Upper Ribblesdale was in angry mood.  The mountains were cleaved into ridges by grey mist-banks, borne on the cold easterly winds; the trees, deprived long since of their clothing of leaves stood alone or in open groups, naked and miserable; the brown moors even seemed to sulk at the day, and here and there terraced limestone, dirty grey, ran with water.  There were hamlets that huddled as if sheltering each other, but with scant success, and isolated farms that pressed their stone sides against the wind and the rain.  The road was hard; interminable little hills ascended to points where the free wind swept across unhampered, and where the rain it bore along in a horizontal track stung like a whip.

I have seen Ribblesdale like a gem in summer, all gleaming under warm skies and kindly sunshine.  The moorlands, brown as they always are, have been alive with living beings like the virtuous curlew and the hoarse grouse; lambs have skipped and dozed and bleated with thin throats, and their black-faced parents have foraged the coarse, spare grass with undisturbed tranquillity.  In summer time the riverside fields have yielded their lot – hay and wheat, and where triumph from the encroaching moorland has been greater, other crops have flourished.  The trees too, even those isolated survivors in windy spaces, have held leaves to show the world they live, and round about the farms men and women, with noise and bustle and many a shout have plied their endless fight against nature.  Little winds from west and south have helped us up the dale, and we have greeted the country folks with a smile or a ‘good day’.

This day on the threshold of February made us wonder if summer could ever come here again.  Perhaps it was that human folk had given up their losing fight and gone away to the warmer plains for ever.  We had no place there, the wind seemed to cry, but we continued just the same, for man can defy the elements and push himself against their will.  He loved to do it sometimes; in the creeping, tortured road beneath us he had set a permanent seal to his defiance; down below, in the dale, his road was strips of metal on which his vehicles ran with speed that defied the very easterly gales.  We met a burly farmer down the road, and knew then that Man only rested behind stone walls.  Spring and the bleating, frolic-some lambkin would come again; the sparse fields would nourish growing things that spelt life to man and beast, and the bustling and day-long toil would come with the sun.

There were places in these hills that never heard the wind, that knew no light but the occasional candle of the timid humans who knew their sufferance was only in hours what ages had built and ages did not destroy.  Now, when Winter ruled above, there was no place for man; only swirling water that did not stay, and darkness that never moved.  There were vast places where light or man would never go, and in them beauty grew unknown…….fated never to be seen.

Can it be wondered then, that as we slowly pressed our way to Ribble Head, the elements and these thoughts occupied our minds.  We had been out at morning, and had faced those elements all the day except for a rest at Worston near Clitheroe.  Dusk overtook us at Ribble Head, where we turned for Hawes, along a metalled road that was abandoned to the night.  A good, metalled road, yet deserted as the windy fell tops themselves.  Man had graded it carefully, lest his road across those hills should not bear its worth, but his winding tilts were devilish hard that day, and we were glad to walk long stretches of it.  There was snow near the summit and the cold rain held sleet.  We passed the fork-road where through the mist a single finger-post pointed ‘Dent’ towards the northward wastes, then in a little while a window gleamed its light and we sought shelter and tea there, at the ‘Inn’ on Newby Head.

A hundred years had brought two changes there.  We had tea at an old, misused sideboard in a large room.  In the open hearth a peat fire burned but did not spread its warmth to us; the floor was flagged and sand-sprinkled; the roof (or ceiling rather), was supported by massive beams of oak; food lay on the bare table – the remains of a meal; and three young children crawled on the dilapidated rug that constituted the only floor covering or ran up and down the sanded floor with iron-shod clogs.  The two men-folks were busy giving each other haircuts all the hour we were there, while the woman; middle aged wife of one, sat sewing clothing that would long have passed out of ken in town.  The two changes – a Ribble bus company timetable, and a fine wireless set that gleamed new in such a careless, ancient room.  There, at 1,400ft, miles from the nearest village and isolated by gale-swept moorlands, we heard the sports results from throughout Britain, the weather report from Manchester, and the news bulletin relayed from London.

We went out from that big room cold, but the outer void was colder.  It was black, welded into a frozen whole, in which the Nor’easter played unhampered.  For a space we could not pierce the black because our acetylene lamps had frozen; the first blue flame announced our success at last, but we had only shifted the zone of activity – we almost cried with frost-bitten fingers.  Our haste to get down to the sheltered valley, five miles down the night received a jolt when brakes too easily jammed the wheels, which slid quickly off the perpendicular.  The road had become a sheet of black ice.  Two miles below the wind growled to a silence and the road was again wet.  Rain began.  The steep end of Hawes with windows pale through curtained light assured us we had come to rock bottom at the head of Wensleydale.  We only required that assurance of Hawes, and we left the bulk of its one main street behind with less than a glance.  We crossed the dale to Hardraw.  The Buttertubs Pass begins its ascent at Hardraw (you can hear the roar of the Force from the buttressed road); I had crossed the pass once, on a broiling Bank Holiday weekend, when crawling cars crossed too and people covered the moors almost like maggots on choice Limburger after long isolation, but not so admirably camouflaged as the insects are.  We expected nothing moving on the pass, except the northeaster, and its sleet, and we were right.  The gradient is easiest from Hardraw, but at a thousand feet we reached snow.  A sludge at first till the Pass proper, then the snow deepened, hung on our feet, jammed our wheels.  The going got hard at 1,500ft, for the Nor’easter was gusty with frozen sleet slashing at us, and the deepening drifts under-wheel.  A mist came down or else we climbed up to it, and our lights came back at us.  The road then was buried with nothing to tell its boundary from the moorland bog, but the faint track of a cart that had crossed hours before.  We were lucky, for that was our only guide to the summit.  Our slow plod was rewarded with a final drift three or four feet deep through which we almost swam to the cart track, faint but still faithfully present on the other side.  That was the summit at 1,726ft.

The descent began, hardly easier, but for a time sheltered.  I could smoke a cigarette at last!  The snow underfoot got us in the legs which became heavy, wearied.  On the right a grey gaping Nothing kept us to our solitary cart tracks; on the left the tousled white of the bank must be eyed with suspicion.  Once, in a flash of memory I recognised a landmark that had seated a motoring party at tea one August afternoon, and to test my memory I found a loose piece of independent rock and threw it into a snow cornice.  It sped through, awakening a hollow cataclysm of noise in the depths of the hill.  “One of the Buttertubs”, I said to Fred, who grimaced and suggested a closer attention to the friendly cart tracks.  The cart tracks certainly saved us from complications.  Half a mile further down the road shook itself clear of snow and slid down like a precipice to the Swaledale road at Thwaite, just above Muker.  Four miles, four hours!

The next three miles climbing round Kisdon Fell put the finishing touch to us.  We admit quite frankly that we were ‘knocked’.  Cathole Inn at Keld was hailed with relief.  It was built with the one purpose to receive us on that Saturday night.  The dales-folk knew their business; cyclists often arrive like we did, starved, tired, wet, and no questions are asked – requirements are known.  There was a fire in the front room, deep armchairs, books, and from the blackened roof-beams huge bacons were swinging, the table was very old and heavy, and on one snug end of it a festive supper was laid.  Various food and good, with strong coffee to stimulate yawning reaction; the food was home produce or stored for this very night – for us, we felt.  The dalesfolk make you feel like that.

