Let’s back up a bit though first……

Unfortunately, somewhat intentionally, our route today has been mostly north and easterly rather than south, thanks to there being a large estuary between our start and end points: Grange over Sands and Tewitfield. We had also replotted our route to avoid dodging cars on the main road, which has proved to be an interesting decision…….

As soon as we left our hotel what always happens, happened:

So we ended up dodging cars for a few minutes anyway on a 50 mile an hour speed limit rat run. Right on cue, a huge forestry lorry came around the corner just as we were debating the merits of a footpath on the map that appeared to circumvent a fair bit of the main road, so our minds were made up. It was lovely, despite Mark’s reservations that all too often, footpaths on maps end up being flights of fantasy through the undergrowth and not actual paths. How wrong could he be……

We then spent a fair bit of the day on lovely paths and back roads dodging mammals rather than cars. There were small mammals that were easy to dodge:

and larger ones that arguably weigh nearly twice as much as our car…..

Debrett’s book on Etiquette and Modern Manners is short on detail when presented by this challenge, but we had a sense that the right thing is to wait for the bull to go first.

Thankfully this bull also had a sense of decorum and moved politely out of the way.

Outnumbering the mammals by about 5:1, finally there were MAMILs that needed very little dodging at all.

When we reached Milnthorpe, we had two brief discussions:

1. With a man at our house about a pair of gates and garden wall that he’s building for us and whether we need to pay him or his errant brother for the remainder of the work due to be finished two months ago.

2. Whether we continued to walk down the A6 cycle path that looked as though it too was going to disappear versus the route Strava had mapped for us off-road.

Buoyed by the success of the previous  footpath, how could we refuse the one that Strava had already plotted for us? How hard could this be? 

This was the easy bit.

The token bit of blue plastic in front of this stile is to prevent us from being electrocuted by the electric fence wire inside.

I may have to reluctantly concede that Mark’s opinion of Strava footpaths as flights of undergrowth fantasy is correct.

6 hours and 16 minutes after starting out today, we joined the beautiful canal path at Holme, which is about as far south as Grange over Sands.

One more bizarre sidetrack onto a footpath took us through a petting zoo where they had clearly bred a Dalmatian dog with a horse and we reached our destination, the Longlands Inn.

Distance – 33km, 20+ miles, 25 walking days in, 25 left to go and a whole 6km south of where we started this morning.