a walk on the wild side

Although cycling has been our principal activity this summer, Paula and I have usually gone for a walk on the days when we’ve not been cycling. Most of these walks have been short, just a couple of miles, but one day recently, Paula told me that she wanted to do a longer walk. I decided immediately on an appropriate route.

A few years ago, we’d followed a path leading from Eamont Bridge, a small village that straddles the middle of the three road crossings of the River Eamont about a mile south of Penrith. That seemed like an ideal choice. I documented a walk along this river, also starting in Eamont Bridge, in Water from the Mountains, but that walk followed the river downstream on the north side. Our intended route this time started on the south side of the bridge and, while not actually following the river, headed in a general upstream direction.

Because we hadn’t come this way for quite a few years, I didn’t recognize anything, which probably explains why, when we arrived in Yanwath, a small hamlet next to the railway, it was at a different point from the one I remembered. However, while we’d walked along the main road to the next village, Tirril, the last time we came this way, on this occasion we spotted a signpost indicating a public footpath to Sockbridge Mill, and Sockbridge is a hamlet that is contiguous with Tirril, so we followed it.

At first, the path followed the edge of fields, but after a short distance, we came to a stile that led into the narrow wooded area on the banks of the river. I hadn’t planned to document the entire route, but the path was quite tricky to negotiate, so I took the following photos of Paula, who was walking ahead of me:

We eventually reached a footbridge across the river, which led to a footpath that we could follow back to Penrith. I took two photographs from the footbridge, first looking upstream:

…then downstream:

Note the low water level, the result of an exceptionally dry summer, although this river is capable of unleashing catastrophic floods.

There isn’t much to see on the return footpath, except where it crosses the railway via a pair of tunnels:

These tunnels probably date back to 1846, when the original line through Penrith was opened by the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, which almost immediately became a small part of the much larger London and North Western Railway. The first tunnel passes underneath a loop once used by goods trains to allow the much faster passenger trains to overtake. I can still recall seeing old LNWR steam locomotives, which we nicknamed ‘grunts’, waiting in this loop in the early 1960s, so they would have been pretty ancient by then (the LNWR had become a part of the London Midland and Scottish Railway in 1923). This procedure is probably unnecessary on the modern railway system, which no longer carries slow goods trains, although I don’t know whether the rails have now been lifted. This is a closer look at the entrance to the second tunnel, which passes underneath the main line:

A good example of solid Victorian engineering/workmanship.

And that was our ‘longer walk’, although we still had to negotiate junction 40 on the M6 motorway, which is quite a tedious exercise nowadays for pedestrians.