With half an hour to midnight we went to bed.  Up above, on Buttertubs, the nor’easter was driving sleet into the drift.  A grey mist possessed the wilds; the tracks of a single farm cart lumbered over the pass……… maybe now they were buried under the new snow.  At the undefined roadside slender cornices of snow hung over silent pits to launch the wandering sheep into oblivion.  We went to sleep………

The bedroom window abutted over the road.  Fields of wearied green beyond, and moorland fellsides hugging them within narrow limits; the sky was grey and cold like the mist had been last night, and the nor’easter was still blowing, not so hard, perhaps, but the wind was only resting and in a few hours would renew his power – perhaps with rain or snow – or sleet.  February was here now.  Yesterday had still been the first month of the year, but today was a definite stride ahead.  Old people and weaklings dread the month, for February kills, but Spring is cradled too, and lower in the dales the snowdrop – the crocus too if the month is kindly – will push through the winter earth.  There was a stride forward in that grey Sunday morning, for February had entered the dales.

The ‘Cathole’ did us well.  Breakfast was the result of years of close study as to the basic needs of cyclists about to cross Tan Hill.  Not that Tan Hill is such a terror to face; it is hard – any mountain crossing must be hard, and it is long, but we knew that deep snow lay on the way – untrodden, maybe, and the breakfast fare laid for our assimilation was calculated to help us, to fortify us.  The threat in the sky came to pass at that breakfast table; rain settled down, and capes and sou’westers came out.  We faced the mountains again after the merest introduction to the infant Swale, bawling along on its deep-set course down to gentler meads.

Progress at first was not severe, for after the stony road had taken one leap out of Swaledale head, it settled down to a gentle tilt along a moorland depression – Stonesdale – to the snowline.  The snowline was definite; one minute the road was clear, the rest we floundered across a drift, and thereafter the Cathole breakfast proved its worth.  There are some old ruins at Ladgill; we missed the road and found the ruins, for no friendly cart tracks, not even single footsteps, had left their marks on virgin snow.  We found a ditch too, with a stream underneath, and the water was cold to the feet.  The road regained, our pace settled down to a long slog, with many a stop to scrape the stuffed snow from between the mudguards and the wheel, or to debate which was road in the unbroken expanse of white.  The rain ceased.  Then ahead a black speck showing against the snowy folds of moorland resolved itself into Tan Hill Inn, the highest in England (1,732ft) and we reached the fork road just beside it.  From this point we anticipated a long series of swoops to the Vale of Eden, but the snow was the best scotch of the day.  Riding was a farce, unless it was done for fun down the steeper parts, for heavy drifts across the road always concluded in a hectic skid.  Snow is soft; often it received us hands first in wild dives, but it is never conducive to speed unless skis are used.  We didn’t carry skis, but shall do so next time!  A wild descent round an elbow called Taylor Rigg placed us in lower, clearer climes, but the road wriggled uphill again almost to its original altitude.  Views were blotted by the grey mist that hung two hundred yards ahead, waiting for night to call it nearer.  Just above Barras the road became visible underneath a thinner coating, and we slipped down to freedom in an exhilarating glide.  Kirkby Stephen at 2.30pm, five hours, 14 miles.  We thought we had done well !

We had lunch in Kirkby Stephen, and changed our stockings, our only contribution to a dryer existence, for the rest of our clothing would have to ‘dry’ on.  At half past three we toiled up the long climb on the Sedbergh road.  After that we drifted; the nor’easter had regained its old power, but now pushed us from dead behind; the road was all falling down a winding stream-fed dale with billowy fells bright with snow-tops, couchant on each side.  It was beautiful.  At Cautley the spectacular waterfall, Cautley Spout, lying back in a ravine, was a glassy line of spate, then we drifted through Sedburgh, and sat back waiting, it seemed, for village after village to be ‘lapped’ back, and for familiar scenes as lovely as ever to unroll themselves and roll up again behind till we came again.  The final stage of Lunesdale was by lamplight, we climbed up through Lancaster to tea at Scotforth.  Contrast?  Morning miles; 14 in five hours: afternoon; 43 in two and a half hours !

The going continued good, and Preston receded to Walton-le-Dale.  At Bamber Bridge Fred forked off for his Wigan; I endured many thousands of setts towards Bolton in company with a Manchester lad who was ‘all out’.  The kind of fellow who rides a ‘stripped’ machine and gears up to 85.  He had done Blackpool the previous afternoon in half the time we had crossed the hills from Newby Head to Keld.  I crawled with him for many miles enduring his talk of a speed he could not then even strive for, and at length, as my way turned from his, I decided that he would never see the Dales by his own power.  Blackpool, perhaps, but………………….

Post:  This October 1929 story of Charlie’s has an unexpected 1956 update!  (I couldn’t have put all this in Charlie’s books because they are about him, but on this website I can include other relevant items, so here goes).  The four people standing before you at Easter 1956 just below the summit of Moel Sych (2,713ft), are left to right, Fred Dunster, H.H. Willis, myself David Warner, aged 16, and ‘Bart’ a gentleman with the surname Bartholomew.  We were all attending the very first – inaugural – RSF Easter Meet, and the photograph was taken by Fred Dunster’s time delay camera on his tripod.  I should explain that this mountain is a peculiar shape, in that the space to the right of this summit is a pretty sheer fall of well over a 1000ft down to a small lake Llyn Lluncaws. Charlie has had other adventures on this mountain at other times, including one where his wife-to-be nearly slid over the edge, complete with bike, a very frightening moment. This incident is described in full in an article dated 1932, repeated in Charlie’s book Volume Two, ‘Further Adventures’, page 101.  In this day and age Charlie would be described as foolhardy for tackling this crossing in the weather prevailing, especially as there was no mountain rescue teams in their times.  Maybe he was lucky to only just contract pneumonia and get over it six weeks later!

Behind the Ranges took place on the weekend of 5/6th of October, 1929.  The weather across those two days is described by Charlie in his diary in one word, ‘Deluge’.  It also involved a total mileage of 170 miles over the two days, and his companion would have been one of the We.R 7.  One other historical point, Fred Dunster later became the Rough Stuff Fellowship Secretary, serving the Club for some years.

Llanrhaiadr-yn-Mochnant !  To you, my reader, just another of those atrocious Welsh names perhaps, a name heard or read sometime, somewhere, and forgotten; a name unknown to the heedless world; a place unseen except to an occasional wanderer or a traveller straying beyond his latitude.   But to a comrade and I a place of substance, a reality deep in the heart of the mountains; a place not easy of access; to our dreams – and now to our memories – a place of “laughter and inn-fires”.  Reader, look behind the ranges and behold – Llanrhaiadr-yn-Mochnant !

It so happened one fitful Saturday morning early in October, that I turned my wheel against the wind towards those distant inn-fires and the joys of comradeship that I should find at Llanrhaiadr.  There was a hard tussle, a battle royal across the plains to Chester; a battle broken only by a stop for lunch at a quaint Cheshire home-stead.  Though skies gloomed Nature was in a gay mood, for in the park of Eaton Hall Autumn had traced a gorgeous pattern.  Man too, had done a share; the Golden Gates glittered with a new gilding and all the lesser gates were newly silvered.  Life was there – a grey squirrel lurking for prey, red squirrels, gorgeously plumed pheasants, and, of course, prolific bunnies scuttling away on every side at my approach.  I cheated the wind by seeking the shelter of the border hills to Cefn-y-Bedd, and gave way to the temptation of footpaths – in Nant-y-Ffrith.

