Drenched Double Stage : Keld to Reeth...to Richmond

“A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.”

Patrick Rothfuss

Realities of Long Distance Hiking

There is a temptation with every travel narrative to make the experience seamless, as if life itself moved smoothly from one event to the next toward some inevitable and inspiring conclusion. A journey begins. A challenge appears. A lesson is learned. The rain clears. The walker arrives wiser than before.  But this is not really how hiking or life happens.

Most days are more disjointed than that. Plans change. Weather interrupts. People misunderstand one another. Roads are taken, reversed, and taken again. What feels meaningful in hindsight often felt confusing, frustrating, or absurd in the moment.  Most of life is actually disjointed and full of randomness.  The structure comes later, when we sit down and try to give shape to what happened when we tell tales, write blogs or publish books.

On the trail, this is especially true. Hiking itself is a simple and physical undertaking, but that does not make it romantic. To set out on foot out the door and across a landscape is not to move through a curated version of the world. It is to accept whatever the day gives you: the weather, the mud, the kindnesses, the mistakes, the closed tearooms, the cancelled rooms, the costs you did not expect, and the distance you suddenly have no choice but to cover.

Long-distance hiking slows travel down. It lets us see more, listen more carefully, and move through landscapes at a human pace. But it also exposes the body and mind to conditions that cannot be avoided, negotiated with, or wished away.  To walk across a country is very much to put yourself at the mercy of the world and the gods.

Today was one of those days on Wainwright's Coast to Coast Trail.

It began beside our tent in Keld, surrounded by birdsong, fog, and drizzle. It ended in Richmond, in one of the largest and most expensive hotel rooms (though a Victorian suite may be a better description) we have ever stayed in, with water being poured out of our backpacks into a claw-foot tub and every available surface in the elegant room turned into a practical drying rack.

Between those two points came torrential rains, flooded fields, a cancelled reservation, several kilometres of pointless backtracking, and the realization that our planned stage from Keld to Reeth was about to become something much longer.

As The Oh Hellos sing in Cold is the Night - “…Without the bad, the good disappears…”.  By the end of this day, I understood that line a little too well.

Morning in Keld

We woke in Keld to steady drizzle and a valley filled with fog. Both of which were in their own way beautiful.  I have always loved the sound of rain on the outside of the tent and the look of fog in across a landscape.  Not far from our tent, a pair of pheasants strutted around the field with great self-importance, while curlews circled overhead, calling into the damp morning.

Given the conditions, we packed as much of our gear as possible from inside the tent. It is a routine we have used many times on the Trans Canada Trail in bad weather: collapsing the inner body away from the outer shell, packing the mostly dry interior separately in a dry bag, and then moving quickly to deal with the fly, groundsheet, poles, and pegs, all of which were sodden and which go in their own dry bags.  It is not a perfect system, but it means that when the tent goes up again at the end of the day, at least some part of our small shelter may still be dry.  Or at least dry-ish.  The downside is that the process is less than perfect, and with everything separated, the tent takes up a lot more room in my backpack.

We set off without coffee, eating trail bars as we walked. This is never my preferred way to begin a hiking day, but the plan seemed manageable enough at the time. If everything went well, we would walk the stage from Keld to Reeth, reach town in four or five hours, which would be around noon, find something hot to drink, and then settle in before the worst of the weather arrived.

The forecast was the reason for our haste. Heavy rain was expected later in the morning, with more serious amounts predicted for the afternoon. Some forecasts suggested 20 to 60 millimetres before noon alone.  Others implied more. Either way, the message was clear: the earlier we got moving, the sooner we arrived in Reeth, the better everything would be. At least, that was the theory.

What we could not know then was that this day would not end in Reeth. What began as a damp but manageable morning would eventually become a double stage in driving wind and torrential rain, through fields that had turned into rivers, ending only after a desperate push to reach Richmond before the hotel receptionist left for the day.

Coast to Coast and Pennine Way

Leaving Keld, we crossed a footbridge into a small park and then crossed the River Swale on a wooden pedestrian bridge. The river below was already running high, its water moving with the force of a landscape that had absorbed more rain than it could easily hold.  A fact that we could appreciate after almost a week of near-constant rain on the trail. 

Nearby, waterfalls poured down through the greenery.  Before long, we came to a wooden sign for the Pennine Way, complete with the acorn symbol of a National Trail. For a few minutes, the Coast to Coast and the Pennine Way shared the same route.  This felt wonderful to us. We knew that we would return to this very place in a few weeks, having completed the Coast to Coast and begun the next stage of our larger UK hiking plan. Keld would not simply be a village we passed through once. It would become a crossing point between one trail and another.

