Important Info

Planned kilometres: 26 (cummulative 765)

Kilometres walked: 28 (cummulative 816)

% Completed (based on 1800km trip): 45.3%

Weather: Sunny

Pubs visited: The Commercial, The Albert

Pints: 0 (cummulative 99)

Kms per pint: 8.2

Blisters: 0 (cummulative 3)

 

Marsden to Hebden Bridge

In yesterday blog, I mentioned I had been collecting pint glasses (given to me by pub landlords), so below is a picture of the 3 collected on yesterday’s pub crawl. They are: Black Sheep, Trooper (based on the band Iron Maiden) and Peak Ales.

It’s another beautiful sunny day for today’s walk from Marsden to Hebden Bridge. Steve, Kate and their friend Niall are walking with me today which means that I can leave all the navigating to Steve. Steve has been given special instructions regarding navigating as when he normally organises walks he looks to maximise the number of hills in the walk, so today is going to be tough for him as he has been told to minimise the number of hills.

 

We only just made our train to Marsden as the Greater Manchester Run was on this morning (30,000 runners) and this meant many roads where closed. We had to drop Kate near the station to buy tickets while Steve and I found a car park.

 

Steve managed a great flat start to the walk by following the canal out of Marsden and through the town of Slaithwaite where we went past a pub and Steve commented that it  was a great name for a pub, however Kate disagreed.

After walking above the highest motorway in the UK (the M62) we stopped at The Commercial Hotel for a cold drink. This was a local’s & family pub as evidenced by the pictures on the door and on the bar.

As we are now in Yorkshire, there were amazing dry-stone walls everywhere. these walls are made by stacking stones (without any mortar to hold them together).

In Yorkshire, it’s hard to avoid hills, so after our pub break we had our first big hill of the day. It’s not a great feeling when you start walking down a very steep decline and can see the valley at the bottom and know you must climb back up the other side. We did get  some great views from the top of the hills looking down on the villages along the valley.

Steve, Kate & Niall on one of the laneways.

Niall conversing with one of the locals.

Wait for me – Steve, Niall and Kate leaving the bloke with the big backpack behind.

After another hill in the village of Triangle, Steve redeemed himself by the last part of the walk being a nice flat walk along an old railway line and the Rochford Canal.

I don’t think these football pitches along the canal have seen many games for a while.

I really enjoyed just walking today (even the couple of hills weren’t to bad after I had completed them) and it was great letting someone else worry about the route and not getting us lost. Tomorrow I back to having to navigate for myself, so I may need to review planned km’s