Day 10: Ingleby Cross to Clay Bank Top
I was still tired when I woke up, and the knowledge that, at 10 miles, this was to be our shortest day did nothing to convince me to get up. But eventually I did. We had a slow breakfast in the pub, more due to the service than out of choice, then Naomi left for Nottingham. We packed up, and after almost leaving my phone in the pub, we set off, waving goodbye to the Chain Man who was sitting outside:
It wasn't long before we saw the perfect symbol of honest country living. Something of a change from Nottingham, recently dubbed "the gun capital of England":
We joined on to the Cleveland Way, our route for the next day and a bit. The views from it were pretty cool, although I think it's fair to say that my free 35mm camera from Barclaycard didn't exactly do them justice:
We were soon greeted with our first view of the North Sea though, much to the excitement of Bola. The stress of 9 days' hard walking was getting to him by now and as you can see he's understandably looking a little worse for wear. Even so, I've never heard of someone's head nearly coming off from too much walking before.
After a mere 3.5 hours of walking, we arrived at our campsite, Beakhills Farm, at the stupidly early time of 1.15pm. The place looked a bit run down, and there was no-one around so we just sat on a picnic bench and ate our lunch. I tried my phone but unsurprisingly there was no reception. As we ate, the idea of spending an entire afternoon and evening in a little field in the middle of nowhere, with no pub nearby, no phone reception and generally nothing to do began to appeal less and less. We dug out our accommodation guide and found that the reason we'd chosen this campsite was that it was the only one near Clay Bank Top within walking distance from the Coast to Coast route. We read on, however, and discovered that there was a pub in Chop Gate that would collect us from Clay Bank Top (about 2 miles away) for a couple of quid. As the following day was going to be a fairly long one (17 miles), we decided that it would actually make sense to get the extra couple of miles to Clay Bank Top under our belt today.
Luckily, Dave's phone had just enough reception for us to ring the pub, The Buck Inn, and arrange everything. Just after that, the owners got back to the farm and we were treated to a live demonstration of sheep herding involving a quad bike, a motor bike and the ubiquitous sheep dog. We felt a bit guilty not staying there after booking in advance so we gave the woman the £3 change we currently had on us and left. It was only going to cost us £4 if we'd stayed anyway, and the woman really didn't seem to mind much so we didn't feel guilty for long.
As the sherpa van had already dropped off our big rucksack at Beakhills Farm, we were left with the task of carrying it to Clay Bank Top, along two miles of quite hilly paths. We decided that the best way of splitting the bags was therefore for one person to carry the big bag (very heavy) and the other to take both day-bags and the tent (couldn't see your feet). I took both the day-bags to start, but after swapping soon after, we both felt more comfortable, so I kept the big bag.
Meanwhile, I'm not entirely sure why, but I found this quite funny. I think it's the name "Euroforest":
We arrived at Clay Bank Top about an hour and a quarter later. It had been a difficult bit of walking, but we'd knocked over an hour off our walk for the following day and we got to have a drink in the evening so it was all worth it. We got picked up a bit later and made it to the pub at 4pm. It didn't open till 6.30pm though, so we set up out our tent, did some crosswords and I had a bit of a sleep. Again, no phone reception.
We had dinner soon after the pub opened and then spent the evening chatting to a guy we'd briefly met during the day's walk. When it turned out he was a software engineer, the geek chat began to flow thick and fast. With software being more Dave's area than mine, most of it went over my head. And as the people who can attest to my geek-ness will tell you, that is no mean feat. Eventually we said our goodbyes and went off to bed. I couldn't sleep so almost went for another pint, but in the end I couldn't be arsed.
Day 10 Stats:
Distance: 11.2 miles
Total Ascent: 921m
Total Descent: ???
Time taken: 5.5 hours
SMR (Stile-to-Mile Ratio): 1.79
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