Nant-y-Ffrith is always beautiful.  In a land of exquisite valleys none ever seem to be quite like Nant-y-Ffrith.  Summer lingers late there, and all the green livery of summer was there that gloomy Saturday afternoon; only along the topmost ridges Autumn had started to tinge the green.  A month yet ere this even-hued seclusion would be turned into a riot of living colour.  While I still lingered there the drowsy sky filled up and rain began to fall.  Head to a wind-driven torrent, I crossed the open moor from Bwlch Gwyn, and descending into the Llandegla ‘basin’, I sought shelter and tea at homely Ypento.  There I fretted an hour and a half away, waiting till I cared to wait no longer.  The rain had settled in.

I crossed the Horseshoe Pass.  There was a mist up there and drenching rain and with it a wildness that overawed me – a lonely desolation on the erstwhile busy Horseshoe Pass !  During the descent a not uncommon, but no less undesirable incident occurred.  My brakes failed to grip the wet rims as I was approaching the double loop of the ‘horseshoe’:  I grimly watched the front wheel splice the water on the road with increasing impetus, and the steeply cambered bend rush upon me.  My fingers strained at both cables, until, on the very bend itself the brake blocks creaked complainingly and froze to the rim – the wheels locked, and in a skid I swung round the bend and found myself gliding easily round the second twist.  The nick of time !  Thence all was well.  The mist was above now, and the mountain slopes were revealed aglow with effusive dyes.  Down in the Vale it was dusk and Llangollen was lamplit and snugly wet with people hurrying along the streets or stood in groups in sheltered places…..  I left Llangollen, facing precipitous ‘Aullt-y-Body’ with, ever before me, the picture of ‘laughter and inn-fires’ at Llanrhaiadr-yn-Mochnant, still far behind the ranges…….

As I tramped the long steep lane I wondered if all this was worth the while, and cursed myself for the doubt in me.  The pall of darkness descended; I lit my little oil lamp and laughed at its impotent flicker – laughed at it and wondered why I hadn’t got a better lamp – laughed as I struggled on through filth and ooze, or as I stumbled over a stony outcrop, and wondered again – why I laughed !  Near the ragged drawn-out summit a belt of leafless trees screamed in the wind, and there, in hazy silhouette, I saw a horseman stopped still, weird and unreal.  What an experience that was – the steep road and driving rain, the screaming trees, the cloudy darkness, the silhouetted rider.  As I stood there taking it all in, the horseman moved and then with a clatter of hoofs he passed me and I was alone again, tramping, tramping……… tramping.

For just a short time I was able to essay a ride – more of a skid and a jolt – until the road tilted downwards so steeply that I dismounted again.  I knew Allt-y-Body of old !  Down I ran, down till the hazy lights of the Vale of Ceiriog shone below through the rain, down again till the houses – the lights – the warm glow of the wet main street  of Glyn Ceiriog, and people again and……. the road, the dark, wet, silent road once more.

It was a good road along the upper Glyn Valley, hedged by the shadows of mountains, edged by trees, by rocks, and crossed by streams that babbled in the night.  Up and down and sinuously round bends it ran, past occasional farmsteads and through one or two dimly shining hamlets, each sheltering its little knot of chatting men who shouted a musical “Cymric” Good Night! to me as I passed.  There was comfort to me in each of the courteous calls !  In the narrow depths of that valley the wind was but a low murmur sounding from the pines above, and travel was easy and loaded with glamour.  Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog was dimly lit from the diamond windows of its two inns that face each other across the village square, marked the end of the road, and in one of those inns I rested and refreshed myself – not in the ‘flowing bowl’.  I talked with the company, a grizzled group of mountain men who were playing dominoes for pints of beer and laconically passing the days-old news around.  There was one lank individual with a weathered face and muscle in every movement of his six-foot body who told me he had tramped the Berwyns for thirty years, who knew their highland whims and every treacherous yard of them.  The Berwyns were his; in the telling of tales he displayed a love, a passionate love for those upland wastes with all their many-headed moods, and I admired that love, envied him of it !  It must be a great thing to know and to love with understanding, such things as that broad ribbon of mountain peaks, the Berwyns.

Once again the shrouding uselessness of the cape, and this time the last of the ranges; the last, the hardest, crossed by a lane that really was no more than a track at times, a heap of stones here – a morass there – a puzzle-in-the-dark  with the snare of the great invisible Berwyns as a trap to the unwary.  It was a trap of steep falls and branching lanes that led to the cold heart of them.  The Berwyns heart is cold, even with the lives of men who love them.  Wild….. a grim land of mists and steeps and echoing nothingness…..

There came a long, steep climb with but the absurd glimmer of a little oil lamp to light a yellow pin-patch of the grey blankness that swirled around.  I felt myself breaking up like an old ship near the summit, for, as later events proved, I was in none too fit a condition, but I pulled myself together as I thought of the last five miles and the end of the road…..”laughter……  and inn-fires”.  At the summit I mounted, and in a reckless mood probably born of weariness, I plunged out of the grey into the black mouth of a sunken lane diverging on the left.  Trusting to intuition (an untrustworthy sense at best), and to some knowledge of this country, I crashed along over loose stones which more than once threw me into an alarming skid in the slime that followed.  Once the evil glimmer of water ahead made my heart leap, but in a twinkling I was beyond it with nothing more than a cold douche over my already saturated feet.  Many other lanes converging into this one, once made me fear that I had gone wrong, a dread thought in the exhausted condition I was in and with a mountainous nowhere on all sides, but I received an exiting assurance when the road dropped away like a chasm below me, and jamming both brakes I jumped away from the saddle.  Well enough I know that descent !

And so came a last steep fall to a little lighted street – Llanrhaiadr-yn-Mochnant.  I was not disappointed; welcome blazed in the lights of the inn, and soon I was enjoying a scrub, shaking the dirt and the damp of four ranges from me.  Even while I was so employed, in came my comrade as wet as I had been, with a story as adventurous as mine – an afternoon’s hard ride, and – the ranges.  He spoke with a voice that burned enthusiasm as fuel and glowed with love for a game he had chosen as his.  Like the mountain man of the inn at Llanarmon a great love was his…… and he was not alone in it.  That night , as never before, I had felt the love of it, and even in weariness, the joys of it.

Then down to company…….. comradeship…….. laughter…..and inn-fires !

*         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *

It was still raining when we awoke next morning; it was still raining at breakfast, and when we left the friendly shelter of the inn it was raining still.  Over the bulky mountains the rain-clouds hung and the sky was cold and grey.  Our chosen route climbed constantly, with the swollen Rhaiadr stream chattering below and the slow fires of Autumn burning overall.  We agreed that everything was lovely.  In four miles the road ended at a farm, in a complete cul-de-sac, and there we viewed Pistyll Rhaiadr, “The Spout of the Cataract”, thundering in spate.  I will leave it to John ‘Ceiriog’ Hughes, the Glyn Valley poet of a hundred years ago to describe it in his own Cymric tongue.  The translation is George Borrow’s:

“Foaming and frothing from mountainous height

Roaring like thunder the Rhyadr falls;

Though its silvery splendour the eye may delight,

Its fury the heart of the bravest appals”.

