Saturday, 17th February 2018
I decided today was going to be my "out of county" walk day and I chose Eccup Reservoir on the (retrospectively, stupid) assumption that Yorkshire Water usually provide pretty good "easy access" tracks around their reservoirs and it wouldn't be too muddy.... Pahh!
To be fair, the route that hugged the reservoir was, indeed, okay. But, the walk up to it from Stair Foot Car Park following The Dales Way ..... MY GOD .... MudFest. Slippery, slide-y, goo. Some of which had been well squished about by sheep and cattle and was ankle deep. Delightful!
Aaaaand, to add insult to injury, my ViewRanger track didn't record properly. I set it going at the start of my walk (obviously) and it managed to track 0.02 miles before it switched itself off. I don't know why. Anyway, lesson learned - sometimes it's not a good thing to follow a paper map and have electronic gadgets as back up - because that way round, you don't check the gadget as often (at all) as you should which means you don't spot things like it stopping recording your track. I'm miffed because that's about 3.5 miles it hasn't recorded for my Challenge365
Aaaanyway, despite all of that, the weather was lovely and thankfully not like the weather I'd left back home. My legs got a bluddi good workout, slip-sliding around and, in Summer, this would be a lovely walk.
So here's some pictures (strangely enough, I didn't take any during my MudFest as I was too busy flailing my arms around trying to stay upright
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| Just amused me - sheep and geese grazing! |
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| Looking towards Harewood House |
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| Looking down to a bridge spanning the reservoir dam intake river |
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| Eccup Reservoir |
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| Valve pumps ... apparently |
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| The higher trail around the reservoir |
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| .. plus better views of it from up here .. |
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| ... than from down here on the "official" path |
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| A zoom-y in of a comms mast in Horsforth |
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| I would have walked through here back to the car if it was less muddy |
All in all, this would have been a lovely walk if it wasn't for the mud and maybe one for a re-visit in summer.
So here are the fairly pointless ViewRanger Tracks ...
Thanks for looking
