Category: England

One of the great things about being a tour manager is you get to do a lot more Christmas trips than the average person, Christmas tours to snowy destinations, European Christmas markets, English stately homes with their themed Christmas decorations and Christmas lights.

Longleat combined Christmas lights and decorated English stately homes, and as an added bonus, you get to go around a safari park too.

Longleat first started drawing the crowds when they bought lions as a way of attracting visitors and since then they have expanded.  These days there are a lot more animals and a multitude of other attractions to set this place apart from other English stately homes.

And throughout December and the beginning of January, Longleat have a Festival of Lights for Christmas.

We came to Longleat on a weekend when there was heavy snowfall through the Midlands.  Fortunately we did manage to get to Longleat, unfortunately because of the cold weather, the animals weren’t exactly the most active I’ve ever seen them.  If they were to be seen at all.

When we drove around the safari park, the deer, zebra and Bactrian camels seemed happy enough in the cold weather.  The recently rescued elephant was in her house and the rhinos were also indoors.  We drove through the monkey enclosure and the monkeys are normally jumping all over the vehicles being both playful and destructive.  But in the cold weather, the monkeys also preferred the shelter of their tree hideaways, just a couple of hardy souls were sitting outside, but they were conserving their energy and barely moved a muscle, they certainly weren’t doing any running and jumping.  Even the Canadian timber wolves who you would think would be used to cold winters, were mostly sheltering inside and only one or two were visible, laying under the trees.

The big cats did make up for the inactivity of the other animals though, the lions were all out in the open, grouped in their prides in the two enclosures, one of the cheetahs was sitting proudly on a tree stump as if posing for photos, but the tigers were the stars of the show, stalking around the enclosure as if they were hunting for prey, one of them walked right in front of our bus.  Very clever.  If it was going to get a meal, it seemed to make sense to target the vehicle with the greatest number of people in it!

After the safari we had several hours to look around the rest of the Longleat estate.  The train that runs along the lake shore had turned into a Santa train for Christmas so I didn’t ride the train on this occasion, however, the boat was sailing as normal.  The hippo was a long way in the distance, but at least you could catch a glimpse, unlike the gorillas who were nowhere to be seen.  Nico, the old gorilla who lives on his own island in the middle of the lake, in a house with central heating and a telly, was not receiving visitors today.  In warmer weather he’ll sit outside, but when we went past his island he was in his house, probably lounging in his armchair in his dressing gown, drinking Cabernet Sauvignon and watching a Christmas film on telly with the radiator on full blast.  Which is exactly what any sensible person would have been doing on a day like this.

The other gorillas were also in their house, they’d already been fed so there was no incentive for them to venture out into the cold again.  But the sealions could always be relied upon to provide the entertainment on what would have otherwise been a very dull boat ride on the lake.  They were swimming alongside the boat for the entire trip.  All of the sealions are females apart from Buster, an enormous male who is probably the noisiest of the sealions too.  The children on the boat could purchase fish to feed to the sealions who greedily waited for the food to be thrown overboard.

I hadn’t been in Longleat House for a few years, but I went inside on this occasion to see it all decorated for Christmas.  They had done a beautiful job of decorating the house, a large Christmas tree in each room, the dining room table set in readiness for a festive meal and all staff dressed in period costume, happy to tell visitors about Victorian Christmas customs.  Sadly no photographs were permitted inside the house, so I can’t show you what the decorations were like.

The main reason for coming to Longleat was to see the Christmas lights.  Every year Longleat have a Festival of Lights where they decorate the grounds around Longleat House in a particular theme.  The theme this year was fairytales.  The decorations were made of silk and had lights inside them.  The lights were due to be switched on at 4 o’clock.  The Fairytale Festival of Lights was one of the best outdoor Christmas light displays I have ever seen.  It was worth coming to Longleat to see these alone.  My particular favourite was the gingerbread house from Hansel and Gretel, but there were so many other fairytales represented from classics like Cinderella and the Sleeping Beauty to more unusual ones like the Firebird, a Russian fairytale and the local Gurt Wurm, a legendary dragon originating in South West England.  There was also an illuminated boat on the lake as part of the Little Mermaid fairytale and an archway leading into the Snow Kingdom from the Snow Queen, which was appropriate for this time of year and the animals from the Snow Queen were all quite happy to be out in the cold, snowy, winter weather.  A path weaved its way amongst the fairytales and brought you into the courtyard where there was a giant Christmas tree.

