Walking to Scotland: an American Hikes the Pennine Way

Day 6 Cowling to Earby

A day of rain and food. This week is a United Kingdom Bank Holiday. I’m not really quite sure what that is, but it means that places to stay, particularly in tourist areas are hard to find. One reason I chose to hike the Pennine Way was to avoid carrying a sleeping bag and tent, so booking lodging is imperative, although I don't want to plan too far ahead. My gesture toward the wild on this trip is keeping my itinerary open-ended. But as a result my day out of Cowling will be short, only to Earby which is under 10 miles—what is called on the Appalachian Trail a nero. Rest days on the trail are called Zeros, as there are zero miles hiked. A Nero is a “nearly-zero,” which for my son and me usually meant anything that could be hiked in an easy morning—roughly anything under 10 miles.

After sleeping in, I had an incredibly pleasant nearly full-English breakfast (sans black pudding) with Susan and Sandy, who were the ones who suggested I should write this book (so please write to them if you want a refund). It is a curious phenomenon,  the full breakfast or “fry-up.” Although the ingredients and mode of preparation are clearly central to the experience, it is also very much about time—leisure.  People telling the history of the full English breakfast usually place its origin in the 19th century (incidentally the period  of advent of leisure walking) though its roots run deeper, into the more ancient landed gentry for whom breakfast was indeed a leisurely affair, but still one that might precede a hunt or a journey. Its very extravagance was to show off the foodstuffs available on the estate and be sure everyone was well-fortified for the day.    

It became a more broadly embraced phenomenon in the Victorian period when the newly rich industrialists and entrepreneurs began to copy the habits of the old families. The plentiful and leisurely breakfast served as a marker of gentility. The best-selling Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book and Household Guide advocated for large breakfasts and included recipes for a broad range of breakfast meats and vegetables. Though still a matter of some debate, particularly between the member nations of the UK, the standard full Breakfast in England, particularly in the north of England where the Pennine Way meanders and the meats are produced, includes eggs, beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, back bacon, sausage, toast, and black pudding. Now any American who has ever visited a Shoney’s breakfast bar well-understands the notion of a meat-heavy breakfast, but the full English still makes me wonder how anyone got up from the table to do much of anything after such a meal. Most of the people I spoke with on the Way said they almost never ate a full breakfast, but they were standard offerings at B&Bs and were the first listed on any respectable pub breakfast menu.

In a hold-over from the time of the local gentry displaying the produce of their own lands, places today try to locally source their breakfast materials. My eggs often had bright orange yolks which I am guessing were from free-range chickens I would encounter regularly while tramping through barnyards. Given the PW’s position near an important agricultural region (the pigs are definitely locally sourced), the ingredients are astounding. An American gets the bacon and eggs, but, like the ubiquitous butty, this is back bacon, not streaky. Sausages are also familiar, but sautéed mushrooms—who ever thought of that for breakfast? And the sautéed tomatoes always looked more like a garnish that an actual part of the meal. The one thing I soon discovered was that, even though it is considered a fundamental part of the full breakfast, most B&B proprietors ask if you want black pudding. My guess is they are tired of tossing out the portions left on the plate. Black pudding is a sausage, but the filling is a mixture of blood and some sort of filler such as oatmeal. It has a long pedigree. According to the English Breakfast Society, black pudding is mentioned by Homer several times, was intensely disliked by Sir Isaac Newton, and was the source of much theological debate, including a tract called “The Trial of a Black-Pudding” by Thomas Barlow (1652) where he argues that eating it violated both Jewish and Christian dictates. Interestingly enough, the English Breakfast Society goes on to claim that Black Pudding is a low-carb, healthy alternative to heavier sausages and breakfast meats—go figure. For those looking for something closer to an American breakfast, hash browns are generally frowned on, but there is bubble and squeak— leftover vegetables fried up with mashed potatoes until they brown. Apparently while they are cooking, they both bubble and squeak.

What a temporal and gastronomical disparity between trails. On the AT, my son and I would wake with the sun. In a carefully choreographed set of gestures we would: dress, roll-up sleeping bags, pack-up all equipment, get food bag from the bear hang (food suspended from wires, trees or placed in fortified boxes to discourage bears from eating supplies and hikers). We would then each eat two cold, frosted strawberry Pop-tarts, maybe take a swig of water if any was left in last night’s Nalgene bottle, and off we went. It took at most 15 minutes. We always tried to make good time hiking early in the morning. Campsites on the AT are always near a water source which means they are usually down in a valley or a saddle between two peaks, so the beginning of any day almost invariably involves a climb, best made in the cool of the morning. We would try to hike at least two hours, then start looking for a water source, a place to sterilize a couple of liters, down one with a sports drink powder mix, and eat “second breakfast”— some sort of energy bar. We were living on sugar and protein on the AT, on the PW it is salt and fat.

