How ungrateful am I! Last time I was in Horton it was drizzling and a bit misty, and I thought I'd quite like a bit more sunshine. Here I was again, the sun was beating down from a cloudless sky, and I was wishing for a bit more coolth. There was a breeze, which stopped it becoming unbearable, but I was unused to heat after our chilly spring, and the combination of that and week's worth of stuff in my backpack was to prove challenging throughout the day.
Never mind, onward and upward, following the Pennine Way up to a contour high in the Ribble valley, which it mercifully followed, more or less, for a mile or so. I had a choice to make: to keep on the Pennine Way, eventually climbing to a junction with the Dales Way at Cam End, or branch off on to the Ribble Way, which appeared to do more contouring along Ribblesdale. I chose the latter option, and I think I chose wrongly.
The Pennine Way is not generously signed, but it is usually obvious on the ground, while the Ribble Way is erratically signed and often invisible on the ground. Think I'm lining up an excuse for getting lost? Quite right. My strength is that I soon realise if I've lost my way, and I can usually make a quick correction. I wandered twice from the Ribble Way. On the first occasion the correction was easy, the second time not so easy; to get back on course I had a tiring trudge round a hill made of some sort of grass-covered pudding. A lunch stop was necessary.
It was now very hot and despite the breeze, rather close. Whenever I was out of the breeze, it was much worse. There were several distant prospects of the famous Ribblehead Viaduct, jewel in the crown of the Settle to Carlisle railway line (which had delivered me to Horton earlier in the day). The Ribble Way met the Dales Way, my next "Way", on the Blea Moor Road, and together they headed up to West Acre Ridge as cruelly as possible - straight up - so more contouring along the ridge was very welcome. When I reached Dent head, I turned from North to North West, joining the road which runs the length of Dentdale. The promoters of the Dales Way have not managed to come up with an alternative route so, for about two and a half miles, along the road it was. There was not a terrific amount of traffic, but the out-for-a-Sunday-spinners were driving too fast for the road (natch). The main compensation was upper Dentdale itself, a stunningly beautiful, classicly V-shaped valley with a stream gurgling along the bottom.
I had had merely a long-distance view of the Ribblehead Viaduct, but there was nothing distant about the Dent Head Viaduct - the road goes under the railway through a modest bridge, but then swings round to run parallel with the viaduct. Funny how a view of hillside and sheep, beautiful anyway, becomes even more magical seen through an elegant arch. A mile or so further on, I happened to glance sideways, and there was another viaduct, the Artengill Viaduct, yet another magnificent but bonkers engineering marvel on the crazy Settle to Carlisle railway line. The Midland Railway company, anxious to have its own route to Scotland (the East and West Coast routes being already taken by deadly rivals) determined to force its own line through this unaccommodating country.
"The line was built by over 6,000 navvies, who worked in remote locations, often enduring harsh weather conditions. Large camps were established to house the navvies, most of them Irish, with many becoming complete townships featuring post offices and schools. The Midland Railway helped pay for scripture readers to counteract the effect of drunken violence in these isolated communities. The engineer for the project was John Crossley, a Leicestershire man who was a veteran of other major Midland schemes. The terrain traversed is some of the bleakest and wildest in England, and construction was halted for months at a time due to frozen ground, snowdrifts and flooding of the works. The line was engineered to express standards throughout — local traffic was secondary and many stations were miles from the villages they purported to serve. It reaches a summit of 1,169 feet at Ais Gill, north of Garsdale. 14 tunnels and 22 viaducts were needed, the most notable being the 24 arch Ribblehead Viaduct which is 104 ft high and 440 yards long. The swampy ground meant that the piers had to be sunk 25 ft below the peat and set in concrete in order to provide a suitable foundation. Soon after the crossing of the viaduct, the line enters Blea Moor tunnel, 2,629 yd long and 500 ft below the moor, before emerging again on to Dent Head viaduct. The summit at Ais Gill is still the highest point reached by main line trains in England" (Wikipedia).
The bit about the stations being not very near the towns and villages is very relevant round here. I passed the turning for Dent station; Dent itself was still four miles distant!
I left the road with high hopes of the footpaths to come. I was pretty knackered by now, which no doubt coloured my view that I had swapped the reliably descending road for a fiddling, up and down, round the houses series of paths. A ghastly stretch across a ruined hillside, where all the trees had been felled and a lot of the wreckage left all over the path, did not improve my mood. I sneaked off back to the road rather sooner than I needed to, ambling gently past the point where Deepdale merges with Dentdale. Again the Dales Way left the road, and this time I followed it, alongside the Deepdale Beck and, later, the River Dee.
Now these watercourses are a swizz. The Dee, particularly, has a dramatic riverbed, all precipitous falls and racing turns - the only thing is, often there's no river. Being a limestone river, it just disappears without warning, leaving you to walk alongside what looks like a badly-maintained roadway, then up it pops, burbling along as though it had never been away.
A pleasant meadow walk took me to a road leading into Dent, known as Dent Town but really a village, and a pretty village at that. A large block of granite in the centre of the town/village serves as memorial to Adam Sedgwick. A son of Dent, Adam Sedgwick (1785 – 1873) was "one of the founders of modern geology. He proposed the Devonian period of the geological timescale and later the Cambrian period. Though he had guided the young Charles Darwin in his early study of geology, Sedgwick was an outspoken opponent of Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection" (Wikipedia).
I was feeling rather sawn-off after my tropical journey, but was restored to good order by a three-course bar meal.