There were a couple of other Christmas specialities at Longleat, the first was the story of the Enchanted Christmas Tree.  In the courtyard, a story was narrated, centred around the giant Christmas tree where the lights on the tree changed colour and visually told the story and images were also projected onto the opposite building to accompany the tale of a child’s journey to find an enchanted Christmas tree.

The other special Christmas show was the Flight Before Christmas where a lady sat on stage telling a story of Christmas in the forest and owls flew silently in a triangular pattern around the dimly lit room, flying so low that they brushed some of the audience as they soared past.  I love birds, probably more than any other animals and owls are a particular favourite, so I adored this show.

It was a marvellous day at Longleat, I thoroughly enjoyed it and it’s made me want to go back there again to see another Festival of Lights.  Who knows what the theme will be for the next Christmas season, but I’m willing to bet it will be just as spectacular as this one.

I visited Longleat to see the Festival of Light in December 2017

There’s still time to catch the Longleat Festival of Light

It’s on for another week until 7 January 2018.

For more adventure ideas in England, check out these posts.
Yorkshire: Gaping Gill Winch Meet
Norfolk: Hiking the Pingo Trail

I’d come to the Yorkshire Dales specifically for the Gaping Gill Winch Meet which happened just twice a year, once in May and once in August. Gaping Gill is a cave in the north western part of the Yorkshire Dales with the 100m Fell Beck, the highest unbroken waterfall in Britain inside it. However, most people don’t get to see this waterfall because it’s inside a cave and access is restricted. You can only go in the cave if you’re an experienced potholer, the general public aren’t allowed in. Except, that is, twice a year during the winch meet when around 2,000 people get to be lowered into the cave to see this wondrous, extensive underground cavern, the biggest in Britain.

You have to be serious about wanting to see the cave because the access isn’t exactly easy. The nearest village is a 90 minute walk away and we’re not talking a gentle woodland stroll either, some of it is quite challenging terrain. But it’s nothing that isn’t manageable if you’re careful and take your time.

At first, I was planning to do this adventure on my own, but after the success of our long weekend in Snowdonia last year, I asked my niece and nephew to join me as their birthday treat. My niece, Megan, turned 22 back in April, but Tuesday when we were making our way through the Yorkshire Dales up to Clapham village where we would be staying overnight before the winch meet, that was my nephew Dylan’s 19th birthday. After overnighting in the village we’d walk to the cave on Wednesday.

It’s not possible to make a reservation for the winch meet at Gaping Gill. You turn up, register and wait. They can only winch so many people into the cave each hour, get there late and you have either a long wait or worse, the capacity for the day has been reached and you can’t get into the cave at all. And it’s a long way to walk for nothing. I asked advice at the bed and breakfast where we were staying and was told that on Monday some guests had left at 8.30am and got to the cave at 10am and had to wait 2 hours. On Tuesday the guests had left at 7am, got to the cave at 8.30am and had to wait 45 minutes. They didn’t actually start operating the winch until 9am, so I decided to aim to set off at 7.30am and hope for the best!

It was a nuisance dragging out of bed at 6.30am, but I knew we’d regret setting off too late, so I made sure Megan and Dylan were awake and out of bed, we had a light breakfast, I put bottles of water and waterproofs in my rucksack and we were ready to go.

The first part of the walk is easy, wide path through the wood, slightly uphill, but not a problem. It took around half an hour to walk to Ingleborough Cave and Dylan thought we were there already. It is part of the same cave system, although this fact wasn’t discovered until 1983, but Ingleborough Cave is a show cave that is open year round, not the one we were going to be lowered into. It was another hour to walk from here.

We passed a few of the iconic Yorkshire Dales Swaledale breed of sheep with their curly horns, the emblem of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. The path was still wide and relatively flat at that point. And then it started to get more difficult. The path was narrower and slightly steeper and it started to rain making the stones wet and slippery. There were quite a lot of puddles and muddy parts of the path to negotiate too.