Our chosen way was a hard way, and seemed a grim way too – over the highest Berwyn.  The outlook was repelling, a constant downpour, dense mist above, and steaming hillsides – but Autumn was there in all its beauty, and the tangled bracken seemed to leap in tongues of still flame to meet the curling clouds.

A ‘short cut’ soon led us into difficulties; a promising path that ended in dripping bracken, and the subsequent performances ere we reached the true track involved climbing walls, crossing a swollen stream and clambering up a steep slope.  Our feet were drenched by then, but that, we soliloquised, was inevitable sooner or later.  The track was good and we enjoyed a long walk uphill with the russet and gold of the bracken on each hand, and the valley behind, with Pistyll Rhaiadr a fleck of white shining through the rain.  But the track ended with dramatic suddenness, and threw us away from Autumn into a land of bog and brown grass and outcropping rock, a desolate scene as grand in its barrenness as the valley behind in its loveliness.  Not the least sign remained to show us the track, and wide bog-areas, sluggish, slimy streams, and tough tangly heather gave us a foretaste of that to come.  We struggled up to a ridge, and found ourselves gazing on a dark little lake bounded by reeds on three sides, and on the far side by scree – below the mist-capped crags of Moel Sych, Berwyns highest peak.  Picture it if you can, reader: picture we two, the only things in that wild region, gazing in awed stupification at all around us, solitudes seeming infinite in grey mists on looming heights, and silence weirdly profound below the dull roar of the wind on the crags above.

Mutely we moved on, skirting the tarn (Llyn Llyncaws) and peering anxiously at the crags – looking for the green ledge that would mark our path.  We knew it was there, somewhere, and we had to go that way – the only way a bicycle could be taken across Cader Berwyn.  We detected it, a faint zig-zag of green on the sombre grey, from the top of the scree to the ridge.  Only a year ago we had traversed it, after a wearying search and an endless trail over long bog-slopes.  This time we meant to make no mistake; we struck out boldly up the scree in a direct climb.  We soon   discovered that there was no easy way…… a thousand feet of sheer desperation on that scree !  From yielding sod and slimy bog-holes, rock and shale cropped out, became the crowning difficulty, and the scramble became a struggle, the struggle a crawl, till oft-times we mounted on hands and knees inches at a time, with the bikes somehow across our backs.  I grit my teeth now – as I did then – when I think of it, the times we slipped and cut our knees or barked our shins till we ignored the pain in the general exhaustion, or in the greater pain of a collapse beneath the bikes.  Our fingers often tore up fugitive sods wedged in the crevices as we grasped them in the effort to save ourselves, and the cumber-some bikes often added to our confusion by bringing us down heavily, whilst all the time the untiring rain streamed over us.  We reached the ledge, and that was little better – infinitely more dangerous, we thought, as we warily skirted the crags and listened to loosened shale bounding down from rock to rock into the welter of mist below.

At last the ridge – the summit !  At two thousand six hundred feet we stood and watched the grey vapours now below steaming up as from a great cauldron, occasionally parting for a moment to give us a glimpse of the cliffs and dark lake below the scree.  That was all we saw, but we were impressed more there than with all the impressing scenes on that memorable weekend.

Obviously it was foolish to delay:  we were wet through and the cold wind chilled us to the bone.  Ahead now were brown wastes bounded by mists, swept by the wind, and trackless except for treacherous sheep-trails that wandered everywhere and led nowhere.  We had profited by a bitter experience of such on those bleak moors, and so, unconcerned by the blankness around, we pushed our way into a wind that sent warning spasms of cold running through us like the striking of fever in the body.  We came to a tiny stream and followed it closely, watching it gain in volume, until, to our delight, we struck a track – rough, but how infinitely easier than the miles of pitted bog behind !

Suddenly the curtain lifted, and the vast stage lay set before us – a splendid prospect of moors above moors, mountains behind mountains, red and purple and gold shining, smiling in the rain.  That was not all.  The rain ceased, the track improved, and soon our stream took us into a fertile valley with farms, fields and woods – and then sunshine, warm, beautiful sunshine.  From the desolate to the sublime !  We rattled down that track, through gates, a farmyard, across a ploughed field, over a water-splash to a road, a sunken, muddy lane, but a road – down to Llandrillo in the sweet Vale of Edeyrnion, and to the Corwen road.  We had barely reached a favourite house at Cynwyd for a late lunch when the grey ousted the blue, and the rain came down again.

There followed a bathroom scene in which towels, cold water, and massage did much to still the involuntary shivering which still racked our limbs – legacy of exhaustion and Berwyn !  The healing influence of a cosy room, a fire and tea-dinner worked wonders.  Time sped by until……….

The road again and the constant douche of rain again; the wind dead behind, making the thirty-three hilly miles to Chester comparative child’s play.  With the shining wet streets behind we pursued a lamp-lit course back to the quaint Cheshire homestead for tea.

Now a gale was blowing – and still the rain.  On the homeward side of Warrington the wind blew one of us clean of his bike, providing us with many a thrill ere a turn of the road gave us its assistance.  At Winwick we separated, my comrade for his Wigan coalfields and I for my home in the Town of Cotton.

Thus ended our search behind the Ranges.  We won through in spite of weather conditions that were fiendish, conditions that laid me low for many weeks following, for I had started with a shadow overhanging.  They called us the “dammedest fools” at home, and maybe you, my reader, will endorse the verdict.  We don’t deny they may be right, but you cannot know – they cannot know – who do not love the hills.  They may kill us, these wilds, but we shall love them.  They lash us with their fury, yet how our hearts do yearn for their very fury !  They have bound my friend and I in a tie of comradeship that took each of us through so much to meet at the hospitable inn – and to face together hell itself across Cader Berwyn.  Others had started – but just we two had faced the worst and found the best.

Reader, go across the ranges and forget not the almost forgotten name…..  Llanrhaiadr-yn-Mochnant !

[Charlie was certainly right about a ‘shadow overhanging’, he contracted pneumonia after this weekend effort, and was off his bike for seven weeks.]  

Sorrowful tones and a scraping sound assailed my ears that Sunday morning at Glandyfi, and I looked round to see Jack industriously cursing himself and wiping butter from everything in his vicinity.  It transpired that he had been sleeping on the butter all night, and half a pound of butter can be spread an amazing distance.  Sleeping bag and groundsheet received the most plastering, and I thoroughly enjoyed listening and watching Jack work.  It was a great pleasure to see him up at 8am, a most unearthly hour to his way of thinking.  And mine.

The rain was still inexhaustible, though nothing but a hard wind remained of the hurricane.  Dry, warm clothing awaited us at the farm; we breakfasted, packed up, and were streaming along into Machynlleth by ten-o-clock.  We tackled Corris Pass manfully, and marvelled at the volume of water in every stream.  The rain was merciless and nothing we wore was proof against it; ere we reached the summit we were at last nights point of saturation again, and therefore happy.  Happy with childish delight at every cold douche over our feet, at our streaming hair splayed like battered wheat over our heads.  With a swoop we descended to Minffordd at the foot of the Tal-y-Llyn Pass, and with the wind now dead behind, we found it no more than a heavy drag.  Cader Idris was a line of cliffs with a hundred streams down its hundred-crannied sides and the grey swirl of storm clouds enfolding the broken summit-crags.  Tal-y-Llyn was far behind down the valley, a gloomy reflector of the gloomy heavens.  And all the hills were lost in mists.  The run down to Dolgellau was hectic.  The brakes on the wet rims were a long ere they started to grip, and in that space we needed them.  The many bends below Cross Foxes were taken at a steep angle that, each time, left us wondering why we did not conclude on our necks.  In Dolgellau we shook ourselves much as a wet dog does after a swim, and went in a place for lunch.

