THE WRONG FORK

Day 9          Tuesday, 16 September 2014
 
In which we spend a reflective hour in cloisters and I get hopelessly lost

When I poked my nose out of the awning door, a thick mist had rolled over the landscape, blurring it as if colour-washing a painting.  I had taken to cycling to the toilet block.  I had to have a reason for bringing my bicycle.  I listened to Magic Radio.  They were playing music from 1977.  I had forgotten how awful most of the songs were from that wretched discotheque era.  ‘Thunder In My Heart’ by the exploding-haired Mr Leo Sayer was arguably the worst song they played.
We drove to Kirkby Stephen, in the wilds of what used to be Cumberland. The sun appeared and the day was glorious for a while. We sat in a beautiful churchyard. The greensward before us was about the size of a football field.  It was bordered along one side with weeping willow trees, on the other by limes. 
The church is of mixed denomination, both Protestant and Roman Catholic.  They provide their main services on alternative Sundays.  That avoids fist-fights.  The church bell rings on the quarter-hour, a light, unpretentious tone.  There are two pathways of concrete flagstones, and these are flanked by slender and elegant cast-iron lamp-posts, quite possibly the original gas lamps with the mantles replaced by electric light fittings. I noticed later that two of the other churches in the town had been deconsecrated.  One is now an antiques emporium, the other is a youth hostel of some sort.
Of course I had been here before.  For the first six weeks, when I started work at Hestair Duple, I used to pass through the town on my way from Wallsend to Blackpool early on a Monday morning and return via the same route on a Friday night. That was back in those dear, dead days of 1984.  I would halt opposite the old railway goods yard and drink from a flask of coffee and eat a sandwich. After six weeks I had found somewhere in Blackpool to rent and we moved there and my weekly commute was at an end. The thought of the bravado and optimism I showed then in driving a tiny 2-cylinder, 600 c.c. Citroen Dyane 140 miles each way over lonely, hilly and desolate roads was quite invigorating.  The funny thing was, Kirkby Stephen was nothing like I had remembered it.  I suppose that’s true of most things in life after such a passage of time.   
We drove back to Barnard Castle in the early afternoon and I went to the library.  My wife drove back to the caravan site.  I elected to walk back from the library to the site.  I decided I did not fancy walking along a main road with no footpaths where the traffic careers along in both directions at sixty miles per hour, and that was just the tractors.  I saw a sign at Startforth, just over the road bridge from the town, which said ‘Public Footpath,’ so I took it.  At first, all went well.  The footpath was well tramped and comfortably wide enough.  After half a mile, I crossed a narrow wooden bridge over a stream and the going became more difficult.  The path narrowed to a muddy track, overgrown with rhubarb-like plants and nettles.  I was wearing shorts.  I don’t like nettles. The path grew slippier and more treacherous.  I had to climb away from the stream, higher and higher.  I held on to tree branches to help me get a purchase.  The path twisted and turned.  The woods at this point were so dense that I could hardly see the sky.  Then, suddenly, the path stopped dead. It went no further.  All there was were trees and bracken. No exit.  No way forward.  I spotted some partially burned branches and a pile of litter.  People had been camping here.  They might have been glue-sniffers or escaped convicts.  I had to go back.  I could have been jumped upon by a footpad at any stage.  There was no sound – I was utterly alone.
The journey back was worse, because most of it was downhill.  I grabbed a thick branch to help me climb down a particularly slippery slope and the branch, brittle with age, broke clean off in my hand and I slid down on my backside for four or five yards, clutching the broken branch.  I was filthy with mud and wringing-wet with sweat. I was stung by nettles as I plunged downward into the undergrowth. Eventually, I recognised a ruined brick building I saw about halfway in.   I crossed the same narrow bridge and the going became progressively easier.  About three-quarters of a mile from the main road, I noticed that the path forked right and left. I hadn’t really noticed the fork.  I had automatically taken the wider left-hand path.  I met a middle-aged couple in walking gear. “Does this footpath go to the caravan site?” I asked. “Yes – you have to take the right fork and follow the stream.  We’re on our way there now ourselves.”  I called myself all the stupid idiots under the sun, before I telephoned my wife and she picked me up in the car at the end of the path, where it joins the main road.