11th October - Waverly Down

A new Geoff, from WW3.  Weather forecast was OK first thing, rainy later, so we got up at bastard on a Sunday morning to beat the rain.  Hah bloody hah, and a beautiful afternoon once we were home and had started the long process of drying out everything.

The village of Cross is interesting, here's a rather lovely housefront, some topiary, and a rather unusual garden ornament..

One pleasant surprise, especially for Margie, was how many blackberries were still available, and they seem to have reached a peak of sweetness.  I was often waiting for her to finish grazing...

On one of the road stretches of this walk, (very quiet lanes really) we passed a kennels which housed a large pack of foxhounds:

We seemed to arouse their interest ...

It's the foxes I feel sorry for

The walk did become more of an ordeal than a pleasure, as the walk up to the summit of Crook Peak was in complete cloud, and we got wetter and wetter.  We bottled out of the push to the summit, and then on our walk over Waverly Down my boot sole came away from the boot, suddenly and almost completely, so that I had to tie the bootlace under it to be able to continue walking at all.  This picture of Margie by the Waverly Down trig point summarises the walk quite nicely...

In all, a walk that we would love to repeat in dry weather, especially as some of the downhill sections were rather treacherous.  A fair bit of motorway noise during much of the walk is another consideration for the future.