Keld to Horton in Ribblesdale

Leaving the village, the sun rose over the typical Dales scenery of Swaledale. A shallow river nonchalantly winds its way along the flat bottom of a steep sided valley. Small fields, grey dry stone walls, remote barns and isolated clumps of trees break out of the fertile ground and encroach some way up the hillside. After the final limestone walls lies untamed moorland in various rich shades of brown and green and mottled by the occasional dark boulder.

The rocky path stays high and surveys this tranquil beauty before rounding the hill and dropping down to the small village of Thwaite. Here the Pennine Way takes on Great Shunner Fell, a great drifting whale of peat amongst the dales. Completely unrelated to this, I made the decision to leave the Way and take to the road, today's excuse being that Ribblesdale is a long way away and shaving off a couple of miles may mean I avoid stumbling around in the dark (of course, that may happen anyway). It didn't feel like an easy or boring shortcut as I climbed quickly to 1725ft alongside the steep rocky gorge of Cliff Beck. Dodging cars was made more difficult by steep verges and walls, and the main attraction was the deep limestone chasms of Butter Tubs, where water trickles down dark holes into unfathomable depths.

Road signs pointed me to the town of Hawes and the most people I'd seen in one place since Scotland. The steep climb out of town was interrupted by some confusion over how exactly to get out of a field but I eventually found my way back into the land of the snow. Cloud obscured the views but what I could see of the sheer slopes and the occasional glimpses of the far off valley bottoms gave an impressive sense of scale. The many miles that followed were mainly on soft tracks that came over the hills and dropped into the Ribblesdale past limestone slabs and pot holes. I kept myself occupied by slowly catching up with and overtaking a group of kids heavily laden with the weight of their teachers responsibility. These are my stomping grounds, used for the little training I managed before setting out and the familiarity is somehow comforting.