Then ahead of us, the gorge of Trow Gill and a steep, narrow path through the centre of it. Megan looked at it and said was that where the trail went. I wasn’t sure, but on closer inspection I realised there was no other way through. Megan was not happy about having to climb up there, she’d dodged the steeper paths the day before. I said we had to go that way to get to the cave. Megan had no need to worry; she leapt up that path like a mountain goat! Dylan is very tall with long legs and had no trouble either. It was poor old Auntie Hayley, more than 20 years older, with shorter legs and carrying the rucksack that was struggling! But I made it. Going up is generally not too much of an issue provided the steps aren’t too deep for my little legs. Coming down is always the scarier prospect for me. But I’d worry about that later. For now we were at the top and on our way.

It was warm work walking this trail, I’d taken my waterproof jacket off earlier and when it began to drizzle slightly, it was quite welcome, cooling me down nicely. But then the rain started to come down a lot harder, not only making me very wet, but also making the path muddier and the stones more slippery. I put my waterproof back on and put my hood up. I didn’t say anything to Megan and Dylan, but when it started to rain quite hard I was a little concerned because I knew that they suspended the winching into the cave when it rained. If the winch meet was cancelled either a notice went up at Ingleborough Cave (which we’d already passed) or the potholing club who ran the winch meet posted something on Facebook or Twitter. There was no mobile service out here, in the middle of nowhere. So once you were past Ingleborough Cave it was the point of no return and you just had to hope that conditions wouldn’t deteriorate so rapidly in the space of the next hour that you’d done that hike to the Gaping Gill for nothing.

Thankfully as we walked further, the rain did ease off making me more hopeful that they would still be operating the winch by the time we arrived. We came to a style and a sign on the wall saying Gaping Gill was now just a quarter of a mile away and once at the top of the nearby ridge, the tents that had been set up for the week long winch meet were in sight. It was still raining, but as we approached the registration tent we were handed a form to complete and told it was about an hour to wait to go down into the cave. Thank God they hadn’t cancelled it!

We went to wait in the beer tent where planks of wood had been laid across beer barrels so there was somewhere to sit. You could smell the beer, but none was available for consumption, at least not at this time in the morning. It was about 9.10am by now and we were numbers 21 to 23, so there weren’t too many people who had arrived ahead of us. A few minutes later numbers 16 and 17 were called, so I was optimistic we wouldn’t have too long to wait. I had certainly made the right decision leaving at 7.30am because in the next half hour a lot of people turned up. Had we been much later, we would have had a much longer wait. As it was, before 10 o’clock one of the potholing club staff came to the beer tent and called numbers 18 to 23, they were ready to lower us into the cave!

We got kitted up in hard hats, I’d already put my waterproof trousers on while waiting in the beer tent, we were ready! As I waited for my turn I chatted to the man taking our wrist band numbers so he had a record of who went down and could also therefore check we had come back up again! He said the weekend hadn’t been that busy, but Monday and Tuesday had been busier than expected. He told me around 160 people went into the cave each day.

In order to be lowered into the cave I had to sit in a yellow chair, lean back, I was strapped in, instructed to keep my arms in and legs tucked under and enjoy the view on the way down and they started the winch up.

It went a lot faster than I expected, I was really motoring. The descent is 105m, so it is a long way down! A waterfall was pouring from the main shaft entrance to the cave and I was lowered down through the waterfall! It was a great view going down; I was looking around in every direction, amazed at travelling through the waterfall and then when I got to the floor of cave, I saw more waterfalls.

It did occur to me that you go down into the cave through the waterfall, so I wasn’t sure why they stopped operating the winch when it was raining, you got wet anyway!  It would only be if the cave was flooded there would be an issue.

You don’t get the impression of how high the waterfalls really are because the cavern is just so big. You wouldn’t guess Fell Beck is the highest single leap waterfall in Britain because of the loss of perspective of height inside the enormous cavern. The main chamber of Gaping Gill is the largest natural underground chamber in Britain and it’s the size of York Minster.  And the main shaft of the Gaping Gill is the deepest open pothole in Britain.  A lot of superlatives for this cavern in the Yorkshire Dales! Makes me very proud to be a Yorkshire lass!

I waited for Megan and Dylan to be lowered into the cave, we were given an information sheet and a torch and then we were free to explore the cavern floor. There were lots of passages out of the cavern as part of this vast cave system, but we were told not to go crawling through any of them, there were 10 miles to search for us if we went missing!

