July 19

We head to York and take some time to visit the Cathedral and climb the almost 300 stairs to the top of the tower on a very hot and sticky day. We chat to some rough local lads, meet “Goldie” (a 150kg body builder with 2 gold teeth) and then get back into the now very hot car and push on. The road signs are clear – “THE NORTH’. It feels rather Game of Thrones as we take this choice. 

We drive deep into the North Yorkshire Moors National Park to the Mallyan Spout Hotel. This really is a remarkable part of the world. Sheep with long tails roam freely. There are no fences; they just go where they like.

We walk for about 2 hours through the purple flowering heather of the Moors and on this hot sunny day if I close my eyes and smell the wind I can swear I am in Australia – on the cliffs of Peterborough near the 12 Apostles. I smell warm salty air with the herbal scent of coastal heath in the sun.

We had a wonderful walk, slightly haunted by the huge omnipresent structure on the horizon at an Airforce base. We wondered a lot what it might be; an intercontinental ballistic missile silo, or radar maybe. We concluded that whatever it is, it can’t be that innocent or they wouldn’t have stuck it out here in the middle of nowhere.