walking with mum – 9 sep, 2018
Day 33 Land’s End to John O’Groats – Abram to Sollom
Distance: 25km
Cumulative distance: 838km
It was just me for the morning session today and I didn’t muck around after Mum and Dad dropped me back at the canal where I’d finished up yesterday afternoon. The first goal was to reach Wigan and I just smashed it as quickly as I could along the canal to try and get some early miles under my belt. As always it was peaceful walking beside the water, and fairly quiet despite it being a Sunday morning without rain. I crossed over a bridge and the canal took me into Wigan which wasn’t overly scenic but I suspect I’m not the first to make that observation. To give it some credit there were a bunch of sculptures along the way depicting what life used to be like for people in these parts. Pretty grim by the looks of it, much like Wigan life in 2018 – I really shouldn’t say that. A little further beyond I walked past the DW Stadium which I think the rugby league team shares with the soccer team, and by the time I reached Crooke I’d FINALLY left the industrial north-west conurbation behind.
This was a much nicer section. I went past Appleby Bridge and a little canal boat that was operating as a café on the water. I bypassed it so I could maintain my lunch date with Mum and Dad and kept soldiering along the canal, trying to work out how far away I was from each town by converting the cycling time each sign offered into walking time. I figured I was going about a third of a cyclist’s pace, so when the sign said 30 minutes to Parbold I was looking about an hour and a half on foot. I’d been walking along the Leeds and Liverpool Canal all this time, and occasionally I’d past little signposts telling me how far I was from each city. The history of this stuff always fascinates me, it’s one of the reasons I keep returning to the UK. Construction of this particular canal began in 1770 – in the same year Captain James Cook found himself sailing along the east coast of Australia, to where the English would return 18 years later and claim the land as their own.
All said the Leeds and Liverpool Canal is a 204km waterway which I guess over the years has helped the big boys in West Yorkshire (Leeds, Bradford etc) export their goods across the sea via Liverpool. Deep in thought, I looked ahead and saw Mum and Dad walking towards me. That shocked me back into coherence – they’d arrived at the lunch spot a little early and decided to head along the canal and intercept me. We walked to the Yours is the Earth café in Parbold and I will happily say it was one of the best I’d been to since beginning the walk – right on the water in a beautiful building and with some of the tastiest food you could ever hope to eat after a stint beside the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.
After lunch Mum decided to join me for a section! Exciting times – I pretty much guaranteed her it’d be more gentle canal walking for the rest of the way and that we’d have nothing to worry about in terms of hills or navigation. After about five minutes I realised I was completely wrong. We stayed on the western bank of the canal and after about 100m the path disappeared and we found ourselves walking across the edge of a farmer’s field. I looked across the canal figuring we were on the wrong side of the water, but there was nothing over there either. Hmmmm. I pulled out the map and found we could take a few roads along to a farm, across which there was a public right of way which would ultimately allow us to rejoin the canal a few miles up the road. We were aiming for a town called Rufford and after that it looked like we’d be able to resume walking along the canal via a footpath, or at the very least a grassy verge. We took care on the roads and managed to successfully weave our way through some light traffic before strolling up a farmer’s driveway. There were a few no entry signs about the place and I lost all faith in the public footpath which had been marked on the map. We came across the farmer on the other side of a gate – he was in the process of mucking out his sheep trailer. The poor bloke had been wearied by age and would’ve been rather surprised to see us as he struggled out of the back of his trailer. We politely asked him if there was a public footpath through his property, and he told us about another public footpath which would require us retracing our steps down the roads we’d just walked. I wasn’t about to backtrack so I played dumb and pointed out the footpath on the map which was clearly marked through his land. At this point he yielded slightly and said he’d allow us to go through the gate and walk up to an old hay shed from where we could cross a field and eventually link back up with the canal. We thanked him and were on our way, walking past fields of sheep on a wide driveway with another river on our right hand side.
So far so good, and when we arrived at the old shed there was a stile over the fence and a public footpath sign pointing us left. We followed what looked like a rough path all the way down to another creek, which we crossed, before being halted by a barbed wire fence. I was convinced we were still heading roughly in the right direction so Mum and I helped each other through the fence before I decided we’d be better off crossing back over the creek and heading further north. So we did that, and arrived in a field full of horses which we passed by before finding ourselves at another gate. I jumped over then helped Mum do the same thing, and we landed on what appeared to be a driveway. About 100m up we passed a house and tried to pretend we didn’t see the people who were standing outside wondering who the hell had just used their horse paddock as a detour.
We came to a road and then to what I thought was the canal, and after crossing the bridge I told Mum we ought to just follow this all the way into Rufford. Problem solved…or so I thought. I eventually worked out this was not the canal at all, but a little tributary which was a little further south east than I thought we were. It clearly wasn’t supposed to be walked upon, and soon enough we were wading through grass that was almost waist high. We pushed on past a dead sheep – there wasn’t much more we could do – and finally ran into the River Douglas which took us into Rufford where we stopped for ice cream.
Mum handled it all like a trooper and still had a bit to give, so we pushed on again aiming for Sollom. That would leave Dad and I with about 20km to walk into Preston tomorrow, and it seemed like a pretty easy point from which he could pick us up this afternoon. For once I was right along this section – it was well and truly walkable and much, much easier than what I’d dragged Mum across earlier in the afternoon. There was nothing overly exciting along here and Mum rolled her ankle inwards a couple of times, but she managed to keep going. We had a really good chat too which was nice, and by the time we arrived in Sollom I reckon we’d done about 10km together. Only two more nights together before they fly back home! Geez that has gone fast.