I went right round the edge of the cavern and took photos of the waterfalls and the rocks. The floor of the main chamber is composed of around 70 feet of rubble.  The North Passage is a large tunnel filled with glacial material from the last Ice Age.  This section is still being explored in the hope that more passages of the Gaping Gill cave system will be discovered.

It was quite dark, and other than the waterfalls, there wasn’t that much to see down there, the cave formations were much further away and only accessible by crawling through dark passages which we were not allowed to do. You could easily make out the fault line that ran across the cavern, a lot of the passages are above the fault line, a reason it took so long to find the cave system below.  We had some fun trying to take a photo of our shadows against the cave wall! Megan and Dylan didn’t seem quite as interested in the cave as I was, but they had a wander round.

You can stay in the cavern as long as you want, there is no time limit, but when you can’t go adventure caving, there is only so much time you can spend looking at a big underground chamber and its waterfalls, so after around 45 minutes we went back up to the surface.  The joke at the winch meet is, it’s free to be winched down into the cave, you just have to pay to be winched back out again.  Otherwise it’s a long crawl through the underground tunnels in the dark to get to an exit or a cold swim through to Ingleborough Cave!  Definitely worth paying the fee for the winch!

Megan and Dylan probably enjoyed the winch up and down into the cave more than the cave itself; that was incredibly good fun.

I love caves and have been in lots of caves all over the world, so for me it was a bit more special. The privilege of seeing this enormous cavern, the largest in Britain, and Fell Beck, the highest single drop waterfall in Britain, which very few people get to see, was well worth the long hike. The waterfalls, in particular, fascinated me. But all caves fascinate me and I will go out of my way to visit them.

So now, the 90 minute walk back to the village and to my car. Megan and Dylan took off in front which was fine. They walk faster than I do, they’re a lot younger than me and have much longer legs than I have. So I just took my time and let them gallop on ahead.

I want to travel to Patagonia in the next 18 months and hike the W Trail in Torres del Paine National Park, which is 5 days through mountainous terrain. I did wonder as I was battling along this hiking trail in the Yorkshire Dales, if I was struggling here, how was I going to manage a 5 day mountain hike in Patagonia? The simple answer – I wasn’t! Not without some serious training. But that’s another post.

I got to the part I’d been dreading, the steep descent through the gorge. The rain had left the rocks wet and as slippery as ice. I held on where I could and took it one step at a time. No point rushing and falling and breaking my ankle. It was a long way for someone to carry me out of there and that was the last thing I wanted. I managed. There was no one behind me telling me to hurry up, I let anyone behind me come past and waited in a safe spot for anyone climbing up.

I finally caught up with Megan and Dylan at Ingleborough Cave where they’d stopped to have a drink. As Ingleborough Cave is a half hour walk from Clapham village and we probably wouldn’t be out this way again for some considerable time, if ever, I asked Megan and Dylan if they’d like to go in the cave while we were here. Ingleborough Cave is completely different to Gaping Gill, no being lowered in on a winch; it was a concrete path all the way, there weren’t even any steps. Megan was unsure about it, but we convinced her that this would be nothing compared to Gaping Gill.

It was an interesting cave, but it didn’t have a lot in the way of amazing formations. There was a beautiful archway formation and quite spectacular Manhattan skyline which was a series of small stalactites reflected in a pool. Megan did get a bit claustrophobic in one part of the cave where the roof was low and the path narrowed and I made a mental note that Megan is not going to be up for any adventure caving where she has to crawl through low passages and squeeze through narrow openings on any future trips.  I’ll leave further adventure caving for when I’m travelling on my own.

After Ingleborough Show Cave, it was an easy half hour walk to get back to Clapham Village and we made a final quick stop by the side of the river to view Clapham Waterfall before heading back to the car. Our caving adventure in the Yorkshire Dales had ended.

Gaping Gill is in the north western part of the Yorkshire Dales National Park

Craven Pothole Club holds a winch meet at Gaping Gill each year in the week leading up to August Bank Holiday. We joined this winch meet in August 2017.  The fee for the winch is £15 per person.

There is a fee for the hiking trail from Clapham Village to Ingleborough Cave which is currently £1 per adult.

We stayed in Clapham Village at Bridge Cottage B&B which has 4 ensuite rooms. Full breakfast and tea and cakes on arrival were included in the room rate.

