After two weeks on the trot where I’d picked our weekend adventure, opting for new walks in Swaledale and Ribblesdale, Sam finally got his turn to choose the walk. He picked a 5 mile circular route from the village of Greta Bridge just off the A66, which he’d been wanting to explore for a while after spending years driving past it on our way to and from the Lakes.
He chose a route from the OS maps app: something which always fills me with trepidation, as they can be a bit hit and miss in terms of walkability/overgrowness (thinking especially of the return leg of our walk up to the Watercut). Thankfully, this route wasn’t too bad at all. It wasn’t wildly exciting, but it was a pleasant enough amble around mostly flat fields. We did get off to a rather inauspicious start though, with the first field having a herd of cows (including calves and a bull) for us to walk past.
It was a close run thing: we nearly abandoned the walk here, less than 15 minutes after setting out. Not only were there cows in the field, the gate to get in was impossible to open, and in the end we had to lift the dogs over the fence and climb in. The sole thing that convinced me to carry on was that the cows were all very considerately lying down on the other side of a hedge which mostly split the field in two. If they’d been milling around where we needed to walk I might have bailed!
To my relief, the rest of the walk was cow free, using a mix of arable fields and fields with sheep to get around. Although the map shows a few riverside sections, we were high up above the river and so didn’t really get a closer look at it. The best view was probably from the bridge at the Meeting of the Waters where the River Greta joins the River Tees. I suspect there are usually some waterfalls here, but with the dry summer we’ve had the water was barely trickling through.
After a short stint of road walking, we picked up the Teesdale Way, which we’ve previously followed for a spell near Cotherstone. We stayed on it for a short time to pass through Rokeby Park, before branching off through more arable fields to start heading back towards the start. While mostly the fields were unremarkable, it was pretty countryside and we saw an unbelievable amount of butterflies flying around in a few of them: all the more special because we didn’t remember seeing many at all last year.
Before long we arrived at the Church of St Mary, which is right next to the A66. The church here is part of what had piqued Sam’s interest in the area, although I must confess I’d never noticed it before – too busy focusing on driving! We spent a while, as we always do, reading the inscriptions in the churchyard, which included a rather faded but still just about legible memorial to those who lost their lives in the First World War. Then, it was time for the rather hair raising task of crossing the A66 – at least it was one of the single carriageway sections.
Crossing the A66 unscathed, we found the footpath on the other side looking rather unappealing. Narrow and overgrown, it appeared to be a recipe for getting a bramble to the face, so we opted to walk along the field edge on the other side of the hedge. This ultimately is where the path would’ve brought us out anyway (phew), and more fields took us to the tiny village of Brignall, where we followed the river back to Greta Bridge. There still weren’t many river views, but there was a ruined church yard, some nice countryside scenes and apparently the earthworks of an old roman fort (which we didn’t spot until we checked the map later).
All in all, this walk isn’t a showstopper, but it’s a nice quiet wander should you want to avoid other people – we only saw one other dog walker the whole time we were out. Plus, it’s really rather flat and easy walking, being mostly along field edges and quiet lanes.
Dog friendly rating: 2.5/5. This is a really funny one to give a dog friendly rating to: while there are lots of issue free sections through arable fields, there’s also the chance of coming across sheep and cows, needing to cross the A66 and several stiles (I stopped counting at 5), most of which don’t have a dog gate. Plus, needing to lift dogs over the fence into the first field wasn’t ideal. There’s very little water along the route, just a few shallow stream crossings.
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