In the throes of Winter, I always think that it’s really important to get out for a walk at the weekend, especially after a long week of being shut inside at work seeing next to no daylight. However, with the darker mornings I also find it increasingly difficult to drag myself out of bed for day trips to the Lakes or other places which are a bit further afield! Therefore I always breathe a bit of a sigh of relief when we have a ‘lazy’ weekend. We still get out for a walk somewhere, but we stay closer to home so that we can have a slow start without needing to rush around first thing.
A few weeks ago Sam picked a circular walk starting from the village of Ravensworth. It’s one of the many pretty, quiet villages which you’ll find off the A66, along with places like Barningham. The border between North Yorkshire and County Durham zig zags up and down here, but Ravensworth falls on the Yorkshire side of the border – just!
Ravensworth is a small village made up of quaint chocolate box cottages. It’s easy to get to, being just a 3 minute drive from the A66, but as soon as the A66 is out of sight it’s easy to forget that it’s there. The route we were following was this 5.5 mile circular route from the OS maps app, starting and finishing on the village green where there is limited free parking (although it was very quiet when we arrived at 10am on a Saturday January).
Mostly the route follows farm tracks and field edges, making use of the extensive footpath network in the area. The majority of the paths passing through fields were extremely muddy: not the over your boots kind of mud, but the slippy-slidey-fall-over-if-you-don’t-pay-attention kind of mud. The terrain is mostly flat, with a few steady climbs around the half way point. It still felt like hard work to me but I think I’m still working off all the chocolate I ate over Christmas! I do think that in summer this walk probably would have been a lot more enjoyable as I would’ve been able to do more than concentrate solely on where to put my next step in order to avoid mud/falling over.
When you’re planning your route before you set off, it’s worth noting that part of the route passes through a firing range. As you cross over the border of the ranges there’s a very obvious flag pole with a red flag: if the flag is up, live firing is taking place and you must not enter the ranges, while if it’s down it’s safe to enter (sticking to paths). When we did this walk the flag was down so we stuck to the route, but if firing is taking place there looks to be a footpath which you could use to detour this part of the walk.
After several miles of trudging through mud, the metalled track through the ranges was a welcome relief. I must confess to feeling rather sad when it came to an end and we went back to yet another muddy field! However, the countryside around here is very quiet, and we had this walk entirely to ourselves, so I won’t complain too much. It doesn’t have the show stopping views of some other walks, but it did the job we wanted and blew away a week’s worth of cobwebs and tired the dogs out.
Dog friendly rating – 2/5. Both of our dogs enjoyed this walk, but then what dog doesn’t enjoy a walk in the countryside with their owner! At two and a half hours it was just the right length to tire them out thoroughly, and the walk passes a dog friendly pub, the Shoulder of Mutton in Kirby Hill (which we did not enter as we were all covered in mud). Dogs need to be kept on leads while on the farmland, as we encountered plenty of sheep, as well as fields which are grazed by cows in summer. The main issue for dogs on this walk was the number of stiles: I stopped counting after the seventh (and there were plenty more after that). Nor are they (for the most part) the type of stile which dogs can navigate on their own with a bit of help, or squeeze under a gap in the fence nearby. They were nearly all the kind of stile which required some lifting from us, which always seems to be the case on the muddiest walks! Never mind, our coats needed a wash anyway…
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