Today, however, it was not long before the Coast to Coast soon diverged, and we continued along the path we were presently on.  And so we followed a wide gravel track climbing up the side of the valley, passing abandoned stone buildings and, more unexpectedly, an old engine block and steering wheel left to slowly return to nature beside the track. The hills around us were impossibly lush and covered in rabbits. They seemed to be everywhere, darting through the grass and over the slopes as though the entire region had become one enormous warren.

Here we had a choice. The high route followed the ridges and was said to offer insight into the mining history of the region, while the lower route followed closer to the river. On another day, with better weather and more visibility, the high route might have been tempting. But with the sky darkening and the forecast worsening, we had no desire to lengthen the stage or add unnecessary exposure.

As such, we took the lower route.  On which the trail returned toward the banks of the Swale. Oystercatchers were everywhere along the river, sitting on rocky banks, calling sharply, flitting about, or perching on drystone walls. Even under darkening skies and the threat of weather, the region held beauty.

For a while, it seemed as though the day would be manageable. Then we reached the fields near Muker.

Mud, Land, and Weather

With the village of Muker across the river from us, the Coast to Coast left the road and entered local farmland. Almost immediately, we discovered that the riverside path had become a mire. It was less a trail than a second river, brown and slick and already churned by boots, sheep muck, and rain.

After passing through one of the narrow squeeze stiles we had come to think of as “fat man’s misery” gates - the kind that might be perfectly reasonable for a day walker but becomes an awkward negotiation with a full backpack - we were met by a farmer.  He asked us not to cross the field.  Given the amount of rain the area had already received, he was concerned about the land being torn up by hikers. We asked if there was a way to skirt around his property, but he explained that it would be best if we avoided the fields entirely that day. Several other walkers arrived around the same time, and soon all of us were being directed to use the road, which would rejoin the official route farther along near Gunnerside.

It was frustrating, but understandable.

Long-distance hikers depend on access through other people’s land, and it is easy to forget how generous that access can be. From our perspective, we wanted to stay on the signposted route. From his perspective, countless wet boots crossing a saturated field could turn his property into a muddy pit. The right-of-way may have existed, but the reality on the ground mattered too.

So we turned back, losing time as we climbed out of the farmland and returned to the gravel track we had followed from Keld.  The road we joined was essentially the cycling route, partway up the side of the valley. It was not especially busy with traffic, which was a blessing. Unfortunately, that blessing was soon tempered by the fact that it began to rain in earnest.

Not long after, it began to pour.

The sky turned white with the sheer amount of water falling. Below us, the landscape we were meant to have walked through slowly saturated and became an increasingly lush tapestry of green and yellow, divided by kilometres of drystone walls. From our vantage point, we could see the official trail snaking across fields and through wall after wall. We could also see hikers below us slipping and struggling through a route that looked more like a wading pool than a footpath.  For all our disappointment at leaving the official route, I was suddenly grateful we had.

As we made our way along the road, halfway up the side of the valley, the rain intensified, and the wind began to drive it sideways. We were being soaked from every direction.

Village to Village

Eventually, we spotted Gunnerside Lodge ahead and wondered, briefly and hopefully, if it might be a pub or some sort of shelter. But as we passed, there was an armed security guard at the back door, and the building was clearly a private residence.

By the time we reached the village of Gunnerside, we were entirely drenched. It was a charming place, with stone buildings, a pub, and two tearooms. Under better circumstances, it would have been exactly the sort of village where we might have stopped, warmed up, ordered coffee, and taken some time to appreciate where we were. Unfortunately, it was only 9:30 AM, and despite the number of establishments available, nothing was open yet.

Which, to put it mildly, was disappointing. We were wet, cold, and already ready for a break. Instead, with little to be gained by standing in the rain and waiting, we continued on.

Beyond Gunnerside, the trail climbed again and soon left the road for a muddy track. At one point, we passed Lane Foot, where there were historical signs and old stone structures, though we did not stop long enough to explore them properly. The rain had focused our efforts to get to Reeth as quickly as possible.  There are moments on the trail when curiosity gives way to endurance, and this was becoming one of them.

Periodically, the rain eased just enough to allow us the opportunity to take in the countryside around us. We could imagine how beautiful it would be on a clear day, with hills rising around the valley and drystone walls tracing lines across the slopes. We could also imagine how exposed and challenging this stretch might be in heat. Today, however, it was the cold rain and wind that shaped everything.

