Tonight – the great night – has at last arrived, and it is now a memory at the time of writing. At 6pm we were at Four Lane Ends – three of us ready for our long expected tour, the bumper event of the year. Our plans were nicely cut and dried – an average of 50 miles per deum, climbing Snowdon, exploring old tracks, visiting famous beauty spots, waterfalls, fearsome chasms, beautiful vales etc, were only a few of the carefully scheduled points to be considered – in fact we had our hands full for we could not miss one single thing. Alas for plans, schedules and mountains, all were cut and hacked until we got lost in the ruins of our once nice clean sheets of foolscap, now the same foolscap lies in some remote Welsh valley.
Our password is ‘no more route mapping’, but soon we shall be planning away in gleeful anticipation of the next tour! However, on that glorious night we sped along over the usual roads to Warrington, Frodsham and Helsby, where we sat on a gate and looked over the CTC handbook for a suitable resting place. We halted at an old rambling building by the River Dee in Chester at 9.30pm.
After a walk by the river we had a big supper to the tune of a gramophone. After a while we turned in. Our host led us up some narrow winding stairs to a doorway about two feet high through which we must needs crawl into our bedroom. A beam stretched across the room, and because of its support it could not be sawn through to allow for a higher doorway. Looking through the latticed windows we noticed other buildings along the street with the same old structure as our own. We almost imagined ourselves back in the 15th century. Our room was 400 years old and has the reputation of being haunted. Its history was known to the tenants but they would not tell us about it. Anyway, we met no ghost and spent a comfortable night in this unique building.
37 miles, 3.5 hours
