Day 9 - Keld to Reeth

Today's 11 mile hike from Keld to Reeth took 7 hours, but that included a 1 hour stop at the Muker show, a 45 minute lunch at the Ghyllfoot Tearooms and Penny Farthing Bistro in Gunnerside and a long diversion up a hill due to path work that apparently wasn't even happening.

Lois and the group leaving Keld

After an hour or so we reached the town of Muker.  We could hear a band playing from way down the valley.  Today was Muker Show Day which is like a county fair.  Music, food, and lots of displays.  There was a sheep herding contest.  People brought their border collies who tried, usually unsuccessfully to herd sheep.  I was even able to buy a couple of small and very light souvenirs for the granddaughters.

Antique tractors

My pin in New Jersey on the "Where are you from" map

The show from above

Macs Adventures provides us with detailed maps of the route, but more importantly, they provide a very good guide book with a hundred or more local maps.  These are how we navigate.

This is a portion of today's hike.  Notice the notes such as fallen tree, low wall, bench ... These are very helpful, especially when looking for a turn.  We didn't see any rabbits in the rabbit metropolis.  I'll explain why below.

This is an elevation map which we have for each day.  This is from day 2 when I was complaining about climbing Loft Beck.  That's the nearly vertical rise on the right.

Everyone walking this trail is commenting on the number of dead rabbits we are seeing.  In the past 2 days, I don't think you can walk more than 100 yards without seeing a dead rabbit lying by the side of the road or squashed on the road.  We can't figure out if they are sick, or if there is a rabbit eradication program going on.  Some of the live ones we see look sluggish.  That must be why so many are being hit on these lightly traveled roads.  Future guidebooks may have instructions like "turn left at the 42nd dead rabbit".  We can't find anything on the internet about this, so we must just be imagining it.

We came across some interesting ruins late in the day

Today was the day the cows finally decided they were sick of us and decided to block our route through their  pastures.  Within a half hour period, we had to stop a couple of times and wait for angry looking cows to move.  Here are the culprits.