Keld – Coast to Coast (Day 7)

By Stephen M on June 6, 2015

We didn’t want to leave Kirkby Stephens, well actually, truth be known, we didn’t want to leave the B&B. Our room was fabulous and the service from Carol was better again. We have been more than happy with all our accommodation to date, but today we are scheduled for our first night in our tent, due to very limited accommodation options available. So there was another reason we weren’t exactly jumping out of our skins to hit the road.

Hit the road we did by 10am, was an easy day with only 18km, but still with a decent climb until we reached the mysterious nine standards, this also marks the spot where for England, East meets West. Which means water runs down hill out to their respective seas, but as we soon found out, a lot of water has obviously got confused as to which way it should run and has stayed put creating very challenging black gooey peat bog in which we had to navigate through and around for most of the remainder of the day. Not sure what the thrill is all about walking through Bogs, but it isn’t much fun sinking into wet muddy stuff. We probably were lucky as we never got knee deep! But we still managed to come out with wet feet and black boots!

For most of the afternoon we were on constant weather watch as threatening dark clouds hung dangerously close to the point we donned all our wet weather kit just in case. At about an hour from Keld we dropped by Ravenseat farmhouse with the celebrity status of Amanda Owen, who when featured on a BBC series on the Coast to Coast, was pregnant with her 6th child, and popular with walkers serving them tea and scones, now meeting her she is well and truly pregnant with her 8th! She served us Tea and Scones the woodshed due to the inclement weather and as we had recently learned of a horse fair in the nearby town of Appleby, got the low down over our scones on how this is the biggest Gypsy gathering in the country.

Soon after departing we got rained on. Definitely not warm rain from Italy, but cold rain that must have blown over from Ireland, along with all the Gypsies.
We were soon setting up camp and eating a very yummy Thai chicken curry in the camp shed before turning in for the evening.