Goodmanham to Market Weighton and back home again

When Poppy was in high school she went on a geography field trip, got her socks and shoes wet on the first day, continued to wear said socks and shoes for the rest of the trip and got trench foot. It took a long time and a lot of pain and discomfort before it went, and left Poppy with a horror of wet shoes. When we were choosing shoes to wear on this trip my main criteria was lightweight and flexible, Poppy’s was waterproof. During the walk in April from Newcastle to Filey she was very happy with her choice, but although they coped with clifftops and beaches, it seems that field edges were a step too far.

On the first morning we walked through long wet grass and our feet got wet. An hour later mine were dry – my shoes are basically made of mesh and the water can get out just as easily as it got in. Poppy’s shoes, however, were doing a great job of not letting the water back out again, and she spent the day walking with wet feet. Although she had plenty of clean dry socks, and powders and bandaged her toes individually, her shoes didn’t dry overnight in the tent, and she set off in the morning with incipient podiatal dampness. By the time she unwrapped them in the hall in Goodmanham, her feet were painful and raw.

In the morning packing up was easy as there was no tent to dismantle, and by 8am we were on our way to the nearby town of Market Weighton to get some breakfast before setting off on our walk. We were meant to be doing 25 miles, but judging by the last two days, we suspected a taxi hop might once more be on the cards. We could discuss it over our bacon and eggs.

As we walked though, I began to have doubts. Poppy wasn’t walking, but hobbling, and I constantly had to wait for her to catch up. We passed a secondary school where the kids were all arriving for the day, pooling in groups at the gates, pouring off buses and trickling in from the town. We got some strange looks as we walked past with our rucksacks, Poppy hobbling along with her stick.

She thought maybe she could do ten miles, but after a cup of tea she got up from the table and could barely walk across the café to the loo. It was no longer a case of how far, but - shall I carry on with out her or shall we both go home?

In the end we decided to cut our losses. We could get a bus from Market Weighton to York, then a train to get us home by lunchtime. We could spend the afternoon planning a return trip to do the last 25 miles.

2 miles

North Grimston to Goodmanham

I kind of thought we’d get up really early and get on our way with the birds seeing as we were camping, but that didn’t happen. Somehow things take longer in the morning than I expect when I’m with someone else. We ate breakfast biscuits and experimented with eating chia seeds sans yoghurt. I managed mine with a banana. Poppy managed them on their own – but then she has been known to take part in strange challenges which involve eating spoonfuls of dried marjoram or cinnamon or chilli flakes – and at least these had some crunch.

Then we set off down a long straight road which looked as though it should lead to adventure.

Very soon the path turned left from the road and we headed down the hill to Wharram Percy, site of a medieval village and a deserted church. 

The landscape continued to remind us of Hockney, which isn’t really surprising as this is his stomping ground. Yesterday, except for the odd moment, it wasn’t that inspiring. There are only so many field edges you can walk before you feel that you’ve really done field edges. Today was different. Today we felt like we were in the Yorkshire Wolds and that we’d never been anywhere like it before. According to Wikipedia, a wold is a wooded area on high ground. There wasn’t a lot of woodland in evidence, patches here and there maybe.  What was striking was not so much the hilltops as the valleys – green flat bottomed Vs, dotted with sheep, streaked with chalk and yellow rape fields, topped with huge skies. There was a lot of up and down, but it was definitely worth it.

However, we’d made a late start and we just weren’t walking as fast as I’d expected. I’ve discovered that clifftop-walking is faster than wold-walking. Getting to camp before dark was once more an issue.

The lane into Huggate, our planned lunch stop, was amazing. Mown verges, an avenue of cherry trees in blossom against the yellow rape and the grey sky. Never mind Hockney, I felt like getting out my own paint brush and I don’t even have one. It was a bit posh though. I mean, just a country lane – why was someone coming out with the mower? Then we realised it was not just a lane, but the driveway to Northfield House.

In the pub over a late Sunday lunch we decided on another taxi hop, this time to Londesborough. It took a while to get a taxi – four different phone numbers – but eventually a jolly retired gentleman turned up to take us on our way. Poppy had by this time acquired a stick which she put into the car boot along with our rucksacks. The driver laughed – ‘What’s that for?’ he said, ‘catching rabbits?’ The drive was through a beautiful pastoral landscape which commanded huge views across the countryside. Our driver proudly told us that on a good day you could see York Minster as well as three smoking power stations, which he pointed out and named for us – Drax, Eggborough and Ferrybridge. Then he pointed to some wind turbines on the hill, white against the green and yellow, like the chalk beneath.  ‘Those things are just unsightly,’ he said.

Londesborough is part of a country estate – the kind which swallows up villages and generations of lives, and which used to make up much of England.  Walking along its leafy lanes past brick cottages with roses growing around the doors, and through the gates to the Park where game birds hopped in the undergrowth, we realised we felt just as out of place here as we had in Hartlepool. There we had felt like snobs, uncomfortable, middle class. Here, in Tory heartland, we felt like strange creatures from another world. 

