Pennine Way 18. Is Pennine the old English word for mud?

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In Hexham we are not. We’re in Bellingham pronounced as Bellingham. Spelt ham and said jam.

And to get to Bellingham. It’s almost 28 km and the first 4 or 5 are on the iconic Hadrian’s Wall path and have us going past the Sycamore Tree. Everyone, including us, takes pictures and adds to to its fame and further reinforces its reputation. It’s surprising for a wall that’s almost 2000 years old and oozes history, for a region that has a plethora of sights and excavations that are really significant that it’s a tree that is primarily famous because it was featured in a Kevin Cosner film of Robin Hood! But it is lovely. It’s beautifully symmetrically situated between 2 steep sided hills and it does look great. The Pennine Way and Hadrian’s Wall Path share about 5 km in common and the vistas back to Steel Rigg (sounds like a heavy meal band I reckon), around Crag Lough and back looking east and forward looking west are among my Walking best highlights.

At turret 39A we turn left and head north away from the wall. And for the next 23 km we were in the mud, bog or swamp almost without exception. Of those kilometres I would think about 18 of them we water logged kilometres. The open moors have become quite hostile. We have experienced 8 days of rain in the last 8 days of walking so the top of fields are wet and the bottom saturated and ready to swallow boots to ankle level or more with each step. Even the forest offered no reprieve with thick mud or lichen that looks terrific but is just as soft, squelchy and unforgiving.

We walked the last few km with a Scotsman (who was also wet, bedraggled and complaining about the weather and conditions) who had just completed his PhD in ‘computational neuroscience’. Interesting conversation between our mutual grumbling.

There’s a dearth of photos from the time we left Hadrian’s Wall simply because the weather was so bad I had to put the ipad in the pack for some protection.

Not a big blog because again our power rechargers want work in the old plugs here and we need to check a few things for tomorrow’s walk without depleting the power too much.

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