Plover Hill - unexpected and very wet

[nigheandonn]

I had been planning for a long time to head for the Moffat Hills as soon as my assignments were handed in, spending the weekend walking out to Peebles, with my first bothy night along the way - but I'd really been counting on May bringing decent weather, and when I got up foolishly early on Saturday morning and discovered a forecast of constant heavy rain over the Southern Uplands for the two days, I knew it really wasn't worth it - getting soaked is fine with a nice warm bed at the other end, but not for a bothy experiment. But I'd booked the train ticket for the way down, so I decided I'd go down anyway, and come back the same night, whatever I'd done in between.

Since the bus schedule is set up to get you into Edinburgh in the morning and out at night, I was overshooting on the way down - Dumfries via Carlisle - and the Carlisle train was so late that I ended up with an hour and a half to wait for the next train to Dumfries, and no idea when the next Moffat bus would be, and not much desire to go there in the pouring rain anyway.

And then the lure of spending the weekend doing something I wasn't meant to - after months of planning out almost every minute for working or studying or committee stuff or strictly rationed fun - was too much, and I was heading for the Settle train in search of better weather, with the rest of the weekend ahead of me.
After my Pennine Way adventure ended on the top of Pen-y-ghent when I left the path and took the shortcut down to the station, I'd planned out a catch up weekend which would take in Fountains Fell and Darnbrook Fell and Plover Hill and the bit of the path I'd missed out, before I set off on the next section - I didn't have the right map, but I knew the Pen-y-ghent day at least was either waymarked or obvious, so it seemed a reasonable choice.

Arriving in Horton it looked like I'd made the right choice - the sun even came out briefly - although the amount of water in the river showed how wet it must have been. I took the most direct path again, along with quite a few other people - grass, and sometimes slippery mud, and a miniature Malham cove about as tall as me.

The start of the path

A miniature Malham cove

About the start of the stony bit the rain came on in earnest, and my waterproof trousers (which were one of the deals at Lidl or Aldi, once upon a time) finally got their first airing. In spite of that, I didn't find the climb nearly so bad this time, whether because I knew what it was like, or just with having less on my back. The rain had gone off by the time I reached the summit, so I could sit in the shelter and eat my lunch, but I was well inside the cloud, with visibility at a few yards at most.

Pen-y-ghent summit signpost

I decided that setting out for Plover Hill was fine as long as I could stick to the wall - like going round a maze with your hand on the side and missing the centre, I might not find the summit, but I couldn't get lost.

And it worked, more or less, although it was kind of a bog adventure playground - jumping over bits, and wandering round bits, and stepping from stone to stone or along fallen posts, and tiptoeing along the stones at the bottom of the wall - and no real idea how far I'd got, or where I was going, since I could never see more than a few yards ahead - and sometimes it was raining and sometimes it wasn't. Eventually after quite a lot of flat I did start to go vaguely uphill again - but since I hadn't planned to come here, I didn't even know what the summit would look like if I found it. At one point the path left the wall and drifted upwards, which looked hopeful, but after a while it drifted back again, and I kept following the wall. And then after another slow endless time the wall ran out at an odd junction - two walls on one side, one on the other, and none ahead - and I wondered what to do next. I hadn't seen anything particularly summitlike before reaching the junction, so it might be on ahead - assuming it was marked at all, which in all that wasteland it might not be.

The mist was about at its worst, so no clues to be seen, except that there was a stile going over the corner of the single wall to the right. Once over, I tried going on ahead - bravely leaving the wall and following the path towards a post which appeared from the mist - but it turned out that the hill was running out as well - even without seeing it, I was sure there was nothing but downhill ahead. Left was definitely downhill as well, so I went back to the stile and tried going right, but that was all flat, with no sign it might change, and nothing obviously higher than the highest bit before the stile, which I'd already tried.

So I gave up and headed back - and suddenly the mist cleared so that I could not only see Plover Hill and Pen-y-ghent, but even at one point see that there were other hills in the world, which was all quite exciting.

Looking back - the first time I saw Plover Hill

Other hills

Pen-y-ghent

It made it much easier to get back over the bog, as well, when I could actually see where I was going and what lay ahead in time to dodge it - the journey back was still slow, but without that sense of being stranded in time.

I made it back to the summit of Pen-y-ghent, and back onto the Pennine Way - and it RAINED. And rained, and rained, and the wind got up and battered me and blew all the rain at me sideways, and it rained some more. The path was good, solid rather than soggy, and it wasn't that cold, so I somehow didn't really mind too much, but some of the people coming up with orange labels on presumably had further to go, and looked quite miserable.

It rained hard all along the edge of the hill, and down the slope, then the sun came out, and I kept looking for a rainbow that wasn't there. It dried off properly somewhere before the crossroads (crosspaths?), and there were views across the valley again, and colours, and a lot of water in a nice waterfall below the path.

The good path

Waterfall

I made it back to Horton a bit after I had expected, but in time to have a pint of tea and a scone in the cafe - after adjourning to the public toilets and trying to working out how on earth you get *out* of waterproof trousers when standing on a wet muddy floor. In spite of waterproofs I was soaked to the skin, underwear and all, and I was quite glad I hadn't been wearing my fleece when I hurriedly put my waterproof jacket on, so that I still had it dry and a spare dry top.

Sadly, the cafe also had a map on the wall which showed me the summit of Plover Hill somewhere on the far side of the main wall - although not very clear whether it's before or after the stile. But I'm claiming it for the moment anyway - it seems like it can only have been inches, and I have definitely experienced the hill!

And then there was the question of where I was going to sleep that night, which eventually took me to Long Preston by way of Settle, and dinner and beer by the fire in the pub, and all my clothes kindly dried by the B+B owner, and bed, and it was all good, even if I did keep finding bits of earth I'd shed on the nice clean carpet - I don't think I trod any in.

Apologies if this has been more a weather report than a walk report, but it was the most striking thing about the day for me - I've been out in that kind of rain once before, in the Pentlands, but never the solid mist...