Dufton loop

I leave Dufton on the Pennine Way heading north. There are a couple of people walking in the road and as I pass I say good morning. They respond with cheer, despite the thick fog and weak midmorning sunlight.

Dufton Pike looms off to my right as I start the climb up the Pennine Way. The route is well-signed but the trail is muddy and torn up by tractors. It’s slow going until I round a corner and cross a bridge and the ground starts to harden up with frost. Soon there’s a thick layer of rime on the grass and a light breeze. I pass a couple of Pennine Way walkers and chat briefly with them. I pass a long, unnaturally straight ditch, which I learn later is a hush, a sort of strip mining technique where water is used to erode large quantities of land to get at the ore (here, lead) below. In the thickening snow I don’t notice the dam at the head of the hush.

Just below the broad top of Green Fell I come across great snow drifts, clearly dumped there in the lee of some terrible windstorm. The fog parts slightly and the snow and ice sparkle weakly. Everything is filmed in a slight pinkish haze, which might be from the sun through icy clouds or might be the latent snowblindness. I should have brought sunglasses.

I pass Knock Old Man, an old currick caked in rime. I can’t figure out quite when he was built, but he’s on the OS Maps from the mid-1800s so at least a hundred and fifty years or so. They sure knew how to stack rocks back then.

Plenty of ice and snow up here but decent progress across to Great Dun Fell; still thick cloud so I don’t see the big radome until I’m right on it. As I approach, some of the ice falls off one of the two smaller radar antennas and it just about spooks the pants off me. Despite evidence everywhere of hard-blowing wind in the recent past, it’s now totally still on top of the hills.

I cross to Little Dun Fell and then to Cross Fell, which is less of a climb than I remember it being. (Although I do manage to fall through some ice into a boggy pool, leaving a stumbling trail of brown and red splatters across the white snow: gruesome.) Follow the cairns across the top of Cross Fell to the windswept stone shelter, where I eat a couple of cheese savoury wraps.

The descent from Cross Fell is a fantastic bit of running. The snow quickly gives way to firm grass; the path is wide and easy to follow. At the very bottom, a field with hundreds of sheep gathered around a pen full of—silage, maybe? The sheep have torn up the grass and are brown-black from the neck down with mud and dirt. The young farmer trundles by in a big red tractor and I give him a wave.

From here I follow the route of the Pennine Journey across fields and burns and stiles, through farm courtyards and kissing gates and under big silent wind turbines. The fog has lifted but the sky is still gloomy. I can see Dufton Pike in the distance: it feels unfairly far away. The grass squelches under my feet.

I pass through Milburn. I’m pretty sure this one’s haunted. There’s a maypole in the middle of the big silent square that looks straight out of an Alternative Horror movie. There’s not a soul about. Actually there’s a postie fiddling with a postbox over in the corner. I say hello as I pass by.

More fields; more empty farms. Where is everyone? Eventually I make it to Knock and spend like six minutes trying to find my way out of a tiny field, more like a garden with an abandoned car and the remains of a bonfire in it. I don’t want to climb over the wall because I’m sure that someone is watching me. I stumble around for a while until I find a kissing gate buried in a hedge. I wonder whether the bumbling was worth not being seen to climb over a wall in a town I will probably never go to again.

From Knock the Pennine Journey goes back off in search of squelchy fields to cross but I decide to just hack it on the road. It’s not far and there’s no cars about and I need to go meet Sam on the other side of the Pennines. Dufton is empty when I return.