Sometimes it’s nice to have an easy stroll close to home, especially on a Sunday afternoon. After a busy weekend involving race reconnaissance, exploring new bridleways with Paddy and an extensive clear out, neither of us were feeling hugely energetic by Sunday lunchtime. We opted to drive down to the Swinton Estate near Masham, to do an easy 4 mile circular walk from OS maps (presumably from an AA guide judging by the walk title) starting and ending by the Bivouac Cafe.
We parked in the Swinton Estate car park by the Druid’s Temple, where there is an honesty box and car parking is £3 all day. We didn’t visit the Druid’s Temple on this occasion, setting off across fields to pick up the Ripon Rowel Trail – a 50 mile loop around the Ure valley which starts and finishes in Ripon. We had walked sections of this route when we walked from Leighton Reservoir over winter, and a fair proportion of the paths had been soup-like with mud. I’m happy to report that in summer the paths are much better, and while grassy and faint in places, at no point did I nearly lose my boot in the mud.
While the tracks are sometimes faint, navigation is not complex and generally uses way marked footpaths (usually marked with tiny arrow pointers rather than a finger post, so keep your eyes peeled). We ambled gradually down hill, crossing a veritable sea of bracken (which made me seriously consider investing in a machete for future walks), following quiet lanes and field tracks to eventually return up hill to the start. While the walk isn’t flat, it isn’t steep in any places and shouldn’t pose too much difficulty to any walker.
Dog friendly rating: 3.5/5. This is a great dog walk for the Yorkshire Dales – while we did see both sheep and horses, there were enough empty fields that we got to let the dogs have a good run off the lead. They also appreciated being able to have a paddle in the stream (Coal paddled, Merry started collecting rocks as he always does). There are a few styles of varying difficulty to navigate, some with gaps the dogs could squeeze under, some where they needed to scramble over. And while we did walk along a few quiet stretches of road, we hardly saw any cars and those we did see were going very slowly – we heard them well before we saw them!
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