Haltwhistle to Falstone

7 July 2011 - Haltwhistle to Falstone

Distance - 19.5 miles

Weather - Sunny, light showers in the morning

We stayed at - Blackcock Inn, Falstone, Kielder Water, Northumberland, NE48 1AA
Cost £85.00

As Alistair was settling up the hotel bill at Haltwhistle, the receptionist asked where we were going. 'Falstone,' he answered. "What? Today?" Yes it was another of those days!

Pleasant walking by Haltwhistle Burn 

The first part of our walk was beside the Haltwhistle Burn, which was very pretty, we then walked on up to Hadrian's Wall. Alistair went there on a school geography trip, but couldn't remember much about it, apart from the bus getting stuck on a humpback bridge and Jonathan Brian getting severely, severely, reprimanded for bringing a can of shandy with him by Mr. McMahon.  Mr McMahon was from the Western Isles and was a bit weird about stuff like that. Alistair thinks the other teachers looked just as bemused as he did.

Remains of Roman mile castle

This time around, we saw the remains of a mile castle, which were placed along 1 Roman mile apart, no matter if there was a more strategic place to put them. The Romans were a bit weird about stuff like that.

This part of the wall was built along Whinsill. There are big north facing cliffs along here and you can see why they built the wall on top of them. Interestingly, a mile north of the wall is a Roman aqueduct. Not sure why that was built there.

From there we headed north over fields for a couple of miles to get to the edge of Kielder Forest. We had expectations of this part of the walk. We would be going along forestry roads, with trees hemming us in. We would see nothing but forbidding coniferous trees as we trudged on for 15 miles or so. We had been warned about the prevalence of midges and cleggs. Great.

Entering Kielder Forest

In fact the roads varied more than we'd thought. It started with the trees being maybe 100m apart. Sometimes felling had happened and you could see for miles. The avenues got narrower and narrower, and eventually we got onto paths which were just firebreaks, with no roads. Soon we came to a section where a load of trees had been blown down over the path. A second path had been marked in paint through the trees, but this had been disrupted by further fallen trees. We skirted round these and got back onto the track only for it to vanish entirely. We had to find our way about as best we could. Thank goodness for GPS. 

APW sign in the forest

We found ourselves in the corner of a cleared area, thinking, 'should we go through here? It looks like it goes in kind of the right direction,' when we saw an APW signpost. This is pretty amazing. We have pretty much followed the Alternative Pennine Way since last Sunday and we have not seen a sign the whole time. Here was a sign in the midst of our uncertainty!

Soon we left the forest, to spend a kilometre trudging over our favourite long grass and bog combo, again with no track. Then back into the forest. This time the start of the track (and a matching bridleway) could be seen, but went the wrong direction. We did our best through the trees, there was deep moss underfoot - I didn't know there were so many different kinds of mosses, never mind that they could share the same habitat.

We took a firebreak which seemed to go in the right general direction and to our amazement we found a proper road. And where the firebreak met the road, there was another APW sign. Very useful.

The forest roads are far, far faster to walk along than anything without a track. Adding bogs and rough ground means that walking off-track is far more enegy sapping too. We had forest road for the next 5 or 6 miles, phew. Over this bit we had the company of 3 truck drivers, who seemed to be ferrying stones from one part of the forest to another. The road was only wide enough for 1 truck, so we had to get off when they passed. They were organised enough to all be going in the same direction at the one time, Also along here was a relatively posh bothy, which looked dry and had glass in the windows.

There was a pretty good track all the way until a mile and a half from Falstone. Then we hit what the APW book described as 'rough pasture'. Deep grass with ankle tearing tussocks, bogs, thistles and nettles is what I would call it, all while going uphill. There was a road at the top, which lead 2 tired people down to the hamlet of Stannersburn. By a massive effort we somehow avoided going to the welcoming looking pub there, and instead crossed the North Tyne River (yup, it flows into the same Tyne as the South Tyne we crossed a few days ago) then to our pub at Falstone.

Forest scenery

The Blackcock Inn sounds like a location from a 'Carry On' film, but it was a really nice
place, where the owners thought of everything, the food was good, and they had 'Old Rosie' cider on tap.