This is from the very well-managed Bolton Abbey estate in Yorkshire, home of nice cafes, woodland walks, long-distance moorland paths, and of course the Abbey ruins themselves. I set off finally on Thursday 12th, and went via Derbyshire - quick visit home and to see Annie and Martin to make a plan for meeting up in Harris: who knows when we'll next have a signal?)
I camped first of all at a luxurious site run by the Caravan Club called Strid Wood. By luxury I mean quiet, numbered pitches, water, free hot showers, dog walk on site, shop...
This is the Strid itself - quite placid at the moment but it can turn into a roaring torrent in wet weather.
We went for some long walks over the tops, as well as along the waterside. I soon found that I have become much too much of a townie: what was I thinking, going out in trainers?
We did some quite long walks - and I had quite a few 'glad to be alive' moments, particularly when the sun came out and we were in open country. I've been to Bolton Abbey before, but don't know where my head was because I don't remember it being as lovely as this.
The site was really quiet, and ducks and bunnies camped on our front lawn in the mornings. Bon was delighted to come out in the morning to find a rabbit, but luckily I saw it before she did and grabbed her collar. Otherwise it would have been more than Markies for breakfast. I didn't manage to catch the rabbit, but I did get a visiting family of chickens. They hatched the day before. The campsite man said they were wild, and last time she had a brood he'd had to run round the site catching six cockerels because they were keeping the campers awake.
There are, obviously, a lot of animals on these walks. One of the cows looked particularly odd. As I got closer to it, it revealed itself to be an alpaca. Note that it isn't a llama - llamas have longer necks, a slimmer body, and an altogether more supercilious expression. This one merely looks quizzical.
I will leave you to enjoy the views, while I celebrate quietly that in order to achieve this post I have managed to get the glorious combination of a charged laptop battery and a signal. I have no electricity where I am at the moment - but I will leave you to wonder where that is while I catch up with my posts!
Also on this leg of the trip - had a leaky tap, boringly and lengthily sorted out via the insurance company, the camp site office, the motor home dealer...the whole tap needed to be replaced, which I only found out thanks to the rather wonderful Steve Mann of Ilkley, who is a caravan engineer. He had me sorted and back on the road in no time, but I had to wait another day or so - and move to a different campsite - for a new tap to arrive. It's called a 'Reich Mixer' I wonder what kind of party that must have been.
Oh, and here's Bon, sporting not only a new waterproof coat but a new personality. She now pulls, eats sheep poo, and runs away. It's actually a reversion to a previous personality, a lifestyle that she had until we moved to London. The serene, initiative-of-a-potato pooch turns into a keen hunter of Other Creatures, including sheep. She got a real telling-off from some curlews on one of the walks. Not that she'd done anything wrong, but they are ground-nesting. They were saying 'It's a PERSON near our NEST! With a PREDATOR on a piece of STRING!'
Came across something rather marvellous on one of the Bolton Abbey walks - every time there was a fallen tree, it was studded full of bent coins Mostly 2ps, so it must have happened since 1971. It looked like a sort of sculpture made out of wishes.
For my next trick, I am heading to Scotland via Moffat...of which more later...love to all.
No comments:
Post a Comment