After that came ten drenching miles of the Mawddach estuary to Barmouth.  To anyone who will show me ten other miles containing so much beauty I will be forever grateful.  Each mile impresses one as the culmination and the climax, the be-all and end-all of loveliness till the next takes you into further raptures, on and on, beauty transcending beauty till the mental outlook can take nothing more.  Mountains and streams, a river in-tide, rocky banks and sandy dunes, ravines, woods, flowers and roses.  These things in bewildering successiveness and other things unwritten give themselves to you on the Mawddach estuary.

From Barmouth we pursued the coast road and saw the darkness lifting from the sea.  While we watched the mad torrent fling itself across the road when a bridge could take no more at Llanbedr, the sky turned from grey to broken white, and the rain ceased after a constant deluge of thirty-six hours.  It seemed a great pleasure to ride unfettered, to towel our soaked hair and keep it dry, to feel our clothing like dish-rags no more !

Sunday, in Wales, a land as commercially dead as the proverbial dodo.  Bigots have passed a law that no-one must open a shop on Sunday, and bigots enforce strict adherence.  A meal and a newspaper are the only articles allowed for sale, and in the case of the newspaper, to go by the average Sunday paper, that is the one and only thing which might be better prohibited.  Wales, like the rest of Britain, must have its chapels and divorce court news, however !  So at Harlech we were without cigarettes – a calamity !  But we had been in Wales on many a Sunday………  a side-door of a side-street shop smuggled cigarettes to us with the air of criminals, and regaining the main street we stole past the sole policeman with skulking stride and burning cheeks.  We had evaded the law !  And what a law !

The weather improved by leaps and bounds, which was unlike Jack’s singing which always remains at a certain low level, and I had just reason to rebuke him.  Thereafter, for several miles the puritan peace of Wales was disturbed.  We had tea behind a hedge at Maentwrog, a sweet little place in one of the sweetest valleys in all Wales.  We followed our usual custom of eating the whole of our stock, and thereafter found ourselves in the terrible position of being without food on Sunday in Wales.  It was a hard climb to Blaenau Ffestiniog, but it was harder by far combing out Blaenau Ffestiniog for food.  We damned that law to the alleged inferno where bad Christians are sent, and we knocked and punched a dozen side doors almost from their hinges ere one less biased lady, influenced no doubt by our haggard looks, provisioned us, bidding us hide all we had obtained ere we went out.  To hide the stuff we got was nigh impossible, and a great bulge of brown paper covering bread was eyed by a policeman who stood at the very shop door.  We grinned in triumph that he might deduce how happy we were, and rode away.

We tackled Garddinan Pass, a 1400 ft route of unpromising, industrial beginning, but blossoming into a glorious mountain crossing with a view down the Lledr valley that leaves one sobered and thoughtful.  There rise the swelling sides of Moel Siabod in many colours, there on its little rocky eminence, hardly visible in the growing dusk, is ‘Dolwyddelen’s Tower’, and there the mazes of the Dale delight the eye, charm the mind.  “What more seek ye, Wanderers?”, quoted Jack as we tumbled down to the cork-screw bends that took us to the river Lledr.  The river Lledr in swollen pomp rushing down the rocks; the river shouting and chattering back at itself; the white fleck bearing down on the racing back of the flood; the thousand white streams pouring from the mountains in many a magnificent cataract of thirty-six hours growth; the washed shiminess of bare rock and fresh moss on cleaved rock; the roses clean and bravely blooming; the green finery of summer and all the majesty of summer in fields, in hedgerows; the scentedness of twilight – the dusky sky not yet swept clear of cloud……. “What more seek ye, Wanderers?”.

“Ye Olde Fish Inn” lent us the most beautiful campsite of our holiday; by the river the field stood and beyond sound or sight from the road.  Boy Scouts, camping a couple of fields away, sent their chief to talk to us, and he was a man after our own spirit.  Last night he had been washed out completely, and his patrol had been forced to fly to an old barn.  The river had overflown its banks, and even while we talked the work of salvage was going on.

The ground was beyond reproach, and after previous sites, thought ourselves on a feather bed.  We slept long………

Sorrowful tones and a scraping sound assailed my ears that Sunday morning at Glandyfi, and I looked round to see Jack industriously cursing himself and wiping butter from everything in his vicinity.  It transpired that he had been sleeping on the butter all night, and half a pound of butter can be spread an amazing distance.  Sleeping bag and groundsheet received the most plastering, and I thoroughly enjoyed listening and watching Jack work.  It was a great pleasure to see him up at 8am, a most unearthly hour to his way of thinking.  And mine.

The rain was still inexhaustible, though nothing but a hard wind remained of the hurricane.  Dry, warm clothing awaited us at the farm; we breakfasted, packed up, and were streaming along into Machynlleth by ten-o-clock.  We tackled Corris Pass manfully, and marvelled at the volume of water in every stream.  The rain was merciless and nothing we wore was proof against it; ere we reached the summit we were at last nights point of saturation again, and therefore happy.  Happy with childish delight at every cold douche over our feet, at our streaming hair splayed like battered wheat over our heads.  With a swoop we descended to Minffordd at the foot of the Tal-y-Llyn Pass, and with the wind now dead behind, we found it no more than a heavy drag.  Cader Idris was a line of cliffs with a hundred streams down its hundred-crannied sides and the grey swirl of storm clouds enfolding the broken summit-crags.  Tal-y-Llyn was far behind down the valley, a gloomy reflector of the gloomy heavens.  And all the hills were lost in mists.  The run down to Dolgellau was hectic.  The brakes on the wet rims were a long ere they started to grip, and in that space we needed them.  The many bends below Cross Foxes were taken at a steep angle that, each time, left us wondering why we did not conclude on our necks.  In Dolgellau we shook ourselves much as a wet dog does after a swim, and went in a place for lunch.

After that came ten drenching miles of the Mawddach estuary to Barmouth.  To anyone who will show me ten other miles containing so much beauty I will be forever grateful.  Each mile impresses one as the culmination and the climax, the be-all and end-all of loveliness till the next takes you into further raptures, on and on, beauty transcending beauty till the mental outlook can take nothing more.  Mountains and streams, a river in-tide, rocky banks and sandy dunes, ravines, woods, flowers and roses.  These things in bewildering successiveness and other things unwritten give themselves to you on the Mawddach estuary.

From Barmouth we pursued the coast road and saw the darkness lifting from the sea.  While we watched the mad torrent fling itself across the road when a bridge could take no more at Llanbedr, the sky turned from grey to broken white, and the rain ceased after a constant deluge of thirty-six hours.  It seemed a great pleasure to ride unfettered, to towel our soaked hair and keep it dry, to feel our clothing like dish-rags no more !