As we continued across open fields, the wind picked up, chilling our soaked bodies. We tried using our hiking umbrellas as shields, angling them into the gusts to block some portion of the rain. For brief moments, they helped. Then the wind shifted, or the trail turned, and we were soaked again from a new direction. 

There were long stretches through sheep fields, muddy tracks, and open hillsides where the views would likely have been fabulous if we had not been walking hunched over, hoods pulled up, and heads down against the weather. The route skirted Kearton Farm, followed drystone walls along another very muddy track, and then eventually dropped toward Healaugh, a tiny and charming-looking village with no amenities that we could see.

It was there, beside a wall that offered at least some protection from the rain on one side, that I pulled out my phone.  I had resisted using it because of Bell Canada’s outrageous international roaming fees, but the thought of camping in these conditions had become untenable. There was clearly no way we could pitch our tent in this weather, let alone hope to keep anything inside it dry. I opened Booking.com and found a room in Reeth. It was expensive - around £200, or just over $400 Canadian - but in that moment I was grateful simply to know we had somewhere indoors and warm to go.

With that small reassurance, we continued on, and the day seemed more manageable knowing that we would soon be inside and able to put things to rights. 

After Healaugh, the route descended again toward the River Swale and followed a track beside the water, which was running high and chocolate brown. The singular highlight was seeing a frog, likely the only creature beyond the fish in the river that did not seem utterly dispirited by the amount of rain.

Into Reeth

Back near the Swale, the trail followed the waterway toward Reeth, though not as directly as we might have wished. Instead, it seemed to trace the full length of the town before finally backtracking into the main square. Arriving in this open space in the centre of town, we were cold, wet and quite ready to be done.

Reeth itself was beautiful, with historic buildings gathered around the village green and a romantic-looking church overlooking the square. Under different conditions, I might have noticed more. I might have taken photographs, read information plaques, or wandered. But none of that mattered very much in the moment. We were focused on getting indoors.

We found the pub where our accommodation was supposed to be and walked in to discover a blazing fire.  It was exactly what we needed.

Though we had arrived far too early to check in, we were welcome to sit down near the warmth of the fire.  Having done so and stripped off our sodden rain gear, we ordered large and delicious bowls of soup with heavily buttered bread, and tried to stop shivering while water dripped off us and onto the floor. A local man was there with two huge friendly dogs, and for a little while, the day seemed to be turning back toward something we could enjoy. Cozy, we each had a pint of cold local beer.  Seeing us waiting, the young woman at the bar eventually took pity on us and offered to let us into our room early, perhaps out of kindness, perhaps because we were dripping everywhere.

I jumped up to provide the reservation information and confirmation number. Then everything changed again.

The room we had booked had been cancelled shortly after the reservation was made. I didn’t know this because I had no reason to check my email in the deluge en route.  Booking.com had overbooked the property due to a miscommunication, as the hotel was full, and it was accommodating a tour group. We were not the only ones affected. Around nine other hikers were in the same situation, all of us wet, tired, and suddenly without rooms.

The young woman behind the bar was clearly distressed and did her best to explain, but the explanation did not change the reality. We had nowhere to stay. 

I went back out into Reeth and searched around the main square for any available room. It was a fruitless process. The Coast to Coast was busy, the weather was awful, and everyone wanted shelter. When I returned to the pub, Sean had already put on dry socks and was preparing for the inevitable: walking on in the still-pouring rain.

We asked for help and were directed toward Orchard Caravan and Camping, but without Wi-Fi and in the torrential rain, the directions were confusing. By the time we realized we were simply back on the trail, we were already a couple of kilometres out of town. I did not want to turn around, but the thought of ending the day, returning to a fireplace, and somehow making camp nearby was enough to convince me.

So we turned back.  When we reached the camping field, however, it was sodden, with several inches of standing water. Even the kind proprietor advised against camping there, and there were no cabins or other accommodations available.

So we turned around again. In the end, we walked, backtracked, and rewalked the same stretch several times, adding pointless kilometres and another hour in the rain without making any real progress.

Recognizing the seriousness of the situation, I pulled out my phone again. With the number of people on the Coast to Coast, the cancelled rooms in Reeth, the unusable camping, and no clear alternatives nearby, we needed to reserve something quickly.

Richmond, a full hiking stage away, was the only next real possibility.  There were only two rooms available. One cost nearly £400. The other, in a B&B, was £325 -roughly $700 Canadian for a single night. Depressed by the options, and aware that the room cost more than a flight from Toronto to the UK might have, I booked it anyway.

