Borwick Hall 5 miles

Opposite the car park of Borwick Hall is this imposing entrance. The car park is private, but John being John had rung up and got permission for us to park there.

The gate is the entrance to the hall's garden. A man was busy tidying up the gardens. John explained to him who we were and asked him how old the hall is. As he wiped the sweat from his brow, he told us the oldest part, where the tower is dates back to the 1300s. 

As we walked round the left hand side of the hall, we came to this wonderfully historic courtyard.

     

While John went to book us in at the hall office. and the rest of us waited for him, we took some pic's of the back of the house.

Setting off on our walk,we crossed back over the canal bridge that we had driven over on our way here, then turned immediately left, but instead of joining the canal tow path, we carried on along the lane that runs alongside it.

    

We turned off down a very narrow lane, walking, nay balancing along the uneven island between the tractor tracks for about 100 yds. The steep banks and hedges on either side prompted John to speculate on what we would do if the tractor came towards us from the opposite direction.

We came across this sad sight after crossing a green path along side a field of lambs and sheep. The lamb was breathing but had no strength to get up or even raise it's head. There was a swarm of flies around the poor thing,obviously they had been disturbed by our arrival and were hovering over it like a kettle of vultures.

There was a time in the dim and distant past when a squeeze stile like this one would have caused no problem at all. Not so today.

   

We passed under a railway viaduct carrying a branch line from the west coast main line over to Skipton in Yorkshire.

We had dinner on the bank of the canal. The blackberries round here are well behind the ones back home, but Danny had brought a Tupperware container and had spotted some rare black ones near the canal bridge, so took the opportunity to forage some for Mrs Kirby's jam making.

Further along the canal, one of the not very frequent trains crept silently out from behind the trees on the other side of the canal and crossed the bridge while I fumbled to get my camera out of my pocket. Too late. drat!!

                                          Another awkward squeeze stile.

Arriving at the road back to Borwick, Mike and I parted company with John, Anthony and Paddy, to take the slightly longer way back via Priest Hutton.

   

     Passing between some gentrified farm buildings, over a stile and into some pasture land.

     From Here it was a steady though not too steep climb to the road into Priest Hutton  

          

      

On the way back to Borwick we passed some old but very well maintained, what would have been farms at one time.

Clock towers like this one can be seen on the roofs of many old farms. Would they have been perhaps to tell the farmhands when it was time to go home, or maybe to let them know that it was not yet time to go home.

                                   Back at Borwick where we meet up again with our pals.

                                                                   The End

                                                                        DK