Blogtober 2024 : Day 3

I had such a lovely day yesterday catching up with my friend Lucy (she of the blog Attic24) in her home town of Skipton in North Yorkshire.  It’s always worth the drive from Winwick to Skipton (about an hour and a half) and I drive home buzzing with the joy of spending time in the company of someone who understands completely what it is like to live a life immersed in yarn, blogging and online communities.  I really wouldn’t have it any other way!

After brunch in a local cafe, we headed out of town to Bolton Abbey, a place where we have been many times before together and is just the right distance away to be a good place to walk but not too far when I have the long drive home again later.

It was a bit of a grey day; no rain for once, thank goodness, but overcast and we were glad of our jackets.  The leaves are just starting to turn and in another few weeks, I can imagine that this row of trees will look stunning as the green turns to gold.

Whilst we were debating which circular route to do, we counted out our options and one of them was to walk a particular route backwards.  Oh no, we weren’t going to physically walk backwards, but instead walk the other way around to the way that we usually go, starting at the end and finishing at the start.  It’s not really backwards at all as there are no rules to say which way round you should go and someone else might say that the usual way we walk is backwards for them, but it still feels odd to go in a different direction sometimes.  Do you ever feel that when you’re out walking?

We headed out from the car park towards Bolton Abbey, walking all the way down the car park and across a big field to some steps up to the road and the gate into the Abbey grounds.  I couldn’t resist this photo.  Whatever birds made these marks, they look like they had a fabulous time paddling in the mud!

We don’t usually come to the abbey from this direction and even somewhere familiar can look different when you come to it from another angle, can’t it?  I always wonder what the building would have looked like in the 1600s until the Dissolution of the Monasteries by King Henry VIII (basically, he decided to disband all the places where Catholic priests, monks and nuns would live, seize their assets and destroy the buildings – we’ve had some jolly Kings and Queens over the years!), particularly because I am absolutely fascinated by ornate sculpture and stonemasonry, and I think it would have looked wonderful.

These gravestones are very old now, some of them hundreds of years old, and there’s a modern graveyard at the bottom of the hill.  Lucy and I were smiling as she recalled her children asking when they were very small if they would be walking on dead people if they walked by the stones, and I can remember similar conversations with my girls!

As we walked on down the hill towards the river, we walked under a sweet chestnut tree.  Not to be confused with horse chestnuts, these nuts can be roasted (on an open fire … got you singing? 🙂 ), although I have tried them and they are not for me.  I don’t know what I expected them to taste like, but I didn’t like what they did taste like! 🙂  They look pretty, though, don’t they?

At the bottom of the hill is the bridge across the river …

You can see that the river is running quite high and fast – we’ve had so much rain recently, probably the tail end of the terrible hurricanes that have hit the US (I do hope that if you live in that area, you are safe and well).

I know that I’ve spoken about them before and if you’re a regular reader of Lucy’s blog, you’ll have seen plenty of photos over the years of the stepping stones that run parallel with this bridge.  I’m always slightly temped to try to walk them … and then I think about the inconvenience of falling in and being soaked for the rest of the day and I take the footbridge instead.

The water was covering the stepping stones, there is no way I would want to even try walking across those when the water is like that!

On the other side of the bridge, the water tumbled over some large rocks before rushing away.  It looked like Guinness, or perhaps fizzy dandelion and burdock in a glass 🙂  I always thought it was peat that gave it that colour, but Lucy says it’s iron from the rocks; the river is that colour all the way along.

We spent ages looking at the way that the water flowed over the rocks before breaking into foam; we could see air bubbles under the water and it was mesmerising to watch them.  It looked like toffee when it’s just been made, before it goes hard, or perhaps a boiled sweet.  We couldn’t remember what the amber-coloured boiled sweeties with air bubbles inside that we will have both eaten when we were younger were called, but perhaps you can?

Once over the bridge, it was a looooong walk up the hill back to the cafe and car park.  We remembered why we usually do this walk the other way around!  It was good for my back, though (Zelda, I did read your comment! 😉 ) and we were very ready for a cup of tea (coffee in Lucy’s case) and an extremely good piece of chocolate brownie which we shared during more companionable chat … I think that one of the best gifts this life gives us is to have a good friend to drink tea and chat with.  I’ve got more than one, and that makes me very blessed.

I’m sure this photo should have been better presented and arranged, but we had just walked up a flipping big hill and that chocolate brownie was shouting VERY loudly! 🤣

It was still just warm enough to sit outside and we watched the clouds above the trees over the river grow darker and darker as the leaves glowed in the brief sunshine.  I just missed the very brightest glowing moment, but I hope you can get a sense of how beautiful the trees looked.  Looking for the extraordinary in the everyday, eh?

Our tea and coffee finished, it was time to head home.  Never my favourite part of the day but as I used to tell my girls’ small friends when they didn’t want to go home after being at our house to play, you have to go home so that you can come back again another day 🙂

I’ll be back tomorrow! xxx