Kirkby stephen to Keld- Half WAy Point!

After this 13 mile day, we’ve now reached 95 miles completed, or about half way through our Coast to Coast journey, woo hoo! The weather started foggy, drizzly to rainy and breezy and stayed that way the entire day. Such a contrast from yesterday. We began with a fairly desolate long rolling ascent out of the valley and up to the tufty grasses, heather and rock up to a peak at about 2,000 feet called the Nine Standards- which are basically nine large cairns of various shapes standing like statues at the top. The moody, gloomy weather and the stone sentinels made us feel like we were in a Lord of the Rings scene, or perhaps a King Arthur film. After a quick sip of tea from our thermos in the lee of a cairn, we headed out across the summit flat top into a complete fog out with little indication of a trail. The few people we had seen at the standards all disappeared into the mist. If not for Tom’s All Trails app showing the green line and the little blue dot that is us moving along it, I’m convinced we would never have found our way over the next few miles. Even with the app we felt we were making one giant loop and at any moment the Nine Standards would appear out of the mist. It was bog and fog madness. The peat was saturated with what seemed an underground spring, lurking just below what looked like a solid surface of grasses and mosses. The mosses we learned to most avoid are the very bright green mounds that look solid but are honestly worse to step on than putting your foot all the way into an overflowing toilet. It would be more like an overflowing toilet covered with a thin veneer of wet toilet paper clog- except that it’s much prettier. The color of green is so vibrant- kind of like that Action Green uniforms the Seahawks wear, or the color of those new leaves that pop out with first sign of spring. We encountered many “stream crossings,” where the part that looked like the bank you could launch from and the bank you could land on were just as treacherous as the water in the stream. Tom once demonstrated it well when he got a “running start” from a few spongy spots, lifted airborne and landed with one foot up to his knee in muck. I sucked in my breath as I prepared to help rescue him, hopefully with his leg, foot and boot attached. This morning our last host, Gill, warned us as we headed out the inn door, “Yeah, it’s just one big sponge up there. Once a 6ft 6inch bloke got stuck up to his waist and mountain rescue had to come pull him out.” Eventually, instead of all bog, the trail shifted to bog, then rocky, then bog, then rocky and we knew we were descending into better terrain. And it warmed up a bit (still foggy and misty with some wind) for us to find a little place to have some lunch packed for us by Gill, which included a Scotch Egg- Tom’s first encounter. (I knew he’d like it!) Our lunch spot was a small stone wall in a half-circle shape with the number 6 posted on it. We discovered later that these are blinds for gorse hunting, as number 7 and then 8 followed a little way down the hill. It made us curious how that all works. Do they stock the hill somehow with birds? What if #6 and #7 fired at the same bird? How would you know who got it? So many questions unanswered for now. The trail wound down into rolling pastures with small canyon-like cuts of a creek with small waterfalls. Several small stone huts of the same size dotted the landscape throughout the hills and we wondered about this too. Are these old field-hand dwellings? As usual, the last 2 miles of our hike, this time with Keld Lodge as our destination, were actually 5 miles. The joke that never gets old as we are still so pooped each day as we drag ourselves to the doorstep. This hamlet, Keld, is really different so far than the rest. It feels very remote, with just a cluster of stone homes and lodges, all with a similar look, tucked in a few folds of the continuous rolling green pastureland and stone fences. It feels exposed, like it could get a big battering in winter, but it is so beautiful, even in this low misty fog and gray. Our room on the 3rd floor had 2 windows with 6 little square panes each from which I had an elevated view of a wide green pasture with sheep and lambs munching grass, frolicking, sleeping. I flopped on the bed, exhausted but loving letting my mind go and watching them do their sheep things.