No animal encounters today, I’m glad to say, save for the usual sheep who scatter at your approach.
Our first challenge for the morning was obtaining breakfast and lunch, as our Youth Hostel was self-catering. We’d established that the cafe across from the pub did breakfast, but had foolishly made an assumption about the time that they would open. Half past eight, we discovered, was the time of opening when we arrived on their doorstep at half past seven. So the Co-op had to oblige for breakfast as well as lunch.
As we set out for the day we came across a sad sight – the youth hostel we’d stayed at twenty years ago. It was a shadow of its former self, surrounded by undergrowth. was nearly a mile out of the town, up a hill. Twenty years ago we had to walk up to the hostel, walk down into town for tea, walk back up to the hostel, walk down into town for breakfast, then walk back up the hill to start the day’s walking. So in actual fact, it wasn’t sad at all – it was fantastic being in the centre of town this time around.
Anyway. It was looking like a day of two halves again – half on the moorland, half in the forest. But it didn’t quite turn out like that. The moorland was pretty much as expected, and we took a couple of wrong turnings over the right to roam area. There was a clearly walked path to begin with, and it continued, but, when I double checked, we were walking several hundred yards off the path, following the trodden path of a randomer who had also clearly lost the path. With the use of Adam’s nose and GPS, we were reaquainted with the true path just in time for lunch at Whitley Pike.
After a couple of low level climbs, we then saw the forest ahead of us. Or rather, to begin with, a huge climb down into a valley, and sharp climb up the other side of the valley, just before the forest.
When we did get to said forest, it seemed the foresters had been rather trigger happy with their chainsaws. Acres of tree stumps and pulverised earth was laid before us. Obviously that part of the plantation had matured and had been felled, and there were plenty more plantations to walk through. 
And I do mean plenty more. Around six miles of nothing but forestry road and pine trees, the only variation being the gradient of the road.
At the end of all that is the small village of Byrness. Most of the village was built by the Forestry Commission to house it’s workers in the 1930s. Lots of other facts and figures exist, but all that we’re concerned with tonight is the Forest View Walkers Inn, our home for the next two nights.
Tomorrow we enter the final two days, over the Cheviots, into Scotland, and the day after tomorrow into Kirk Yetholm.
[table id=1 /]