There was no evidence here of poverty, of deprivation, of need. There was nothing unsightly. Perhaps when they are invisible it’s easy to believe in rapacious immigrants and benefit scroungers, in the same way as it’s easy to believe in demons and bogeymen and things that go bump in the night. Or maybe we’d have felt differently if we hadn’t set off on this walk immediately after the election.

On the far side of the Park there were cows – a heard of beautiful creatures with their calves, sitting in the evening sunshine chewing peacefully. One of the calves was lying right in front of the gate we were aiming for. However much I tried, Poppy would not be reassured and we had to take another diversion. But eventually were reached Goodmanham (in the pub at Huggate they’d asked where we were headed and I said Goodmenem – running the syllables together, assuming that was the correct pronunciation. No, no, a man told me – it’s Good Man Ham. Do you get that? Good. Man. Ham. Three syllables. I said yes I got it. Three syllables, he said, Good Man Ham. I nodded. He was still saying it as we drove away. Good Man Ham Good Man Ham).

The  campsite was just outside the village. The toilets were next to the farmhouse which was in the village, a few hundred yards walk away. They couldn’t have toilets in the actual field, the owner explained, as the neighbours were worried about gypsies. She unlocked a room next to the toilet block, or rather a hall. It was like the games room at a residential centre for school trips. It had a pool table, about 40 fold up chairs, trestle tables, an exercise bike, a fridge, sink, cooker, the Goodmanham Village Emergency Plan and a cabinet of trophies won for racing driving. Some people prefer to stay in here, the lady told us, and not bother putting their tent up.

The wind was up. It was cold. The campsite field was far away. This room had heat and light and electricity and a sofa. It was a no brainer. The owner even offered us a shower, towels, tea and milk, and hot food.

And although this was a brick building rather than a rickety shed, and the floor was carpeted rather than bare stone flags, and the sofa was in good condition with no families of mice in residence, it reminded me of Bethany again. Makeshift indoor camping, cavernous outbuildings and the generosity of strangers.

18.5 miles

Filey to North Grimston

At breakfast we mixed chia seeds into our granola. They’re used  as slow release energy by the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico, the world’s greatest long distance runners, so we thought they might help us walk 28 miles. We said hello to the grandparents with the child from the train yesterday, who happened to be staying at the same B&B as us. Then we gathered our huge bags and Chris opened the front door for us. Poppy stepped through and stopped. It was raining. I had to shove her out into it so Chris could close the door behind us.

The first few miles were grey, wet and windy. The path went along one field edge after another. But after a while we found ourselves in a strange landscape which felt like it was painted by David Hockney.

The rain had stopped, but the going was difficult underfoot. I’d been led to expect that the walking on this trail would be easy – rolling hills and easy lanes – but the truth was steeper than expected, and the footpath wasn’t level, so all the time our ankles were twisted at the angle of the hill, which made for slow and painful going.  After seven miles in two and half hours I realised we probably weren’t going to make the distance.

We kept on. Field edge after field edge. As it was mostly crops, the path was  straight with right-angled turns, sometimes running along three edges of a field in order to keep us going in the right direction. The path was more than twice as long as the distance as the crow flies. We thought about the farmers who owned the landscape and allowed the path to cross their land, how sometimes they ploughed right to the edge so we had to walk in the furrows. At one point there was a golf course we had to walk around, adding another mile to the distance.  We were accompanied by the regular sound of shooting. We didn’t see many people, but those we did we looked at suspiciously, wondering how they’d voted.

The view, which stretched for miles, was often obscured by cloud, although the rain held off.

We were aiming to get to West Heslerton for lunch at around 3pm but by the time we arrived we were running two hours late. We wouldn’t make the campsite before dark. Over food we decided to cheat and get a taxi for part of the way.  They thought we were a bit odd in the pub with our backpacks asking for the number of a taxi. The taxi driver thought we were hilarious, wanting to be dropped in the middle of nowhere to walk the last few miles, he could barely keep from chuckling out loud.

It was a different landscape here. The sun had come out and there were meadows of grazing sheep, blossom trees, pastoral English village loveliness. We had to do a bit of a detour as there was a sign about a bull and calves in a field, alternative routes and danger, and Poppy wasn’t taking any risks.

We arrived at the farm at 8.15pm. There were old Volvos in the farmyard, a few caravans at the back, but no sign of any tents, and we couldn’t get an answer at the farmhouse, so we pitched our tent on a likely bit of grass with a splendid view, next to a barn full of cows and sheep. Subsequently we found we were in the wrong place. We should have camped in the orchard on the other side of the farm where the toilet block was. The farmer and his wife didn’t mind though. They said we could use the bathroom in their house.

I grew up on a smallholding called Bethany. My parents didn’t have much money, but they had space and big hearts, and they extended hospitality to anyone – and I mean anyone - who needed it. They never locked the door to the house.  People stayed over in the living room, camped in the field, lived for a while in the caravan or in the sheds in the field. As I walked through the garden to Hill Top farmhouse toothbrush in hand, a little girl in her pyjamas waved to me from the upstairs window. The tiles on the bathroom wall reminded me of Bethany. The door which stayed unlocked all night did too. I felt quite at home.

23 miles