandage) Paddy is getting stronger and fitter. We've told him that when he gets home he has a window of opportunity to continue the good work – 'more of a yawning abyss,' he said the other day, but now it actually looks achievable. On the bright side for me, my farmer's tan is coming along nicely.

Back in Whitby we descend from the Abbey's lofty heights to the town centre and manage to find refuge from the teeming masses in a brilliant little Costa Rican restaurant. After a quick glance over the wall at floodlit Whitby Abbey on the way back...
...we're all tucked up by 9.30pm, as per usual. Don't know how I'm going to cope with re-entry.

The rail thing

So we leave the mill hostel in Osmotherley and head over to where we left off yesterday. 

It's just me and Pad today. Mick is resting his leg, which took a beating yesterday, not to mention the rest of his body. We have to drop my car off at the end and it's a tortuous journey, along tiny country lanes with completely inadequate signposting. With two passengers certain about their own navigational skills, poor Paddy in the driving seat is caught between a rock and a hard place. We don't set off until 10.30am and first up is a steep climb to the top of a hill. Pad does well, and we get to the top in half an hour, where Hauke is dawdling about taking notes and pictures and sort of waiting for us. 

I'd find it tough, doing all these walks alone, as Hauke does, chatting to people briefly, who then move on because you've stopped to take notes or coordinates. Whereas we always seem to be glad of a little rest, or elevenses, and so our paces dovetail perfectly. As does our humour. Pad decides to put away his poles, because, 'I won't be needing them any more.' 'Do you want to jog on, then?' teases Hauke.

We come to a stone with a carved message underneath a pointing hand. Pad thinks it's something to do with Jesus. 'No, you've got a one-track mind,' says Hauke. 'It means this way to....' Hard to believe he's not Irish.

There's another stone with a carved face. I can't resist mimicking the expression but I don't quite pull it off.

Pad has brought along The Medieval Messenger, a book he found on one of his abbey visits. We all get the giggles as he reads aloud the lonely hearts ads. 

And so it goes, we join a track created from a disused railway that originally transported iron from these moors to Teeside. We spend an hour talking about etymology, including derivations of the word cleft and their various meanings – cleave, cloven etc. Later Pad muses, 'I wonder why a clove is called a clove.' 'Let it go,' says Hauke.

We find another idyllic lunch spot, though we've been warned of adders and ticks around these parts. But the only animals we see are the ubiquitous sheep, up here sounding quite strangulated with their baahs, and happy grouse who have escaped murder on the moors (dozens of grouse butts up here). Their cry reminds me of a child's wind-up toy. Or an Aussie saying G'day G'day G'day.

There are more beautiful windows onto the lush valleys below, but this time we're deeper into the moor so the belt of purple heather is that much thicker.

These boxes of pellets have us wondering. If one side is normal food, what do [the sheep] get on the other? The day's special, perhaps, or cake when it's their birthday? 

At one point we meet a large group of students with a couple of older leaders. Duke of Edinburgh goings on, I reckon. There's one boy and girl dawdling at the back, holding hands. A D-of-E romance.

After walking miles along the railway track the end, the Lion Inn, is finally in sight. 

Time for one last photo of Pad looking like David Attenborough ready to take on his next gorilla.

We drive to Whitby and can't believe our eyes when we get to the hostel. It's right next to Whitby Abbey. In fact, the hostel building was originally the Abbey guesthouse. My room is top left, sharing with a couple of Spanish girls and a mum and her young daughters. 

View from the room over Whitby. 

We do a whistlestop tour (free to hostel residents)...

...then have drinks by the hostel's conservatory with the Abbey in the background. The hostel's perimeter wall has bits of Abbey wedged in between the stones. This is the life.

Injury time

Wake up to blue skies and sunshine. I don't mind my 6.45am alarm one bit. Paddy is going to spend the day visiting Rieveaulx Abbey, completing his tour of the Sistercian jewels of the north. Mick has double strapped the knee he wrenched in the bog-hole last week and we've arranged to meet Hauke at our elevenses stop. We will miss Pad's whimsical musings on the walk, but he is fired up with the wealth of abbeys and priories around here. Last night he was telling Hauke all about the monastic murder mystery he's written and I've been suddenly fascinated in finding out about the history and habits of these religious houses. Hauke, too, had his area of special interest, which emerged when we got on to 18th century weaponry, as you do.
Anyway, back to today's walk, we quickly arrive on the Cleveland Way, another long-distance walk the Coast to Coast follows all day, much of it paved with gigantic flagstones. Good for the environment but hard on our joints.
The walk weaves over hills and through dappled woods where we encounter horses and dog walkers. It's certainly dog-friendly country. A sign outside a pub the other night said, 'Muddy boots and dogs welcome.' It was like Crufts inside.

