Yesterday turned out to be one of the first days of spring and a great day for a walk in the Yorkshire Dales, Wharfedale to be exact. I’ve approximately sketched out the route on the map, but it’s not my usual GPS track because my Nokia N97 has once again proved that it’s worth its weight in sawdust, taking just the three hours to lock onto the satellites that my bluetooth GPS saw within about 20 seconds.

Route

The route starts at the good car park at Yorkshire Water’s Grimwith Reservoir, plenty of spaces on the hard standing and recently built toilets, I’m guessing it gets quite a lot of visitors in the summer months. We then proceeded anti clockwise around the Reservoir and then down the track to the B6265.

view over Wharfedale

Along the road for half a kilometre or so until a left turn onto a footpath at Bank Top, the path goes across the field and downhill, watch for the yellow painted post in the middle of the field to avoid wandering too much of the farm and worrying the sheep.

Grimwith Reservoir

This path skirts the back of Hebden village and in short order deposits you at the reasonably well known suspension bridge, the stepping stones are also perfectly servicable if it’s too bouncy for your personal tastes, which a little Jack Russell demonstrated for us at a fast run.

Hebden Suspension Bridge

You’re now on the Dales Way running down the banks of the Wharfe so it’s very flat going, the poured concrete path being wheelchair accessible, although I’m not so sure about going up the slopes to overlook Loup Scar, which is apparently famous for being where a local murderer disposed of a body.

Loup Scar

The Dales Way gets remarkably busy later on in the year, you often find yourself walking elbow to elbow with strangers, which isn’t everybody’s cup of tea and buns. The village of Burnsall is very well kept and has some big stone buildings and a bridge that are quite photogenic when the sun is bright, even at this time of the year the village was full of cars parked all over the place. The pubs were very busy.

Burnsall Church

We couldn’t stop to try the beers though, we wouldn’t have started again, because we had the second half of the walk to do before dusk set in and our cars were locked in for the night. The path is still easy to folllow down the bottom of the hill from Appletreewick, after which it’s time to leave the Wharfe behind and turn North East towards Skyreholme.

The Wharfe

Wharfe

Follow the road up nearly as far as Parcevall Hall, where the tea rooms were still shut for Winter and take the footpath headed North towards Trollers Gill.

towards trollers gill

This pretty canyon is where you regain much of the height lost earlier in the way, but you don’t notice it because you’re carefully choosing your steps between all the rocks and stones.

trollers gill

trollers gill

At the top, we paused for a poetry recital from our group’s resident historian, even the wind died down to listen to his oration. Some passersby paused to bemusedly listen, who just shook their heads at our explaination that we were so well equipped we’d even packed the poetry about the valley we’d just walked through.

towards Simons Seat

From there it was a reasonably straight and thankless half hour back across the moors past Fancarl Crag to the carpark, although turning round there was a good view back across the valley to Simon’s Seat. This looked very close by, even though it was 4km away and 100m higher up and the valley between would disappoint anybody hoping to climb it easily.

A good day’s exercise, weighing it at a little over 12 miles. Chopping off the lap of the water to start with would cut it down to a wholly managable 8ish miles.

I went to go see the Hairy Bikers’ sell out stage show last week and very good it was too.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was a good format that included bits of stand up style banter, audience interaction, a few video snippets of their more embarrasing years and, of course, two live cooking segments. As Dave Myers said, it didn’t have to make sense, they were just living the dream and people seemed to like watching them.

I don’t want to spoil it all, but there were a great many of little details that added to the overall comedy. I wondered how they’d make their entrance, on their bikes of course!

The show started at their beginning, they weaved a tale of baby photos into their careers and how they met, including Si’s tendancies to injure himself at every possible opportunity. Their tour has been going for a while now and they’re clearly very comfortable with the material, including some good comic timing that didn’t help my laughing muscles the next morning ( Si: “What happened was”).

They often made mention of their appearances on Saturday Kitchen, one of the TV shows that my PVR watches on my behalf each week, and how doing that live was the most awake they’d ever been. So much so they pulled two unfortunate ‘volunteers’ out of the audience to sit on stage and be fed at their side table, very cringeworthy.

Judging by the number of recipes in the show’s programme, I suspect they rotated through the various meals as the mood took them. The programme was a mixed bag of glossy photos of the two messing about in front of the camera, a series of well written recipes and a few show notes. A recipe for Caldo Verde stood out as including “First take a small glass of port. Drink it, so that you’re in the right mood. Next take..”.

The first one they cooked was a prawn curry with coconut with Kerala Parathas. I’d not met this style of bread before and I made a note to try them at home when I next had a curry because they looked like a fun change to rice, naan or chapati.

As with many live cooking demonstrations, it’s hard to see the details of what they were doing from the back of the auditorium, so they wheeled out a cameraman. NEC Good Food Show quality it was not, with the camera man getting his cable tied up in the set and generally breaking things, but you could still just about follow it (give or take some Jamie Oliver style speed panning) and it added to the overall entertainment.

Dave Myers is probably the undisputed lord of the inappropriate simile, some better than we got in Red Dwarf. Funny stuff from the winner of celebrity mastermind, but I would question likening shavings of parmesan to a chiropadist’s floor..

If they haven’t got to your neck of the woods yet then I’d thoroughly recommend you tried to get tickets to go, tis a good night out. Especially with a G&T in the interval.

Yesterday was particularly good fun, experiencing some of the best that Yorkshire has to offer to the casual tourist. I got across to Ikley to catch up with some friends I hadn’t seen in a while and we took the opportunity to stretch our legs along the Wharfe for a couple of hours. Bolton Abbey wasn’t terribly busy, but the overcast clouds were probably keeping more than a few people away. The Pavilion cafe was doing reasonable trade though, so it can’t have been all bad. I didn’t see the field that the Hairy Bikers took over though, I’ll just have to go back.

Bodgers Workshop at Bolton Abbey

One new addition between the Pavilion and the Strid were a few carpenters demonstrating traditional woodworking techniques in the appropriately named Bodgers Workshop. They had some good approximations of Stags made out of a few logs and appropriate branches and had a few foot powered tools, including a lathe.

The Strid

P and H produced some excellent banana cake at our half way point by Barden Bridge, a recipe I intend to approximate soon, and the remaining miles just raced past, though I remain uncertain whether we were propelled by conversation or the banana cake. Still, about 7km in about 2 hours was a good morning’s stroll by one of my favourite rivers.

The Wharfe

What better way to continue proceedings than afternoon tea at Bettys Cafe in Ilkley, which to my shame I didn’t know even existed. The queue for tables was surprisingly short, shorter still because we kept just popping back to the shop counter at the front to get just another two Fat Rascals or an accidental Stem Ginger Cake. Yorkshire’s little corner of Switzerland delivered as great an experience as ever, the breakfast Rosti was a popular choice, although the Macaroni looked very comforting and the triple decker club sandwich was impressively presented. A pot of their own tearoom blend tea was a lighter and most agreeable accompaniment to the meal and went well with the sweet onion chutney I had (expertly dolloped by our waitress) with lunch.

The afternoon was spent with a bit more 6 nations on the tv and discussing cameras and a few details of P’s epic cross-Switzerland walk he’s planning later on this summer, so it’s looking like my holidays are pretty well sewn up for this year.