There was one catch. We had to arrive by 4:30 PM, or there would be no one there to check us in.  That meant we had to cover roughly four hours of hiking in less than three amid increasingly difficult weather conditions.

Trail Continues, Deluge Continues

Leaving Reeth for the final time broke something in me for a while.

We had already walked the stage we were meant to walk. We had arrived wet, cold, and tired, sat briefly beside a fire, ordered soup and bread, and allowed ourselves to believe that the day was nearly over. Then, in the space of a few minutes, the room we had reserved disappeared, the campground proved unusable, and the possibility of stopping vanished with it.

The only realistic option left was Richmond.  The difficulty was that Richmond was still another long stage away, the rain was still falling, and the receptionist at the B&B we had just booked would only be there until 4:30 PM. The room cost an amount I could barely allow myself to think about, more than seven hundred Canadian dollars for a single night, but by then, the question was no longer whether it was reasonable. The question was whether we could reach it at all and in time. 

So we left Reeth in the rain and began again.

At first, the Coast to Coast followed roads and riverside paths along the Swale, but very quickly the afternoon began to lose its shape. There were fields, then more fields. Gates, then more gates. Mud, then deeper mud. Puddles became standing water, standing water became streams, and in places the path seemed less like a trail than a river moving through the grass. The rain had overwhelmed everything. It ran down the hillsides, crossed the tracks, pooled in gateways, and gathered in the low places until the fields themselves seemed to be filling. We were not so much hiking as actively wading.

By then, our socks were saturated, our shoes squelched with every step, and even the road sections offered little relief. Water had gathered across the tarmac in wide sheets, deep enough in places to come over our ankles. The wind drove the rain sideways, and every climb seemed to expose us more fully to it. There was no dry angle from which to meet the day. Rain came from above, from the side, from the grass, from the walls, from the ground beneath our feet.

At one point, soaked through and beyond patience, I remember shouting at my rain gear, “Aren’t you waterproof?” To which I swear it answered, “In this? Are you kidding me?”

It is, I admit, distinctly possible I had been outside too long.

Sean kept walking ahead, calling encouragement back over his shoulder in the only way that made sense to him. He told me to let him know if I saw pairs of animals marching past or an old man building a giant ark, because if so, we should probably follow them instead of the trail. I knew he was trying to make me laugh, and some part of me appreciated it, but I was too wet, too cold, and too demoralized to offer much in return.

For much of that afternoon, I kept my head down, cried and kept walking.

Near Marrick, the route climbed again, passing the site of the former Benedictine nunnery and rising through the trees along the old Nun’s Steps. Under other conditions, this might have been a beautiful and atmospheric section of trail. Even that day, the trees offered temporary shelter from the worst of the wind, and the dark stones were beautiful, but they were also slick with rain and moss, and the climb quickly felt endless.

Beyond the trees, the trail returned to open countryside, and the afternoon dissolved again into a repetition of wet fields, narrow squeeze gates, slippery paths, and small communities walked through without pause. The route rose and fell across the landscape, sometimes beside walls, sometimes through pasture, sometimes along tracks so saturated that each step pulled at our shoes. By late afternoon, so much rain had fallen that some of the fields held calf-deep water. We crossed them slowly, trying not to think too much about what else might be mixed into the brown flow saturating our shoes, socks and feet.

There were likely details here that would have mattered on another day. Villages. Views. Stone barns. Trees. Birds.  But in my memory, much of that afternoon remains blurred by weather, frustration, cold wind, and urgency. We were racing a clock, trekking with a dying phone battery, a reservation we could not afford to miss, and no real alternative if we arrived too late.

Sometimes walking strips a day down to its simplest elements.

Step. Gate. Mud. Rain. Climb. Breathe. Keep going.

Richmond

On the approach to Richmond, the trail climbed again toward Whitecliffe Wood, where a renewed burst of wind and rain hit us with such force that it felt almost personal. By then, my hands were shaking around my hiking poles, whether from cold or fatigue, I could not say. We reached the outskirts of town, emptied of almost everything except the need to arrive.

Then, with a kind of timing that felt less merciful than ironic, the rain began to ease.

