Does walking the Pennine Way look hard to you? Well why not sponsor me here.

Alas with a case dropping into her dairy my most beloved Hannah was taken from me. The more observant of you will notice that this is in fact the picture of her arriving in Malham but who cares? Fortunately, or should I say unfortunately given our intended arrival back at Ponden this evening, it was not before she had driven us back to East Marton to restart our journey. Our delightful hosts at Ponden Hall are to be thanked for a most excellent breakfast but I suppose this should be expected at what was by far the most upmarket establishment I suspect we shall visit throughout this entire trip.

Sadly there is no evidence on the map that this bridge exists and certainly nothing I noticed pointing out that there is no way down from the road to the canal and thus we added at least a half of a mile getting from where we dropped off at the pub next to the bridge walking to the bridge and then walking back round so that we could pass under the bridge. Any hope that we might walk along the canal for a little while was dashed when we soon after came off and went into a field.

With the rain of yesterday passed a beautiful days walking lay ahead. Having been able to be moved about in a car allows for all but the last day to be less than 14 miles. Today was also the day that we would pass the symbolic milestones of having walked over 200 miles and have climbed more ascent than between sea level and the top of everest. It seems odd these two milestones should occur in such close proximity.

As a child I remember having three “life goals” of which one was to run a marathon and another to climb Everest. Given that I can think of no actual reward for achieving such a goal and the astonishingly high probability of death (approximately equal to that of Alan Johnson leading labour into the next election) I suspect I will take this as my proxy and think not of doing any such silly thing.

Is my father thinking of taking an extraordinary running jump at this wall? If I am honest by this point of our journey any novelty has completely worn off and from when we set off in the morning until we arrive at our destination in the evening I find myself paying less and less attention to the countryside we are walking through and of nothing more than putting each new step in front of the previous one.

Eventually we arrived back at Ponden and though we were not extravagant enough to stay in the exceptional Ponden Hall this evening we were fortunate enough to stay in the still quite delightful Ponden House which can be little more than 10 yards away from our previous lodgings! Oddly enough despite feeling like we were in the middle of nowhere Just-Eat were able to provide us with two delightful pizzas and (due to a perceived minimum spend on my part which may not actually even have been real) 8 cans of Pepsi.

Does walking the Pennine Way look hard to you? Well why not sponsor me here.