Sunday, in Wales, a land as commercially dead as the proverbial dodo.  Bigots have passed a law that no-one must open a shop on Sunday, and bigots enforce strict adherence.  A meal and a newspaper are the only articles allowed for sale, and in the case of the newspaper, to go by the average Sunday paper, that is the one and only thing which might be better prohibited.  Wales, like the rest of Britain, must have its chapels and divorce court news, however !  So at Harlech we were without cigarettes – a calamity !  But we had been in Wales on many a Sunday………  a side-door of a side-street shop smuggled cigarettes to us with the air of criminals, and regaining the main street we stole past the sole policeman with skulking stride and burning cheeks.  We had evaded the law !  And what a law !

The weather improved by leaps and bounds, which was unlike Jack’s singing which always remains at a certain low level, and I had just reason to rebuke him.  Thereafter, for several miles the puritan peace of Wales was disturbed.  We had tea behind a hedge at Maentwrog, a sweet little place in one of the sweetest valleys in all Wales.  We followed our usual custom of eating the whole of our stock, and thereafter found ourselves in the terrible position of being without food on Sunday in Wales.  It was a hard climb to Blaenau Ffestiniog, but it was harder by far combing out Blaenau Ffestiniog for food.  We damned that law to the alleged inferno where bad Christians are sent, and we knocked and punched a dozen side doors almost from their hinges ere one less biased lady, influenced no doubt by our haggard looks, provisioned us, bidding us hide all we had obtained ere we went out.  To hide the stuff we got was nigh impossible, and a great bulge of brown paper covering bread was eyed by a policeman who stood at the very shop door.  We grinned in triumph that he might deduce how happy we were, and rode away.

We tackled Garddinan Pass, a 1400 ft route of unpromising, industrial beginning, but blossoming into a glorious mountain crossing with a view down the Lledr valley that leaves one sobered and thoughtful.  There rise the swelling sides of Moel Siabod in many colours, there on its little rocky eminence, hardly visible in the growing dusk, is ‘Dolwyddelen’s Tower’, and there the mazes of the Dale delight the eye, charm the mind.  “What more seek ye, Wanderers?”, quoted Jack as we tumbled down to the cork-screw bends that took us to the river Lledr.  The river Lledr in swollen pomp rushing down the rocks; the river shouting and chattering back at itself; the white fleck bearing down on the racing back of the flood; the thousand white streams pouring from the mountains in many a magnificent cataract of thirty-six hours growth; the washed shiminess of bare rock and fresh moss on cleaved rock; the roses clean and bravely blooming; the green finery of summer and all the majesty of summer in fields, in hedgerows; the scentedness of twilight – the dusky sky not yet swept clear of cloud……. “What more seek ye, Wanderers?”.

“Ye Olde Fish Inn” lent us the most beautiful campsite of our holiday; by the river the field stood and beyond sound or sight from the road.  Boy Scouts, camping a couple of fields away, sent their chief to talk to us, and he was a man after our own spirit.  Last night he had been washed out completely, and his patrol had been forced to fly to an old barn.  The river had overflown its banks, and even while we talked the work of salvage was going on.

The ground was beyond reproach, and after previous sites, thought ourselves on a feather bed.  We slept long………

Post:   The route described here has always been one of Charlie’s finest – finest for its deserted grandeur, and finest for the frequent worst weather a lone cyclist ever endured or travelled.  He rarely seems to venture on this road with a companion, it is almost always a solitary crossing, and one must ask is this from choice Charlie, or do the others shy away?  Even now, these moors are really deserted and wild, the road a long one and traveller’s infrequent.  What more could a young cyclist, intent on the wild and lonely places, hanker after?  Charlie has the gift of ticking people’s boxes I feel, making them hunger for the loneliness of the mountain track and the scaryness of the open moors.

I have recorded impressions of misty Arenig in the past.  Mynydd Migneint and the wide gap between Arenig Fawr and Arenig Fach may just as well be fifteen thousand as fifteen hundred feet above the waves at Portmadoc, on some occasions.  Nowadays the Powers that Be in County Merion have seen fit to put a layer of tar over the turbulent road that somehow links Bala and Ffestiniog.  Unless the same Powers keep a watchful eye on their new surface, I predict a rapid degeneration to the old state, for a tar-engine and steam-roller did the job between them, and the irreproachable surface was simply placed down amongst the channelled ruts of the old track.  Within twelve months ripples had appeared, with here and there the outcrop of stubborn grit-stone pushing triumphantly through the rolled out, shiny blackness.  There were little water-channels too, and water never was kindly disposed towards road surfaces.  The fact that the Blaenau Ffestiniog had slate to send across the border for English roofs, and this upland pass was the most direct practicable way caused a railway line to be built under the very cliffs of Arenig the Larger; this line ascends in tedious twists above the Afon Tryweryn, and leaves Arenig by the barren Cwm Prysor, towards Trawsfynydd.  A good strata of limestone added to the woes of our moorland col, for someone scenting financial elevation began to quarry that side of Arenig, and now a large works and a small village cluster beside a little railway station.  But in the last few years, following the rehabilitation of the road surface, a great new reservoir was built at Trawsfynydd to drive dynamos for electrical power, and now slender pylons of steel carry living wires through Cwm Prysor and across the moors to Bala and – England.  Welsh current for the people who live under Welsh slate.

You cannot close your eyes to these things.  A railway is not beautiful, but our English railways are often put into tune by Nature; the single Great Western line by Arenig does not intrude upon your vision – I was unaware of its presence on my first visit until the screech of a whistle and a puff of smoke drew my attention to it, and near Llyn Tryweryn I saw the arches of a viaduct.  The limestone quarries are a blot upon the scene, but Arenig is too fine and mighty a mass to be marred by a single quarry that bites at an insignificant corner.  Steel pylons will never be lovely, but unlike many people I cannot think of them as atrocities.  They hardly blend with the scenery, I admit, but they are actually no worse than telegraph poles.  We have become accustomed to telegraph wires, and there’s the difference.

I am diverging.  I said that on some occasions, Mynydd Migneint can be as wild as though thousands of feet were added to its altitude.  Through the winter months grey banks of mist, and clouds descending from Arenig Fawr enclose the pass for days at once, till the hours of daylight may amount to no more than the odd four in twentyfour.  I have been up there in semi-darkness at mid-day.  At night travel is adventurous, though that is improved now by the new surface on the road.  In the days when a tar engine and steam roller had never been pushed over the pass, I have spent hours on that seventeen miles, nerve-racking hours of peering vainly into grey blankets that swathed the night and seemed even to keep sound away, straining eyes for the gates that never seemed to appear, but which always came just when I had relaxed for a moment.  Even the brown road has become merged into invisibility at such times, till hardly a glimpse could be caught under wheel, let alone ahead.  The road channelled water-courses, furrowed, ploughed, piled with loose stones, often steep with sharp bends and nothing but a ditch or a moorland fringe to protect it from wandering sheep.  How often have I jolted off the very road itself into ditch or tangly, bog-woven heather !  People at Bala and Ffestiniog have expressed a kind of wandering awe that I dared risk “the mountain” as they call it.  “What of the mist?” they have said, for it is common knowledge on each side of Arenig that mists are paramount there.

I have punctured up there, and wished I had three good hands instead of two frozen lumps of uselessness; I have walked miles aface a wild blast; I have been soaked in torrential rains; I have emerged at last below the mists drenched and weary, with eyes an-ache.  Seventeen miles at the price of seventy.  Hours of it.  Yes, and I would do it again tomorrow, that seventeen miles.

