Peter and I were up and about relatively early this morning, but the rest of the house was a little slower in waking up. This gave us plenty of time to have a cooked breakfast, pack up the sofa bed and sort out our bags before everyone else was up and ready. Luckily Ponden isn’t far from Haworth so Aurelia drove Micky, Simon and Peter to the start spot before coming back for the rest of us, and we started off our day’s walk at around 10:15. 

We had a lunch booking at 2pm in Lothersdale, which our planning said was at about the 4 mile (6.4km) mark of the day’s 12.4 miles (19.9km). It was an ok day’s walk, with a fairly decent couple of hills at the start, but a lot of just crossing fields, which gave us plenty of time to chat and play walking games.  It ended up being about 8km to Lothersdale, a little bit more than expected, and the last mile or so had a lot of scrambling across fields full of cows, which we were a bit nervous about. There was also a very steep muddy embankment which slowed us down quite a lot, but luckily was just before the descent into town. We were very glad to sink into a comfortable chair and eat some food at 2:30 or so, particularly as we sat down just as it began to rain outside. 

The group didn’t want to linger too long though, as it was a bit of a late lunch, so once we were all done with our food we headed back out the door. Paul joined us, as he’d taken the morning off to rest his sore feet further, and Aurelia was coming along for a couple of miles before going back to the car. The second half was a similar elevation pattern to the first, with quite a hill to get us started, but then a steady descent for most of the rest of the walk. At the peak of Pinhaw Beacon, we found a memorial to Covid victims with an absolutely awful somewhat-rhyming poem written by a local – and a fairly optimistic date of ‘Covid pandemic 20/21’… but there were gorgeous views in every direction so we focused more on that.

Throughout the walk there were plenty of cow fields again, although they must be quite used to people as none of them really blinked an eyelid at us going past. We did have one nervy moment when we spotted a big cow with horns that looked like a bull, so skirted around the edge of the field and climbed over an awkward barbed wire fence, only to circle back on the other side and find that it was just a longhorn cow.

We descended towards Thornton-in-Craven and, after a bizarre walk through a farm that seemed to be run purely by cows, finished the walk along an old abandoned railway bridge that led almost to the Tempest Arms, the pub where Aurelia had managed to find a park for the car. Half of us settled in for a drink while the other half were ferried the half hour back to Haworth, and then we got picked up just as it began to rain. Ros had texted while we were waiting, saying that Micky and Simon’s pub (where they were waiting for us) stopped serving food at 8, which made dinner quite a problem. After a quiet ride back looking at how few options there were for dinner that Peter and I could eat (plenty of Indian), we decided to just grab some stuff at the Co-op and cook some pasta at the Airbnb before shower and bed time.