Hiking Boots For Women – Ideal For Walks Like This!

Today, I did a good hilly walk with Lisa and thought I’d write a little report about it to encourage you to…

• Get out and enjoy your local countryside.
• Treat yourself to some new women’s hiking boots, of course!

The weather forecast wasn’t great, but it looked like we would have a few hours to get a decent walk in before the heavy rain started again.

We caught the number 500 Keighley bus over the hill. The bus did most of the climbing for us, leaving us with a walk that was largely flat or downhill. It gave us an opportunity to walk less familiar paths. We do the local walks all the time so it was nice to get over 5 miles from town and then just walk back.

The bus dropped us off about 1/4 mile down the far side of the hill where ‘the conduit’ passes along the hillside. It is a water course with a good access path alongside it which takes us to Stairs Lane, part of the Haworth Old Road (an old pack horse trail).

You remember Haworth don’t you? It was home to the literary Brontë family, and setting for Emily Brontë’s famous novel Wuthering Heights. Haworth is only 8 miles from Hebden Bridge, with a 1,500 ft hill and the village of Oxenhope in between.

The clouds had closed back in while we were on the bus and it looked like it was going to start raining so I stopped halfway along the conduit to don my rain coat. Looking down the hillside towards Oxenhope, the village was almost obscured by a gloomy mist. And then the rain started…

Fortunately, it was just a brief downpour, and it had fizzled out by the time we got to Stairs Lane.

I was enjoying the walk, but I was also conscious of the fact that I am trying to build a little online hiking shoes business, so I asked Lisa to pose for me as we walked up Stairs Lane towards the highest point of our walk.

Ooh look, she’s wearing women’s hiking boots!

(That’s a terribly unsubtle hint that I have a page promoting the sale of hiking boots and you can go there if you’d like to buy some. I promise I’ll only put two or three such links per post folks! A chap has to earn a living, doesn’t he? ).

We had just started down the Old Road back towards Hebden Bridge when we came across something very strange, which wasn’t there when we did that walk a few months ago. It was a newly built section of dry stone wall, topped by turf. It didn’t appear to serve any purpose, given that the rest of the original wall is in a poor state of repair and is now redundant, having been replaced by a wire fence. We stopped to examine this wall and took some photos of it.

I could only think of three reasons for the wall to have been built:

1. It is there to serve as a reminder of what the original wall looked like. That seems unlikely, given that this area has hundreds of miles of such walling so we don’t need reminding!
2. It is some sort of artistic statement. That’s a possibility given that we have a large artistic community in Hebden Bridge. I’m not sure what the message is supposed to be in that case, but at least it had us talking about it!
3. Somebody was practising or teaching dry stone walling. Maybe… but why the turf on top?

Let’s face it – I’m baffled! On with walk…

The broken stone trail soon finishes and merges with a steep country lane which we had to walk down. There are lovely views in all directions. Old stone farm buildings, dry stone walls, rolling hills, and of course…

… lots of sheep happily munching away at the grass!

In the earlier part of the summer we were heading towards semi-drought conditions here. The reservoir water levels were dropping week by week and the authorities had started imposing restrictions on water use. Of course, since then we have had rain practically every day! As a result, everything is suddenly really verdant – wet = green!

The lane took us down into a dip where we turned right up the bridleway taking us up the western flank of Crimsworth Dean, an attractive valley leading down towards the local beauty spot of Hardcastle Crags.

Conditions were getting boggy towards the top.

That had me slightly concerned because we were rapidly approaching what is affectionately known by local mountain bikers as (er) ‘The House of S**t’! It’s an old stone barn which a farmer uses to shelter his cows in bad weather. Now there is a bit of a dip outside in which water tends to gather during rainy weather. Lots of cows plus soil plus water = very muddy, crappy conditions indeed! I’ve been up there when there was absolutely no way round it – not nice at all…

Today wasn’t quite so bad. Yes, it was smelly and yes it was not something you want to walk through, but a couple of logs had been laid down the side of the mess so we had something clean to walk along, being very careful not to slip off!

Safely past the obnoxious obstacle, we stood a while to admire the lovely view which had unfolded before us. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Crimsworth Dean – in ‘widescreen’! (Click on the picture to see it full size.)

It had been our intention to continue along the bridleway all the way down to the entrance to Hardcastle Crags, but I spotted a walker heading diagonally down into the bottom of the valley and Lisa told me that she knew where the path went. It would make a nice change to go somewhere different so she led me down the path and back towards town. It’s amazing how different it seemed just 50 yards down the hillside. The perspective changed, the hidden became visible, and the visible, hidden. I’ll definitely add that to my list of favourite local walks.

Passing through fields of bracken, we remembered to watch out for deer ticks – you should too, folks! A lot of people don’t know that there are deer in that valley but there are. They are very wary of contact with humans so I’ve only managed to see them twice in 25 years of walking and cycling in that area, but they are in there somewhere, and they quite possibly carry ticks. You don’t want to risk catching Lyme Disease off one, so either keep your skin covered or check it carefully after you get clear of any bracken that you pass through.

We descended into the woods and crossed Crimsworth Dean Beck on a little stone bridge. I’m disappointed, but my pictures didn’t turn out from that part of the walk. The camera exposure time was so long in the gloomy conditions that the pictures came out all blurred. It’s a shame because it is very pretty down there.

At long last, we emerged into open fields which soon took us down to Midgehole, at the entrance to Hardcastle Crags.

There are various ways to get back into town from there, but we took the quickest way – along Midgehole Road, and then the Keighley Road.

Lisa had to work later on, but we had time to spare so we stopped off at Innovation, our favourite cafe in the town centre. We had a coffee each and shared a toasted currant teacake as we sat and talked about our walk.

I checked my mapping software when I got home and calculated that with all the to-ing and fro-ing we did, we ended up covering 6.2 miles in total. It was a satisfying distance – enough to feel that we’d got a good walk in, without being exhausting.

(But it’s just the kind of thing that women need walking boots for!)