As we came into Richmond, the route did not simply deliver us to our accommodation. Of course, it did not. Instead, it wound around the outside of town, offered views toward the centre, dropped downhill, turned again, and sent us climbing back up through streets lined with inns, guesthouses, and historic buildings whose names all seemed suddenly and cruelly interchangeable. Every sign appeared to contain some combination of Crown, King, Queen, Victoria, or Arms, and with my phone battery dead, we could no longer check where we were meant to go.

We were so close, and yet still somehow lost in this small village.

Seeing our confusion, a kind local woman came out of her house in slippers, holding an umbrella, and pointed us in the right direction. It was one of those moments of kindness that can change the whole feeling of a day. Within minutes, we reached the front door of our accommodation just as the receptionist was preparing to leave.

Blessedly, she let us in. Whether she was eager to get home, horrified by the state of us, or simply kind, I do not know. But in that moment, she became the difference between arrival and disaster.

Victorian Suite

Shaking and cold, we climbed upstairs, opened the door, and discovered that our room was enormous.

It was a vaulted Victorian suite with more space than we knew what to do with, which turned out to be exactly what we needed. Within minutes of entering, we had transformed it from an ornate and expensive room into a functional drying station full of soaked camping gear. We strung camping lines across the space, hung clothes wherever we could, spread gear over chairs, along ornamental banisters, over radiators, and carried dripping packs into the bathroom.

Here, we poured water out of our backpacks into the metal claw-foot tub.

It was such an absurd image that I almost laughed. Almost. Instead, we moved mechanically, doing what needed to be done. We handwashed our hiking clothes in the ornamental sink with the provided bespoke hand soap, wrung out socks, sorted wet layers, and arranged the tent, packs, rain gear, and clothing in the hope that the room’s powerful heat might restore some part of our world before morning.

The room had cost an unreasonable amount of money. There was no way around that. It was prohibitively expensive, far beyond what we would normally consider, let alone choose, and the kind of cost that made me feel slightly sick whenever I thought about it too much. And yet, after the day we had just endured, it was also a blessing.

We had never needed a large room with strong heat more than we did that night. Had we been in a tiny room, or camping in a flooded field, or trying to dry everything in a damp corner somewhere, the next day would have been far more difficult. As so often happens on long trails, we had somehow found what we needed, even if it came at a price we would rather not have paid.

By then, neither of us had dry clothes suitable for going back out to buy food or sit in a public pub.  And so, dejectedly and depressingly, I eventually put my soaked hiking clothing back on, went outside, and boiled water on the doorstep of the accommodation in the rain. Then we ate a camp meal in our room, not because it was what we wanted, but because it was what we had.

There was nothing romantic about it. There was, however, deep gratitude in being warm, indoors, and able to stop.

Evening and Repairs

Once the immediate work of drying gear was underway, my attention returned to the recurring problem of Sean’s backpack.

The repairs we had made in Grasmere were still holding, but only just. My patchwork efforts had kept the pack functional from one day to the next, but the signs of strain had not resolved themselves. Straps needed to be tightened and retightened. Seams had again begun to pull oddly. Weight had to be redistributed. Every day required small acts of maintenance, adjustment, and lots of hope.

It was subtle at first, but for Sean, this was not just ordinary equipment wear. That pack had carried him across the Bruce Trail, the East Coast Trail, multiple Caminos, and our first four years of walking across Canada on the Trans Canada Trail. It had been soaked, dried, packed, repaired, and trusted again and again. It was not easily replaced, emotionally or practically, and every new sign of strain felt like a reminder that something important was about to be lost.

The pack’s slow deterioration mirrored something else happening beneath the surface in both of us.  We were continuing, but we were also adjusting constantly. We were finding ways to keep going without being able to fully fix what had gone wrong. The same could be said of the day itself. We had not solved the weather, the cancelled room, the exhaustion, or the cost. We had simply moved through them, one step and one decision at a time.

By evening, the room was filled with damp fabric, steam, and the unpleasant smell of wet hiking gear. Our tent hung awkwardly across the fire mantle. Clothes dripped from improvised lines. Backpacks leaned open, emptied of water and mud. Shoes sat in hopeful positions near the heat. It was not the elegant use of a Victorian suite, but it was exactly the use we needed.

Sometimes, long-distance hiking does not offer revelation. Sometimes it offers survival, absurdity, a large bill, and the strange grace of a receptionist who stayed a few minutes longer at the end of the day.

That night, surrounded by wet gear in a room we never would have chosen under ordinary circumstances, I was too tired to find much meaning in what had happened. Meaning would perhaps come later. Or perhaps not. Some days are simply what they are and have to be endured. After all, without the bad, the good disappears.

See you on the Trail!