Day 44 – Thursday, July 14, 2011 – Badger Fields Farm to Cowling – 16 miles

Garden flowers

The spring flowers in the pastures are just about dried up. The clover is still blooming, the fox glove is working its way to the top, and there is still an occasional daisy. Other than that, most of the flowers are gone – except in the gardens. I keep passing many beautiful gardens, evidence that England has a flower-friendly climate – not like the parching heat of southern Utah or central California. It would be hard not to grow beautiful flowers in England. Why, I’ll bet that most of the beautiful gardens I’ve seen require no more than three or four hours of daily maintenance, and maybe only a full Saturday every other week or so.

Fixer upper

What is required in England, though, is home maintenance. There are many buildings here that are no longer habitable. In America, those buildings would be torn down to make room for a publicly financed stadium. But here in England, the buildings are left to deteriorate until some wealthy celebrity acquires and restores them. Eventually that happens, and the building is once again put to productive use – notwithstanding that it was built in 1538, and the doorways are only 4½ feet high. People were shorter in 1538.

Withins ruins

Today’s walk on the Pennine Way weaved through a terrain of high moorlands and drystone fenced pastures, in an area commonly referred to as Bronte Country, because the sisters Bronte lived here and wrote about the area.  The Pennine Way passes the ruins of the Withins, erroneosly thought by many to be the setting for "Wuthering Heights." 

The Bronte society finally placed a plaque on the building to disspel the notion.

Peter

You will recall that I met Peter yesterday at the Stoodley Pike monument.  We met on the trail again today, and we walked together  the rest of the day. Peter walked the Pennine Way 50 years ago when he was 15, and is re-walking it as part of a 50 year celebration. As we chatted, we discovered a number of interesting coincidences. He lives in a village not very far from where my good friends Dr. George and Lady Ann live. He is a scuba diver, and was diving in Truk, Yap, and Palau in 1992 – at the same time Janet and I were there. He’s also dived the shipwrecks at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands – the very same place where Janet and I bought T-shirts that said we dived Scapa Flow. And the biggest coincidence is that he and I are staying tonight at the same B&B. Wouldn’t it be another coincidence if we ate dinner tonight at the same pub? Or even at the same table?


© 2011 Ken Klug