As I have been (and still am) rather fond of Ffestiniog, it follows that over Arenig by both wild ways to Rhyd-y-Fen has been a frequented pass of mine.  I have in mind one night early in May, some years ago.  In May, mark you, but a wild night, with dusk welling up even as I left Bala.  A westerly wind that had the saving grace of summer warmth had nagged me, and there had been rain in patchy quality, and as I climbed up by Afon Tryweryn  from Fron Goch, more patches of rain floated across.  With darkness the mist came down, and once again I repeated the old process of trying to see through the damp, dense, veil.  I hadn’t much time to give to the crossing, for Ffestiniog never keeps very late hours, and I was chancing on a bed there, so I pushed forward as fast as the wind would allow, but faster than common sense advised.  I passed the little temperance house called Rhyd-y-Fen; left the gate behind that marks the beginning of the last climb to the ruined farm at 1507 ft, and had tramped almost to the summit when suddenly the mist lifted, and not a vestige remained.  In place a full round moon shone down peacefully in rolling wastes of moorland that struck me by their infinite solitude.  It seemed that I alone lived then, and all other things were dead.  But what surprised me most was the sight of a phenomenon rarely seen……. A lunar rainbow forming a broad amber arc in the western sky – a perfect half-circle touching the moors on each side.  I saw it fully five minutes until a single wisp of grey mist floated up.  Shortly afterwards I was plunging and crashing down to Pont-ar-Afon-Gam in a welter of vapour as heavy as ever before.  I didn’t see Pont-ar-Afon-Gam, but I heard the coursing stream below, carrying its full flood to Rhaiadr Cwm.  Rhaiadr Cwm was just a roar in the dark, coming from the bedrock depth of a great Space on my left.  The Space was filled with Things that floated about, crossing my vision as I leaned (not too trustily) on the crumbling parapet of the wall.  I leaned and listened, and saw those shapeless forms splitting themselves and coming together again in raggy procession.  The people at Bala had called the ‘Things’ mists.  Maybe they were, but if you go that way, lean over the wall below Pont-ar-Afon-Gam, and watch them.  Perhaps they are mists…..  You can lean on the wall nowadays, since the road was put in order and motor-cars began to venture over Arenig, but that night in May empty spaces betrayed where Time had brought collapses here and there.  The displaced stones were lying below the precipice, four hundred feet down.  It is easy to leave the road when grey and black are the only universal hedgings.

From Rhaiadr Cwm I crossed another mile of vapoured wilderness, then my wheels rushed forward, downhill.  Then I dropped beneath the mist, shook myself from wispy vestiges, and descended on Ffestiniog in the mellowed beauty of a May night, a moonlit night.

Thus murmered Jack as he sleepily surveyed the outer world from the depths of his shorts-cum-jacket-pillow.  I assented as I saw the steady drizzle descending from the triangular patch of grey sky above the tent door.  So, with one accord, we turned over and slept another hour away.  The grey sky and the drizzle still continued, and we made breakfast a long, lazy affair till nothing remained.  Then a joiner ‘rained off’ from a nearby job came and we chatted away till noon brought a cessation of the rain.  We packed up, and for eight beautiful miles rode dry-shod.  At Llyswen we joined the Wye, and shaped our course up what I consider to be the most beautiful section of a very beautiful river-route, the Wye Valley.  At Llyswen too, we ran into rain of the real Welsh type, thoroughly wetting.  The river was in flood, and it is worth a days heavy downfall to see the upper Wye in spate, bubbling ‘over itself’, driving between rock walls and over cataracts.  At Builth we were soaked and hungry, and we found a place that did us well.  Happily the tyre was on behaviour beyond reproach, so our spirits soared as the mercury fell and the rain settled to a solid downpour all the way to Rhayader.  All the way to Rhayader – miles and miles of winding road by a river that kept our senses in delighted surprise at each bend….. “oh, sylvan Wye thou wanderer through the woods” – sylvan yet in deluge !

A smoke and a ‘breather’ was indicated at Llangurig, six miles above above Rhayader, for ahead were the mists and heavy gradients of Steddfa Gurig,  ‘Plinlimmon Pass’.  A charabanc en route to Aberystwyth from Hereford unloaded a cargo of the most miserable-looking human beings imaginable.  Their very features set Jack and I into hysterics.

Steddfa Gurig !  Incredible, it seemed, that such a deluge could possibly continue for so long, but it did continue.  It swept the moors in hissing douche, and the mists crept down as we crept up in the teeth of a wind that bit us.  We helped a car out of a ditch and didn’t get a word of thanks for it; we saw half a dozen others in a similar fix, and in anger we ignored appeals for help; we got drenched to the last stitch, and laughed thereafter that the worst could no more wet us; we fought our way all along the rippling summit of the Pass, and fought our way down when we should have coasted, till the lower slopes were gained and the wind lost its power.  And at Ponterwyd we had tea after thirty-six soaking miles.

But worse had still to come – and better, withal !  We started again loaded with the evenings foodstuffs, somewhat drier, but still with heavy rains.  The land was very familiar now – we approached the lovely lands of many a holiday tour, a North Wales that is charged with memories and dear to me.  Lovely, lovable North Wales roads !  A downhill sweep took us to Llanbadarn where branched a lane that cut out Aberystwyth and took us well on the way to Machynlleth.  From Bow Street to Tre-Taliesin something like a cloudburst descended on us, and in five minutes we reverted to that state which knows no wetter.  The fury of it was appalling; roads were awash, streams rose to over-flowing, houses were invaded by irresistible torrents, and down the mountain-sides came newly born streams, over bushes and bracken and round the trees, down the walls, across the roads.  We rode through it all like laughing, silly children, though we weren’t silly because we might just as well carry on once we were wet, and we laughed because it was easier for us to laugh than to mope and grumble – and quite as effective. We had laughed at all of our ills in the same way.

Looking across the tide of the Dovey Estuary, we saw the clouds massed as black as night, and the wind from the sea driving them across Cader Idris – though Cader was invisible to us.  As twilight approached the wind growled and grew, and whipped the trees into a sigh.  A gale was coming in from the sea; we could see it in the quickening clouds and in the whining of branches; we felt the lash of the rain to our backs and on our heads, and twilight came early and went…….. and left the night behind it.

A little farm at Glandyfi, four miles from Machynlleth gave us a campsite with sympathy ad lib.  We only required the site.  A friendly hedge staved off the force of the hurricane, and the farmers wife took in to dry as much of our clothing as we dared to let her take.  We were left with little else beside a bathing costume !  We camped in haste, and found ourselves upon tree-roots that stuck up beneath the groundsheet like logs of wood.  But we dined well, and slept well upon them, in spite of the hurricane and the tattoo of rain on the tent.

Post:    I particularly like Charlie’s depiction of this old pack horse bridge to be found on the rarely used Foxup Moor crossing track.   His detailing of the stonework takes some drawing and didn’t he do well.  I first crossed this little bridge in the early 1950’s on a clubrun, and quite often repeated the run because it was perfect in every respect – a track that you could ride, almost always deserted and that delightful little bridge to enjoy.  Was I lucky or was I lucky ?

