Finally, our last day! It’s flown by but we’ve been very impressed with ourselves for managing the distance – if very tired. Peter and I thought everyone would be very slow out of bed this morning, but because our original check out time was 10am, it was actually one of our more organised mornings. Luckily the Airbnb host messaged in the morning and said they didn’t actually need the property until 5 though, so Aurelia had somewhere to hang about for the day. Simon and Micky had booked a taxi for 9:30 and we were ready so the four of us hopped in to head to Thornton-in-Craven. We had a bit of a wobbly start, with the taxi driver driving towards a different Thornton, but luckily we quickly picked up that he was driving in the wrong direction and turned around and got back on our way.

We started the walk at about 10:30 and immediately got distracted by a field full of goats and chickens which was labelled as a ‘goat sanctuary’! They were very friendly and were bleating for snacks, but unfortunately their honesty-box-style food container was empty, so we gave them a few pats and kept walking. Today’s walk was the flattest, and also the shortest! There was a short ascent at the start, but after crossing a few hilly fields, we found ourselves ascending to the Leeds & Liverpool canal and walking along the towpath. This provided both beautiful canal views of people’s narrowboats and sightings of quite a few horses!

After only about two hours of walking we arrived in Gargrave, our lunch spot. We picked up sandwiches at the Co-op in town and grabbed tea and coffee at a cute little café (with old school sweet shop!) before finding a spot to sit by the river to eat. When we’d all eaten we packed up again and headed off, with a brief stop at the canal to watch a narrowboat passing through the lock. The trail outside of Gargrave mostly ran through fields before crossing a little bridge and then following the stream for much of the rest of the way. There were plenty of amusingly tiny gates to entertain us and the scenery was gorgeous. We had a couple of drink and snack breaks by the river before a reasonably hilly last little stretch into Malham. 135km done! The whole trail is 435km long, so we were quite pleased with almost a third of it in 6 days of walking.

Arriving in town, we were surprised to find an enormous carpark full of cars outside of town, which we quickly ascertained was the National Park parking – and parking for most of the town, as it was tiny! The footpath followed the stream into town – past a last few cows – before we crossed a gorgeous stone footbridge to the café above which Ros, Bryan, Aurelia and Paul were staying. Once we’d found Aurelia with the car and grabbed our bags, Peter and I headed up the road to The Lister Arms, our pub for the night. They gave us our room keys and directions to the ‘Lister Barn’, around the corner, and we soon walked into a stunning (huge) room with a bottle of champagne sitting on the window sill. We had an amusing minute of both claiming responsibility for the champagne, before realising that we’d both emailed the pub requesting this little upgrade! They’d done the clever thing and not alerted either of us, but given us the more expensive bottle – and offered Peter a complimentary room upgrade, which is how we got such a gorgeous room. We enjoyed the bottle while we got showered and dressed for dinner before meeting Micky and Simon in the pub itself.

Once everyone else joined us, we had a fantastic dinner in the Lister Arms: beautiful steaks and great wine – and great conversation for our last night of catching up with everyone. We did have some amusing entertainment from a fairly wobbly older guy who kept coming over to talk to us, but for the most part kept to ourselves. Eventually we were all winding down though, and wanted to do a little walk in the morning so we headed to bed.