Day 22 Bampton Grange to Orton/Raisbeck

Well the church clock certainly did require the ear plugs, at least for Jo.

The perpetrator

Sleep was intermittent and punctuated every 15 minutes with out of tune chimes.

Breakfast was much better.                           

A short day, so a later start, even though we have about 2 km to reconnect with the Coast to Coast, it’s a pleasant walk across green fields, past sheep grazing.

Back on track the trail continues through fields, at one point going right through a herd of about 50 cows, so close in fact I was in fear of one pooing onto my legs. They were certainly unconcerned by us.

We descend into a charming valley where the ruins of Shap Abbey are situated. It dates back to the 12^th century, and closed down by Henry VIII, at the dissolution of the monastery’s etc. It is quite large, however only the tower remains largely intact.

Shap Abbey

It’s then into Shap village that has a nice coffee shop, where we have coffee and buy a couple of pasties for lunch later.

Just after Shap we cross the M6 motorway, then into very open moor-like country, where we stop to have lunch.

A friendly dog from the nearby Oddendale Farm joins us hoping for a free feed. The pasties are too good to share.

Back on the path again, the map shows us a path to Orton that cuts out quite some road walking and we take that across open fields, though a huge herd of steers, that ignore us, and into the Orton church graveyard.

The gate of the church leads into the centre of Orton where we find the George Hotel, our digs for the night.

We are delighted to find they will do our laundry, as we are getting quite short of clean socks and undies!!

We are also delight to find our room very spacious, albeit on the SECOND floor!!

A quick strip, shower, then bundle all our clothes off the laundress.

A walk round town takes about 4 minutes, it’s bigger than Bampton Grange. The PO is the town store, so I buy some Kendall Mint Cake and then we head off to the chocolate shop.

Five chocolates later, we decide an ice-cream would be excessive.

As we sit there, other walkers start to arrive, remember we took a short cut AND we walk much faster than most, so we chatted to a couple who we had met a number of times along the way, as one does on the C2C.