All too soon we make a start on the roller coaster of the five hills we have to climb and descend (we've done 750m up and 650m down by the end of the day). The views are out of this world all the way. It's not quite clear enough to see the sea from the lunch spot we share with a couple of Coast to Coasters, but we can make out Middlesbrough – not sure that compensates.



It's like travelling along a high-level skywalk, or being in a plane looking down at the chequered fields and tiny houses. The climbs up and down are like being on a stone-cobbled Stairmaster. We have poles and boy do we need them. Boot removal during extended stops has become de rigueur.



The final hill is called the Wain Stones. Mick is suffering with his knee – he's not his usual cheery self – and I think he just wants to get it over with, so he ploughs on, as Hauke and I take photos of climbers on the rocks, which are one of the few climbing areas in the North Yorks Moors.



We get to the top and Mick's nowhere to be seen. I ask a few people if they've seen him, describe him, and people say 'no', then 'oh yes', and 'I think so' so we're not quite sure. But we arrive at the last descent and can't see him at the bottom, finally meet Paddy who's waiting with the car and he says he hasn't seen him either. Oh crikey. I'm trying to call him and Hauke is all set to walk back to look for him when we see him coming down the steps, hand dripping with blood. Apparently he'd taken the wrong turning at the Wain Stones and fallen off a rock into some bracken. He was lying there, quite happy, he says, because he was tired and it was so comfortable. He shouted 'Cate' a couple of times up at people on the cliff above but no one heard him. Eventually he thought he'd better try to get up, which he did, but then gashed his hand negotiating a barbed wire fence. It's not as bad as it looks in the end, but I get the chance to play nurse, and at last justify the purchase of those antiseptic wound wipes and sterile dressings. Woohoo!
Mick is much revived in the local pub over a pint of Bomber. And we all raise our glasses to a happy ending.

Mud brothers... again

Assembling at Danby Wiske we've got Hauke again for this section. We bumped into him outside the church at Bolton-on-Swale yesterday picking up the car and his face, when he recognised us, was a picture of surprise. 
It's another flat one so all three of us are present and correct, though Paddy is dreaming of his next rest day, and scoping out local priories to visit while Mick and I are trudging the hills. He's really got the abbey habit.

It's a muddy one today, the kind of mud that builds up under your boots until you're a foot taller, slithering around on earth-laden platform soles.

Almost as symbolic, for me, as crossing the M6 or A1, is this crossing of the East Coast train line, a journey I've made hundreds of times since I moved to London almost 30 years ago. We just missed a train, though.

We have elevenses round the back of a farm, though we don't need to buy their juice or flapjacks as we have our own mid-morning refreshments, in the shape of coffee and Tunnocks.

We meet David and Jo, a young couple doing the Coast to Coast in two weeks, camping mainly. I take advantage of the stop to put a plaster on my toe. My boot has been rubbing and I want to avoid it developing into a full-blown blister. Immediately I'm offered all kinds of plasters. It's the one thing people on this journey have plenty of. 

There's marginally more of interest on this third of the very boring sections and we go through a farm where the owners clearly have a great sense of humour. A plastic rat is nailed to the top of the style in the farmyard, and this skull graces one of the fenceposts.

We have to cross a railway line on foot, thankfully it's not as busy as the East Coast line. I even offered to pose for a photo lying across the tracks, but thought better of it once I was down there. I'd quite like to hang onto my feet, just until Robin Hood's Bay, anyway.

There's also the busy A19 to cross, with me screaming at Mick, as he's standing right in the middle of a slip road with a car coming straight towards him at 60mph. So the mad men crossed first and this is my view from the central reservation.
We finish very early, before two, so drive over to Mount Grace Priory, a 13th century Carthusian monastery that boasts a reconstruction of a monk's cell. Pad's quite envious when he sees the space and luxury these monks enjoyed, from plumbed-in loos to their own herb gardens.
Later Hauke joins us for a dinner fit for kings – if not Carthusian monks, who had their vittals pushed through holes in the wall – at the Golden Lion.