Bradford Pothole Club also holds a winch meet at Gaping Gill each year at the end of May.

For more adventure ideas in England, check out these posts.
Norfolk: Hiking the Pingo Trail
Wiltshire: Longleat Festival of Light

Read about when I didn’t have such a great experience in a cave in Georgia and the bizarre events that followed.
Reporting a Theft – A Cautionary Tale

No, not Pingu.  Pingo.  I wasn’t going to see any penguins on this walk through the Norfolk wilderness.  On the other hand I wasn’t going to see any earth covered ice hills on my walk through Norfolk either.  These hydrolaccoliths are only found in Arctic regions; I’ve seen them in the Mackenzie Delta in Canada.  So I was intrigued when I found out about the Great Eastern Pingo Trail, an 8 mile circular walk in Norfolk and decided to investigate further.  I was planning a trip to Cambridgeshire anyway, so I thought I’d do this walk to have a look at these Norfolk pingos.

In fact, these were ancient pingos and bore no resemblance to anything I’d seen in the Canadian Arctic.  Basically they were ponds.  They varied in colour, some were clear water, there were a couple of muddy brown ones and a few that looked like they were filled with green gunge.  If you didn’t know anything about the geology of the area or anything about pingos, you’d think that you were looking at ponds, some of them green gunge ponds.  Actually these ponds were remnants of the last Ice Age when Norfolk was covered in ice that came down from the Arctic and there were around 400 earth covered ice hills in this area.  But it’s warmed up a bit since then.  Pingos are only temporary formations that have a crater in the top, eventually that crater will get bigger and finally the whole thing will collapse leaving a perfectly round pond behind.  And that was what I was looking at on my walk today with my friend, Alan.

The walk started from a car park and was signed in both directions as it was circular.  I decided the route through the woods would be the best start.  I had read an article about this walk and got a map from there, but I have been known to follow a map and wonder why I can’t see any of the landmarks described and then realised I’m following the map in the opposite direction.  As long as I could see the signposts we were fine.  You get to the first pingo pond very quickly and it’s really exciting to see.  Even if it is just a pond.  You wouldn’t think seeing a non-descript pond in a forest would be that interesting.  And it wouldn’t be if you didn’t know it was an ancient pingo.  Knowing this pond is a collapsed hydrolaccolith is what makes it special.  Or maybe that’s just me.  The first couple of ponds were full of clear, reasonably clean water.  The next one was stagnant, green water that didn’t look very attractive at all.  We arrived at another small, clear pingo pond and soon after that reached a very large pond, I’d class it as a small lake really.  There were a couple of serious photographers with their tripods set up here, presumably to take photos of the birdlife on the lake, but we had 8 miles to walk, so after a brief stop, we were on our way again.

A bit further on and we arrived at a spot with a little more water and bulrushes!  There was another photographer who was settled in taking photos of grass or insects or something and I didn’t want to disturb her so I walked round and managed to get caught in some thorns from an overhanging rosebush stem, but I disentangled myself and got a photo of the bulrushes before once again moving on.

We were walking through an area where there were longhorn cattle grazing.  Did I see one?  No!  There wasn’t one anywhere in sight.  They’re big animals, how can they hide?  We went through a few areas where it said longhorn cattle were grazing.  Didn’t catch sight of even a horn!  After that there was quite a boring section of the walk along a road and past houses.  But once we got off the road and back onto the path, then it started to get interesting.

In front of me was the perfect pingo pond.  It was small and round, it was clearly visible in this field without too much vegetation to obscure the view.  This is what I was expecting a pingo pond to look like and I’d found it.

After crossing the field, we got to a bridge which led us back into the wood to follow the trail.  The next part of the trail was lovely, a nice woodland path by the side of a stream.  A log over the stream provided an ideal photo opportunity, but I resisted the urge to try and stand on it and certainly I wasn’t going to attempt any Dirty Dancing type moves, that would have been a recipe for disaster, I’d have been straight in the water!  So I just shuffled onto it and struck up a pose, trying to look relaxed and comfortable in this precarious position, reasonably successfully I like to think.  I did shuffle out almost half way across, but then again, the stream wasn’t very wide, so it wasn’t a huge distance.  We came across another pingo pond with a fern growing out of an isolated patch of soil in the middle of it.  It looked like a kiwi to me.  As I reached the next bridge, the stream was a gorgeous colour, a kind of milky grey and bronze coloured stripes.  This is where I also saw a tiny frog.  There is an endangered frog, the pool frog, living in this area, it was thought to be extinct, but they discovered one and introduced a breeding programme and released them into the swamplands of Norfolk.  Whether this was a pool frog or not, I’m not sure, I know the juveniles can be that small, but it was gone far too quickly for me to be able to tell,  In fact I only saw it because I almost stepped on it, it was so tiny and well camouflaged.

