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Last night we had a great Indian meal at Rozi’s tandori house. The restaurant caters mainly for takeaway but has a small seating area upstairs. The food was made quickly and was very yummy. Our breakfast at the B&B was great and set us up well for the short 12 mile walk into Buckden.

We left the B&B at 9:15 and it was already very hot with clear blue skies and little wind. We bumped into another hiker for a short while doing something called the ‘Inn Way’ which appeared to follows the Dalesway. We then entered beautiful hills above Grassington passing two runners out weigh their dogs. The path up onto the hills was nice and lush green grass but hard to follow in sections with few visible landmarks. The GPS came out a couple of times to keep us on track.

We soon reached the top and continued on well defined trails skirting old collapsed mine shafts (from lead mining). Anyone taking these trails in poor weather would need to be quite careful. From the tools it was a lovely descent down into Kettlewell where we found a local pub serving Timothy Taylor Landlord ale! From the Racehorse Hotel we followed the valley along descending to join the Dalesway along the riverbank, There were lots of people out with dogs swimming in the river due to the high heat.

We entered Buckden, a small village hamlet around 4pm and found our hotel the Buck Inn, a 16th century coaching house. We settled into our room and then went down to the hotel for a nice pint of ale. We met several locals who’d just completed a charity walk supporting TFA, the tenant farmer network, and FCN, farm community network.

We overheard a very funny story from their hike: “I was walking along and saw a bunch of cows walking up the road. This cyclist then comes along at sled wearing all the fancy cycle gear clearly looking like he was on a time trial ride. Unwilling to wait or dismount, he starts to weave in and out of the cows at speed, This is working great until one of the cows turns sideways and t-bones the cyclist who flies over the top of the cow coming skidding to a halt on the road.”

Tomorrows walk is back up to 17 miles so we plan to have and early night so we can start the hike by 7am.