Day 13 - Steamed

Having arrived at the Lion Inn on Blakey Ridge early in the afternoon yesterday, and with a thirst on, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the title of today's post relates to the consumption of a great deal of ale, and indeed we had a few, but we weren't that far gone. Nor does this reference the fact that we left the pub this morning to find ourselves in the middle of a cloud. So read on...

In fact, there's not much I can tell you about the morning, as there wasn't anything we could see. To illustrate the point, here's a picture of Mike by the sign to the delightfully named and allegedly picturesque Great Fryupdale. I say allegedly because, as you will note, there's no way we could verify the fact.

So, before I describe the afternoon's much more successful walking, I'm going to digress, and tell you about something I learned last night in the pub. I was chatting to a bloke who claimed to be a Grouse Winder. Now I initially assumed, as you would, that this was local dialect for a gamekeeper, but it's not so! I wouldn't normally ply a chap with drink to ferret out his secrets, but it was Mike's turn to pay the bar bill, so I quickly abandoned my principles and got the fellow comprehensively trousered. This is what I learned:

Most people have probably never seen a grouse in the wild. In fact, if they've seen one anywhere other than on the front of a bottle of scotch, it's probably in the TV ad for the very same whisky, and they will have assumed that the bird in the ad in question has been very badly animated. Wrong. The grouse is, in reality, a badly animated bird. Well, "sort of" bird...

It turns out that in 1899, with hostilities escalating towards the second Boer war between the UK (and allies) and the Orange Free State, the Brits decided they needed a new and devastating secret weapon, the task of developing which was given to Major Tangible-Hairpiece of the Electric Light Brigade, who worked for several years with only the help of his assistant, Sergeant Merkin, of the same regiment. Their objective was to develop a bomb which could fly just above ground level, into the enemy forces front lines, before spontaneously exploding. The final fruit of their labours, cobbled together with the remains of a pheasant from the regimental kitchen, a hand grenade, and most of the inside of a cuckoo clock stolen from the junior officer's mess was the prototype of what we know today as the grouse.

That's right, the grouse is in fact a late Victorian example of a reanimated bionic bird. Unfortunately for Tangible-Hairpeice, his invention was too late to be used in the Boer war by a matter of days, and he eventually died penniless and unknown in Southern Austalia having fled the country in shame. However, this wasnt the end of the story for his creation, which was further refined over the years by a coalition between the league against cruel sports, the upper class twit association and the vegetarian society into what we know today as the modern grouse. A clockwork powered bird, which can fly at no more than three feet high, for twenty five metres or so, all the while making a ludicrous noise, before finally exploding. Its unique niche applications being in providing something that herbivores can shoot at without damaging their consciences, and which upper class twits can claim to have bagged despite the fact that, as shootists, most of them couldn't hit a cows arse with a banjo.

The grouse winder, then, has the task of regularly ensuring that the birds are fully wound up and, on and after August 12th, that they are properly armed and will explode in a satisfactory manor whenever someone so much as looks at them.

To get back to the walking, it's fair to say that by the time we had covered ten miles and sought shelter in the Cafe in Glaisdale, we were wetter that an Essex girl's T-shirt on a club 18-30 holiday. Fortunately, after several pots of tea and some excellent pork pies the three of us (we were accompanied for most of today by Phil) were a little drier, and ready to hit the road again under cleared skies.

A highlight for me today was the station at Grosmont, which is under the care of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway (used as the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter films). Our arrival being timed so well that we saw two trains! A final trek uphill to the moors has brought us to tonight's stop, at Intake farm in Littlebeck, leaving us twelve miles tomorrow to the finish of our walk, and a well deserved celebratory ice cream!