Saturday afternoon walk

When Dean was up on Tuesday evening, I suggested to him that we might go for a walk this afternoon if the weather was good. To be honest, it was pretty grotty, yesterday, but this morning was a lot more promising, so we went ahead with our plan.

Dean arrived just after lunch and we drove out to Barbon, leaving the car just opposite the church. As you can see from my first extra, it had turned into an unexpectedly beautiful day by then. The first part of this walk is, unfortunately, the hardest part; a pretty steep climb that gets harder about halfway up. 

After that, though, it's a stunning loop up the valley and down the other side. Now that they have cleared* hundreds of trees, one has a clear view of that manor for the first time in all the years that I've lived here, and the walk along the road down to Barkin Beck (main photo) is simply beautiful.

I must admit that part of the reason I arranged to go for a walk today was in case my Achilles tendon was still bad and I needed some exercise (although, happily, I did get out and do three miles, yesterday) and the stretch back along the other side of the beck happens to be my favourite part of my favourite run, which was unavailable to me for most of last year while they were tree felling. It was lovely to walk along here once again and I'm looking forward to running it this coming year. 

And, in the evening, Abi had a party to go to but Dean and I collected Dan from the station when he came back from RNCM and the Minx was there when we arrived back, cooking us all fajitas, which were delicious!

*they have replanted with hundreds of saplings

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-11.1 kgs
Reading: 'Plan For Chaos' by John Wyndham. I finally finished this, today. Now I love John Wyndham but this really isn't that good and I can see why it remained unpublished for so long; the story's not great or particularly well told. It's almost impossible to believe that he wrote it around the same time as 'Day Of The Triffids'.