From Foxup, at the far end of Littondale, a track goes through a long depression below Pen-y-Ghent and ultimately emerges at Horton-in-Ribblesdale.  Littondale is not well known except to that increasing sect that travels map in hand, searching out unspoiled bits of Britain.  Motorists sometimes stray into Littondale, mostly by mistake because, as they speed up Wharfedale towards Kettlewell, Littondale opens promisingly on the left with a promising road quite as good as the Wharfedale highway for four twisty miles to Arncliffe.  Arncliffe is grey and solid and satisfying to these strayers, and so to them this typical dale-village becomes the end of Littondale.  Some, more venturesome, might cross the Litton by the old bridge and discover delight in the wilder reaches, following a narrow but quite decent road to Halton Gill, which appears first a mile away like a Swiss village clinging for dear life to the steep hillside.  There they turn back unless they have sufficient incentive and a good reserve of power to tackle the dusty byway that corkscrews into Silverdale, then makes their brakes give burdened groans down into Stainforth.

For he who dotes on those double-lines or trails of dots that exemplify the Ordnance Survey and Bartholomew, Littondale becomes a paradise.  He may be lured by the white bit of a road that leaps up a ravine from Arncliffe and strides over lonely places to Malham Tarn.  He may cross the pebbly river from Litton and find the green springing lane restful to his feet and Pen-y-Ghent across the Gill good to his eyes, until he reaches Silverdale Road.  If strenuous is his mood he might chance his strength on the zig-zag track above Halton Gill that takes him 2000 ft over Horsehead Pass to Raisgill in Langstrothdale.  Or he might search out the long-lost trail the ancients used to take them round the back of Pen-y-Ghent to Horton.

I travelled up Littondale on the fourth day of an Easter tour.  Where had been three of us at Kilnsey for lunch; but my two companions had already stayed on a little too long, and had bade me a hurried goodbye, heading westward into a great throng of homeward-bounds.  The day was sunny: Easter Monday on the highways is not a day of restfulness…… and I was free for another day.  My mood demanded peace, so I turned into Littondale.  My fancy was for the white lane that leaps over the fells to Malham, but I passed it by and formed new fancies as I crossed the bridge from Arncliffe.  At Litton I remembered the springing turf of the track to Silverdale road, but again I passed on, and passed the dusty by-lane that presses under Pen-y-Ghent.  At Halton Gill I hesitated; the Horsehead track was tantalising, and cool breezes were up there – the other side held lovely Oughtershaw and the head of Wharfedale in its moorland grip.  Yet again I passed on, along a rough lane to tiny Foxup, the last attempt at clustering humans have made in Littondale.  There the valley closes, is trapped by dark fellsides.  I would have to find that fabled path across to Horton-in-Ribblesdale.

A first attempt along a cartway close by the beck failed where it reached finality at a farm.  The farmer sent me through a gate, up the grassy hillside, through another gate into a sheep pen, from which I emerged by another gate to the open fellside, high above the hamlet.   He had promised a track there, a faintly pressed trail, but had expressed doubt that I should get to Ribblesdale by nightfall.  “You will miss the track”, he had said: “but keep the gates in sight”.  Drowsiness lay on the moors that afternoon, for I missed the curlews and the grouse: the sheep strayed away without a sound, the sun had taken on an aura, and was sinking, and the becks were low-voiced.  They murmured.  No-one came: with an even stride I passed from gate to gate without trouble, for the turf was smooth to the feet, and the gates themselves were fairly new.

They even swung, had real catches to them.  My mood was tranquillity.  The track had a slight upward trend so that each wall and its gate made the skyline.  On the left a perfect upward curve in the land suddenly lost its symmetry to form the semi-sheer flank of Pen-y-Ghent, and on the right the narrow end of Littondale was shallowing rapidly to meet the ridge.  A higher ridge was behind.  For an hour I walked where I might easily have ridden, but I never gave riding a thought.  It did not seem quite the thing, someway.  Then a limestone gully crossed the path and looking up along it I realised that Pen-y-Ghent stood just above, aloof, with worn-in scars of many a waterway striking parallel lines down it.  Just after that I passed below a little line of outcrop crags, and lost the track.  The farmer had spoken truth…… the way the ancients had trod was obliterated.  At the next wall there was no gate, but a great gap through which I passed, and carelessly descended into a great basin, a perfect saucer in the moors.

I am writing as an impressionist now, and my impressions must be faithful or this book is untrue, unfair.  I am speaking truth when I say that my descent into that hollow place on the moors led me to a feeling akin to trepidation.  The place was eerie, as if haunted.  It weighed on me.  The sky had blazed all day, and now it was charged with a coppery heaviness that had smothered the earlier breezes.  Not a sound could I hear, not a living movement could I see; the wandering sheep, with unerring instinct had never tracked this place.  I knew something lay on the bed of that depression that I was confidently beginning to cross, and I reasoned that I, who was strong, had hardly known a moment’s fear in my life.  Why should I now fear a moorland hollow that was deserted and lost to sound or movement ?

I hesitated, pushed on, and hesitated again.  There certainly was something queer here, some brooding moodiness that was getting on my nerves.  The turf underneath was silent as a rubber pad, and sprang under the weight of my feet.  An ideal camp-site, but I shuddered to think of camping in that atmosphere.  As I pushed forward again I became aware of a sound, a faint, hollow murmur that I could not place.  The sound became louder in a few yards, a gurgling, muffled voice that seemed to rise underfoot.  The truth then dawned on me: a stream ran underground a few inches beneath me, it could not be deeper.  I moved forward again, and the sound died away, to be replaced by another, yet another, until the deep-voiced chattering came in on all sides, hollow murmurings from every side and eerie in the almost unnatural solitude.

I could not shake off that uneasy feeling  which had first assailed me, and as I approached the centre of this basin, a new quite natural explanation appeared.  My feet suddenly sank into bog; before I could retard myself I was knee-deep, and it sucked at me with great force.  I tore myself out of it, extricated a shoe just as that necessary piece of footwear was becoming immersed in green, slimy fluid, and back on the turf, surveyed the treacherous expanse.  I ought to have guessed the obvious at the sight of this moorland saucer without outside outlet.  It was a great sink into which drained all the water from the surrounding ridge, and as the limestone underneath, being porous, could not hold the water to form a lake or pool above, there was constant saturation of the surface.  Beneath that central bogland must be a great underground lake or an intricate series of channels to bear the water down to some other outlet.

Obviously it was foolish to attempt to cross there, so I turned sideways, skirting the bog and climbing the ridge.  Over the other side drowsy sheep scattered on my approach, I climbed a wall and dragged the bike after me, then covering a rough heather tract, I regained the track where it showed clearer in a dirty gateway.  Thence the going was boggy and well defined; I was able to reach a stream where I cleaned the mess from my legs by the simple, usual method of paddling while retaining footwear.  Clean wet shoes and stockings are preferable to the discomfort of caked slime !

Over the next ridge I espied a walled clearing and a hut, and descending into the clearing, came upon the great gap of Hull Pot, smooth, grey-walled, gaping to the sky.  Without ropes Hull Pot – over 100 ft deep – is nigh impossible to descend.  From there the wide sweep of Ribblesdale appeared below; on my left a huge ravine blocked by limestone cliffs, each cliff a tremendous step towards the head held a stream of pigmy size.  The track, now a road of sorts, led me down past an isolated shippon where a farmer was engaged.  From him I obtained a ready consent to camp in a lovely little hollow sheltered from the wind, and ere dark brought heavy banks of cloud onto the fells, was comfortably ‘bivvied’, and soliloquising on the crossing from Foxup by the path the ancients trod, and the weird ‘sough’ below Pen-y-Ghent.