The last week of May had been my planned holiday week since taking the same week last year, so the appearance of two Friends of the Settle & Carlisle Line walks in the immediate area during my week away was a very neat bit of happenstance, the sort of coincidence you often wish for and never get. Especially useful is the fact that the first of them goes to somewhere that I had been planning to walk ever since I chose Kirkby Stephen as my holiday destination, as Smardale Gill has landscape and industrial heritage and the walk promised us a bit of nature too, "For the Botanists" the FOSCL leaflet claims. "Sold!" is my immediate thought to that premise.
Spring Jollies: Day Four
Smardale Gill circular. 11.7 miles
Meet the 10.34am train at Kirkby Stephen and shuffle my parents off for a day trip to Carlisle, promising to meet them at the end of their return trip, and see what size of party the FOSCL group is going to muster. Not big, it seems, only 8 of us, and two will not be walking the whole route and the planned leader has not turned out so we get a pair of subs in his place, so we won't be getting our botany guidance after all. Instead we get D&A as our leaders, who normally lead off the Carlisle trains, so they're folks I wouldn't have met otherwise, and I warm to them immensely, D is a railway enthusiast and A is one of the most chatty women I've met. We also get H, an 82 year old local who knows every path in the vicinity and seems to know of every person who farmed or worked the railways locally in the last six decades, so it might be a small group but we won't be short of things to talk about. We then discover that all paths from the station involve a circuitous route as our leader takes us on a rightly long way round to meet the section of the Stainmore Line that we will be walking today, steps of previous walks are retraced up to Halfpenny House and thence past Kirkby Stephen East and around Croglam Castle to meet the lane down to Greenriggs farm. We can't join the line here, instead it's a long field circuit, all the way to alongside the S&C line before turning north to pass through Waitby before finally meeting the walkable path to Smardale Gill nature reserve.
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| The SD&LUR Line, near Waitby |
So hello again to the SD&LUR, still nicely intact since its closure in 1962, and a big note of gratitude needs to be sent to the Cumbria Wildlife Trust for taking the effort to make this section of trackbed accessible for walkers, it might not have the best surface and one bridge is frustratingly missing, but it has a ton of atmosphere and you feel like you're having a good explore as you go. Our leader talks about the mineral traffic that fed the line, and H has many reminiscences about the railwaymen of the distant past, and I sneak up to the front of the group to take pics, as the line narrows to single track width and looks like it was very roughly blasted out of the landscape in places, rare to see un-lined cuttings in this country. Flit between cutting and embankment before rising up to the road at the site of Smardale railway station, recently restored to habitation, and really without a settlement to justify its original placement. Pass Smardale Hall, a massively fortified farmhouse with a bit of a Scottish Baronial feel, and rejoin the trackbed to enter the nature reserve, wondering where the ladies who had driven out to meet the group might have gotten to.
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| Smardale Viaduct |
Here we get an explanation of the 1955 Smardale train crash from our leader, and the move on to pass under the Smardale viaduct, the highest on the S&C line and it's odd that such an imposing and tall structure should be so hard to photograph. Thence into Smardale Gill, a deep cleft through the limestone upland which stretches from Shap to Mallerstang, which has a river, Scandal Beck which puzzlingly flows north to join the Eden, when the landscape profile suggests that it should flow south to join the Lune which rises at Newbiggin. Sadly, the day has glummed over somewhat and the nature reserve doesn't look as pretty as it should, also the flowers are hard to spot by the path and we only have one botany-inclined walker in the group anyway. The path is sound though, good for a speed cycle, and I spend most of the mile down the gill trying to spot the other viaduct, and cursing the fact that the trees have grown high enough to obscure the view. If Nature Management were my thing, I'd always ensure there we open vistas available towards anything worth seeing; I'm probably an 18th century man at heart!
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| Smardalegill Viaduct |
Acquire our missing ladies to the group and then joy as Smardalegill Viaduct appears. 14 arches long and 27 metres high, built to double track width but only ever single-tracked, a beast that dominates its landscape (hard to imagine that such a landscape could get a railway built in it in the modern world), saved by the Northern Viaduct Trust in 1992 after British Rail decided to donate the cost of demolition (around 250K) to the cost of its restoration (about 750K). So good to see it put to good use, but it's another one that is hard to photograph, not least because it bows the wrong way, and we're not going down the path that offers the best view. We're going to stop by the lime kilns just beyond the viaduct, for a lecture on lime-slaking and for our leader to dish out the FOSCL leaflets for the second half of the year. Keeping one eye on the turning weather, lunch is taken as I start to plot out walks for the second half of the year.
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| Sandy Bank Cutting |
Continue down the line, a bit rougher here as ruts left by removed sleepers show up in the path, and as we leave Smardale Gill, we encounter a couple of railway houses by the trackbed, looking ideal for the Grand Designs treatment until you realise that there is no road access of any kind to them and Kevin Mccloud would tell you it's a very bad idea to try living there. Onward through Sandy Bank cutting and past the ghost of the signal box, and I'm delighted to find that there is so much walkable railway path out here, and the vista opens out to show the Howgills in all their strangely-all-the-same-height glory, or it would if it were less glum and cloudy. Leave the track for the walk's apex at Tower House, near Brownber Hall, and hear of the Rye House Plot in 1685 and the execution of Elizabeth Gaunt, a religious dissenter who had lived here, and of more immediate worry, we seem to have misplaced H, and a good while is spent loitering as our leaders go off the find him. Being local, he hadn't got that lost, he's just too polite to mention that he'd stopped for a toilet break.
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| Smardale Gill |
Field walk to the edge of Newbiggin-on-Lune, and then head back toward Smardale Gill via Hag Mire and a deeply cut bridleway to stop at the nicely ancient Smardale bridge, which had looked a long way away from the railway path, but is only a couple of hundred meters distant. One of our party leaves to retrieve her car from the other end of Smardale Gill and then we get our uphill legs on and the rating of this walk as 'moderate' comes into question as we head over the upland of Smardale Fell, and it's a tougher walk than I'd expected despite being only 100 metres of ascent over a mile. At least we get ace views into Smardale Gill, and the vista of the Howgills is just as good from here, and there's Crosby Garrett fell to the west and Smardale Viaduct and Crosby Garrett tunnel to be spotted by the eagle eyed, not a lot to note on the fell itself, but the Eden Valley sneaks into view as we crest and the sun peaks out again too.
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| Freight to Ais Gill |
Once meeting the road, one which doesn't seem to have a name, we lose another party member who fancies a longer stroll, and it feels like a bit of a route march as we aim to meet the train at Kirkby Stephen, there's still stuff to see, like a freight train grinding its way up to Ais Gill, and the surreally humped Whinber Hills with cows standing proud atop them. H notes I take a lot of pictures along the way, and explaining the wonder of digital photography has me realising that it is such a ridiculously huge improvement over analogue. Meet the A685 and I know exactly where I am again, as Kirkby Stephen station can easily vanish in the landscape, and my intuition that we would not meet the 3.55pm train proves right as it passes with us about 10 minutes distant. We'd have made it if we hadn't lost H, but he makes it up to those who missed it by taking them home for teas, no such worries for me though, my parents are waiting and I bid adieu to D&A, actually sad that I won't get the opportunity to walk with them again anytime soon.
To Be Continued...
1,000 Miles Cumulative Total: 165.3 miles
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