Bidding farewell to Susan and Sandy, I waddled out of Cowling into the adjoining village of Ickornshaw and from there climbed a hill, crossed some pasture, and soon found myself on the outskirts of Lothersdale. Although it was a dark, cloudy day, the rain thankfully was holding off. I was looking forward to Lothersdale as the guidebooks correctly describe it as a charming village. One of the last of the mill-towns as the PW transitions into the limestone agricultural dales, Lothersdale still has the remnants of a mill including a big chimney that makes it easy to mark at a distance. Had I worked my timing better, I would have arrived at the proper time for a pint at the Hare & Hounds, a beautiful old pub, but it was still early. On the way out of town I spoke briefly with a woman in high rubber boots out walking a pair of border collies. She became for me a type I would regularly encounter: energetic and outgoing, enjoying the outdoors having a brisk walk with her dogs regardless of the conditions. This area marks a geological transition to limestone, and with that, the agriculture changes as well, with more cattle, pigs, and chickens instead of primarily sheep, although today I did see black sheep- something only known by the nursery rhyme.

Up and out of Lothersdale, my day was not far from complete. Rather than follow the PW into Thorton-in-Craven, I took a side trail to the larger town of Earby which boasted a YHA and a bunk. That path took me across fields that made me wish I had worn my waterproof socks. When the bogs gave way to a hill, I found myself on a road going past a working farm, with a number of people out in the fields doings various labors. Along a newly-strung barbed wire, I came upon 24 dead moles, strung up on the fence with the barbs stuck though their jaws. Now Americans are fairly famous for their displays of dead animals. I grew up in the mountains of Virginia, and many houses were decorated with deer heads and such, but I had never seen anything like this. My first thought was that they perhaps were to serve as a warning to other moles: Keep Out! But I then smiled at the idea of a blind mole crawling out of a hole to look up in the sky at some of his dead cousins. As it turns out, this is part of another ancient tradition, one where landowners would pay mole catchers by the mole. Apparently in the late 19th and early 20th century, the going rate was 50p per mole with the catcher being entitled to the skins, (though the skin of a mole is not the same thing as moleskin). Stringing them on a wire just makes it easier to keep the tally. I guess I should have been warned by Woodlanders, the Thomas Hardy novel I had been carrying on this stretch where Giles’s helper, Robert Creedle, had as one of his many jobs catching moles in the fields, and of course there is Jem Rodney, the mole-catcher in George Eliot’s Silas Marner.

I made it down to Earby without getting impaled on a fence, discovering I was too early check into the hostel, so I wandered the mile or so to the middle of town, the whole time trying to parse the smell— then it finally dawned on me that it was coal. There was still a sharp chill in the air and the old houses had coal furnaces and grates. Earby, a former lead-mining town has not yet recovered from the industrial shutdown. Unlike the other Yorkshire villages with winding streets and little squares, Earby is laid out in long blocks with Main Street lined with storefronts. It had a couple of fish and chips shops and various takeaways, but nothing that inspired hunger, so I found myself upstairs in Morgan’s Cafe, a really pleasant spot for hot coffee out of the weather. The odor brought me back to my youth when many of the old houses in my hometown still heated with coal. A good friend’s father owned the local cinema. On the weekends we would go to see the picture and then, before walking back up the hill to home, we would stop at his grandmother’s house just across the street, shake the grates of the basement furnace, rake out the clinkers, and shovel more coal for the rest of the night.

By mid-afternoon, the rains returned. Commenting about the bad weather on my way out, I was corrected by a gentleman sitting by the window, who noted, "it's never bad weather, only bad clothing." The skies opened as I hotfooted it back toward the hostel,  an interesting, multi-level building. I was directed to a large bunkroom, quickly claiming a bottom bunk by right of being first but also the most decrepit. After a deliciously warm shower and putting on some dry clothes, I realized my full breakfast had  worn off and set off to the Red Lion, a nearby pub, for what I hoped would be some more Yorkshire sausages and maybe some mash.

For reasons that I could not quite understand, the pub’s kitchen was closed, so if I wanted supper I needed to swim back downtown for some Chinese takeaway. Opting for a liquid meal, I discovered another bar area through a door near the vestibule, a much less formal and truly inviting space that was clearly where the neighbors gathered. One motioned me in, and I found a seat near the back with full view of the proceedings and the television which was about to broadcast the Champions League Championship game. I watched as the patrons trickled in. An older woman stopped to kiss her husband who had long been stationed at the bar, then joined her friends at a table where an intense conversation ensued. Other men arrived, arranging themselves and their pints on a bench facing the screen, each casting a curious glance in my direction for a moment before joining their neighbors in rooting (unsuccessfully) against Real Madrid, or to be more precise, against Cristiano Ronaldo, who they had not forgiven for leaving Manchester United. As the game moved into the second half, the woman who ran the bar appeared with a heaping plate of sandwiches, began to pass them around taking care that I took several. The rest of the crew did as well asking me what I was doing, smiling with approval, and at the end of the evening, as I walked toward the door, they each shook my hand and wished me a good walk.