Day Ten: Snape to Thirsk

Distance: 17 miles
Weather: sunny and warm, I didn't think it was as windy but apparently Rob's hat was flapping a bit.
Fish: some quite big fish and two absolutely 'kin huge fish
Camera panics: 1
Dropped Kindle panics: 1
State of feet: bit achey, dusty

Today was the day we hadn't really been looking forward to, as it involved crossing the Vale of York, which is flat, has the A1 motorway, River Swale and a mainline railway running up the middle of it and virtually no footpaths at all. Even David Maughan, the author of the North of England Way book that we are basing our walk on, apologised for today's route, but there aren't many alternatives and you just have to think of it as a necessary step between the National Parks of the Dales and the North Yorks Moors.

It wasn't all bad. We met up the guide book route near the village of Well, which has a pretty church with a 14th century window and a Norman doorway, and then we were pleasantly surprised at the quarry in Nosterfield, which has been flooded and turned into a nature reserve with geese, shelducks and brimstone butterflies. We nearly passed through a second nature reserve not long after, but really only saw the edge of a field before we had to turn away down the lane to Thornbough. The lane passes by a Bronze Age henge, which was the venue for a beardy weirdy Beltane gathering. Down the road there was some Auto Grass Racing, which was proving harder for some to find.

Here we took a detour away from the roads, following a very neat path straight through the middle of a field of oilseed rape (the pollen count went off the scale and most of it on to our trousers, but it was pretty) and into Kirklington, with its pub and ice cold cokes in the beer garden.

The next couple of miles took us along fairly busy side roads and a couple of very busy A roads, under the A1 (where they'd put in some useful gravel paths over the new drainage system) and into Ainderby Quernhow and along the B6267 and A61 to Skipton-on-Swale. Crossing the bridge we stopped to look into the river and there were a lot of quite big fish there. We were impressed by these (possibly salmon/grayling) until a couple of really, really big ones swam up (possibly trout) that made the others look tiny. Seriously, they were two foot long.

Along the road for a bit further, then we turned off across some fields (where we stopped for a bit of fruit cake and Wensleydale cheese) and then back on the pavements for the last trudge into Thirsk and the Golden Fleece Hotel.