Day 15- Ingleby Cross- Clay Bank Top (12+ miles)

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We were all a bit sad to leave our B&B this morning....while all have been wonderful and each unique in its own way, Park House was extra special. The setting and rooms were beautiful, both the dinner and the breakfast were exceptionally good and we enjoyed talking with the proprietor and the 4 other guests.

Today was another great hike. We are now in the North Moors National Park and today's hike was mostly on the same path as the Cleveland Way (Another well-known long distance path in England) We went up and down all day crossing over several high moors, the total ascent today was over 3000 ft.with comparable descent! It was definitely a "roller coaster" hike.

The most exciting part of today was seeing all the heather....it is just beginning to turn the hillsides purple. The pictures I will try and post don't come close to showing the colors or how awesome the views were.

As you can tell by our lunchtime garb, we did have some rain....but it only lasted for an hour. There were two Australian meteorologists staying in our B&B last night and they said it would rain briefly around noon and then maybe some showers later...they were absolutely right. They also said the next two days will be mostly sunny with no rain....I hope they are as accurate in that forecast as they were today.

The path was really well signposted today with one exception--in the late afternoon we arrived at Wains rocks which is a rather impressive display of rocks at the top of one of the moors. We enjoyed seeing them but had a difficult time finding the path to keep going. The map showed a path going right down the middle which we couldn't find so we followed a narrow ridge path along side of the rocks and then had to climb up the side of the cliff when the path ended....it was pretty scary, especially since we didn't know where we would end up! Fortunately at the top, we found a very good path that appeared to come from the middle of the rock formations. When we finally got to the hotel, we found that both groups who had been at out B&B. Had exactly the same experience. I'd still like to find out where the real path actually was but I don't plan on going back to look tomorrow!

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