Friden and Pennine Bridleway

Rather a later start today... discovered that my canon 24-105 f4 L USM is faulty and was busy collating images to upload to dropbox as part of a fault diagnosis. The short version is that the hand held images are sharper when the stabiliser is off... and at shutter speeds from 1-60 to say 1/100 that really shouldn't be the case, and definitely not at 1/500!

Leaving Rivendale Caravan Park I headed just a few miles south to the Hamlet of Friden, which as far as I could tell comprises some form of industrial works and a few yards further down the road, a single dwelling, although it may be a pair of semi-detached houses... and I thought that I lived in the sticks!

Amazingly Friden has a car park, although really this is for the adjacent park benches and for access to the North Pennine way trail which runs along the back of the car park.

After parking up the Ms Pat Tidsall guide directed me back out onto the road to join a bridleway. This proved rather hard to find and I yo-yo'd back and forth for a bit trying to find it, although I should have had faith, or at least pulled out the Garmin GPS that I was carrying to track my route... the start of the track was rather further down the road than I'd been prepared for...

A few yards along the track I saw this inscribed stone...

"The road up and the road down are one and the same" 

Which is of course a quote from Herculitus, a Greek philosopher [535BC - 475BC]; I'm kidding... I looked it up. How odd that this otherwise lovely stone is embedded at the base of a random rubble stone wall... 

I'd not seen these types of stiles before, cantilevered stone or concrete blocks making steps up and down the side of the random rubble walls. Neither Tikka nor I fancied these, instead we used the adjacent gates each time.

 Lunch was had on the sides of ones of the dales, with my back pushed into a rocky outcrop for some protection against the cold blustery wind. The grass around here is just so rich and green!

The latter part of our trail was along the North Pennine Trail and at the only squeeze stile that I noticed on this route I persuaded Tikka to have her picture taken.

Walk: 6.62 miles. 3hrs