Chris Walks Top to Bottom

Weather: 🌤

Feeling Today: 🙂

So Far: 482.02 miles, 159:43 hours

A casual start today as the walk was shorter than I’d expected and I also had another fruitless early morning High Street search for a Merseyside map.

Very soon after leaving Windermere  I found myself in the most beautiful countryside – really breathtakingly beautiful. Not the lakes or hills of the last few days, but rolling verdant slopes, rocky outcrops, dry stone walls, meadows of buttercups and wild flowers (nope, can’t name them, Mum – sorry), and meandering stone tracks and paths. It helped that it was another fine, warm day!  All in all a lovely day, ending in Brigsteer and views over the Lyth valley.

This evening I had a great meal at the best Cumbrian pub 2017 – the Wheatsheaf in Brigsteer. Having seen so many sheep over recent weeks it was good to have one chopped up and on a plate in front of me, though some lumps of Feta cheese didn’t really deserve to be sitting beside it. Sorry to sound like Jay Rayner but I’ve seen a lot of Masterchef and this qualifies me to be fat, greedy and pompous! The lamb was good but it’s the sticky toffee pudding that deserves a photo:

I’m now in the unexpected situation of having only tomorrow night’s accommodation booked on the stretch as far as the Mersey (which I then leave on the 13th). I’ve decided to stride out along the Lancaster Canal, shin permitting, and follow a direct route south through Lancashire to the Mersey – if only I had a map! (I’ve got my GPS and google maps on my phone but it’s a lot easier to plan a route when you can lay out an OS.) This will allow me to join Bev in Staffordshire for a few days before my booked accommodation starts again.

I might take the risky approach of leaving my accommodation until the day and walking until I find somewhere free. Surely it can’t be like The Lakes where there seemed to be no vacancies at all. On the other hand it could end in tears, … or the bus station, or the homeless refuge, or the M&S doorway, or the garden shed, or the 24 hour McDonalds ….