Yorkshire

At last I got to Yorkshire, the land of green fields, moors, stone walls, stone houses, slate roofs, more stone walls and more moors. Wuthering.

When the Etruscans were building amazing Duomos in the Italian City States, the folk of Yorkshire were building stone walls. The dry stone wall, built 1500's and still standing.

This is about 1.6m high

And there are lots of them

Yorkshire, truly amazing, my favourite place in England, and of course Ron has lots of family there.

We went to the Spring Rock with Aunty Rita and Uncle John for dinner. They lent us the caravan for which we are very grateful. Uncle John is having open heart surgery at the end of this week, so all our love goes to him.

After that we went straight to "The Bridge" Ron's favourite pub in the world.

Aunty Rita outside "The Bridge" Ripponden

We stayed at Maxine (Ron’s cousin) and Andrew’s place. They were fresh back from Glastonbury with a quite a few festival tales.

Tuesday we walked at Hard Castle Crags a valley behind Hebden Bridge. According to the locals Hebden Bridge, once a hippie town now has the largest density of lesbians in the EU. Who knows? Or cares? But it goes without saying that it is a beautiful town and Hard Castle Crags a fantastic walk.

A log with coins in it on the track at Hard Castle Crags

The mill at Hard Castle Crag

The Dales

We run away to the Dales for a day and night. Stayed in absolutely gorgeous pub “The Queens Arms” and did a great walk. From Litton in one valley we walked up over the moor to Buckden in the next valley. We climbed a height of 350m, walked 7km and it took 2.5 hours, that’s one way. We had great lunch of trout in “The Buck”, the pub at Buckden, then walked back to Litton.

The Queen Arms, Litton where we stayed

Litton village

Trout lunch

We are planning to do the Inn Way, 72 miles, 6 days and 26 pubs, next time we are here. Ron was very pleased with the 26 pubs and is still trying to figure how he can get to them all. Let’s see, stay 5 nights, that’s 5, then 6 lunches that’s 11, that leaves another 15. It’s going to be tough. We may have to drive.

The Dales is the home of such TV classics as

“All Creatures Great and Small”
“Heartbeat”
“Emmerdale”

and probably a few others I don’t know, so you can all imagine the countryside. It is very beautiful with heaps of stone walls and moors and is empty and wild. I want to live in the Dales.

The roads are very narrow but somehow this lot have set up a shearing station on the road,
if you look in the bottom right hand corner you can see me taking photo as we drive by.

Family Do’s

Thursday was the big day for Family Do’s. As Mo (Ron’s sister) and her husband Tony were over from Sydney it was a good opportunity to get everyone together for a "Family Do" or two.

We went to Janet’s (Ron’s cousins) (it gets very complicated but I can now say after 22 years I pretty much have the extended family sorted, but don’t expect my devoted blog readers to get it at all) for the baby lunch to see her 2 new Grandchildren, Albert and Luke. Ron called it “the Baby Prod”. It was great to see them both and of course they are beautiful. Well done Emma and Edward. Great lunch too.

Janet and Albert

Aunty Margaret

The relos

Baby Luke

Uncle John and Mo (Ron's sister)

Then we raced home via Brighouse to see Sal’s birthplace and a quick tour of Aunty Margaret’s garden in Soyland. She has fantastic strawberries.

Before long we were off to “The New Rock” for the dinner. Forty or so Priestleys, Broadbents and Bradleys were there. Great fun. Well done Mo for organising.

Ben and baby Luke

Some of the crew at "The New Rock"