Kirkby Stephen to Keld, 12 miles.
The next two days weren't the best of the trip. It's true to say that walking, any walking is a fine activity yet days 7 and 8 were wet and muddy experiences.
I dragged an extremely painful foot out of Kirbky Stephen via a pharmacy and we started on the ascent of Nine Standards, it was painful, windy and a relief to get to the top. The cairns made for good wind shelters as we contemplated the route ahead.
If my memory serves me then we followed the blue route on the OS map but in truth it was just a boggy, peaty expanse - an endurance test in stamina and route finding. We tried as best to follow and find the marker poles while plunging down ravines where all orientation was lost.
Looking back I took this photo of a pretty inocuous landscape, yet a landscape that had been distinctly unpleasant to walk across. In bad weather then it would be wise simply to stick to the motor road and we did seem to find the tarmac sooner than the map anticipated.
Surprisingly, the sun was out now and we walked along the road, for the first time in the day seeing other walkers. Finding the steep turning up Stonesdale Lane we sat down and wondered where our B&B was located.
We were staying at Frith Lodge yet hadn't a clue where it was. Just then a passenger transit van pulled up and the driver asked if we were heading for Frith Lodge. "Hop in".
It turned out that the driver lived and ran the B&B with his wife Mary. Both worked for The Sherpa Van company at the time (don't know if they still do). Mary answered the phones and he transferred baggage and people along the C2C - our bags were in the back of the van.
We turned down a steep drive to a bottom where he got out of the van, we seemed to be in the middle of nowhere and I couldn't see a house although a steep rough track curved up the hillside in front of us. He moved our bags across to a beaten up Nissan 4x4, we got in and proceeded to tear up the track. It hardly seemed passable for a Sherman tank let along a wheeled vehicle. To say the short journey was bumpy is toying dangerously with understatement. We both sat in the back and bounced around like rag dolls, heads hitting the ceiling, limbs flying involuntarily.
Frith Lodge appeared soon and Mary came to greet us. It was very remote. The house actually stood nearer to The Pennine Way than the C2C (although apparently, while close, it's not visible from the trail). Mary told us of walkers in peril who had been rescued from the PW when within a stone's throw of the house.
You know you're in a remote location when not a single light can be seen at night. It was pitch (and I mean pitch) black outside after supper.
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