Our next landmark was Thompson Water and just before that was another pingo pond, this one filled with green gunge.  Thompson Water wasn’t a pingo, it was a man-made lake.  It was a haven for birdlife so I went into the hide and watched a swan with some cygnets swimming across the water and another swan with cygnets in their nest just underneath the hide.  They were busy preening themselves, the one moment the mother stretched her neck and flapped her wings, I didn’t have the camera pointed at her and after that she went back to preening.  I waited for about 4 minutes with my camera trained on the swan, but when she didn’t bother looking up again, I realised I’d never make a wildlife cameraman.  I didn’t have the patience to sit around for hours waiting for birds to do something interesting that might be worth capturing on film.  So we were off again.  With all the stops we’d been making, time was getting on and we weren’t even halfway round the circuit yet.

The trail led out onto another road and the long distance Peddar Way path which was another section of the walk that wasn’t that exciting.  The only surprise was a sudden smell of sulphur and I’ve been to enough thermal areas to recognise that and spotted a hot spring in the stream.  It was difficult to see and fenced off making access impossible, so after taking a very poor photograph, I moved on.  We couldn’t stray off the path because it was fenced off with an ominous warning Military Firing Range – Keep Out sign.  I didn’t hear any military firing going off that day, but still thought it prudent to obey the warnings.

The route didn’t get particularly interesting again until we were off the road and back into the wooded area.  This is also the only place on the hike where we took a wrong turn.  The route was very well signposted and I’d never once wondered which direction I should go up to now.  The signpost pointed into this field, so I took the most obvious path through the dense fern foliage.  I was tripping over the fern stems, pushing the leaves back to battle along the trail, it was like trying to hack my way through the Vietnam jungle.  Maybe that’s a slight exaggeration.  We reached a slight clearing and turned to follow the footpath watching out for signs.  The next sign I saw said “Wildlife Trail”.  What?  We were supposed to be on the Pingo Trail!  So where had I gone wrong?  The car was at the start/end of the Pingo Trail, no use following the Wildlife Trail, I had no idea where we would end up if we went along that path.  So we turned round and headed back watching for another signpost and within 5 minutes came to a huge signpost pointing out the Pingo Trail in both directions and the Wildlife Trail in both directions.  How could I have missed that signpost?  It was enormous, impossible not to see.  And even if I’d not noticed it, surely both of us couldn’t have gone blind at the exact same moment and neither of us seen it.  So we can’t have walked past it in the first place.  And now I had another problem.  The Pingo Trail was a circular route.  The signpost was pointing both ways.  So which direction had I come from?  Which way did we go?  My sense of direction is hopeless, whichever way I think I should go, my best bet is to go in the opposite direction.  And that turned out to be the case in this instance.  Alan had a bit better idea than me, but went along with what I thought and so we did go the wrong way first, worked out that we’d cut out a corner and missed the signpost and so now we should be going in the other direction.

Off I went, through more dense undergrowth.  The ferns were a nuisance, but weren’t particularly hazardous unless you trip over the thick stems that tangle on the ground, but on this section of the path, there were lots of nettles.  My arms were bare, but thankfully I had got trousers on, it wasn’t warm enough for shorts and I was very grateful for that, otherwise I would have put shorts on and got stung to pieces.  The nettles managed to get me even through my trousers, so this is definitely not a hike to do in shorts, no matter how hot it is!  The path was very overgrown in places, but it isn’t a popular path.  Yes, it was a weekday and the schools hadn’t broken up yet, but it was a sunny day in July.  However, the Pingo Trail isn’t a hike you would just stumble across.  You’d have to know about it or be told about it.  It wouldn’t automatically be your first choice on a short break in Norfolk.  But it is well worth doing and the fact you hardly see another soul on your walk is definitely part of its appeal.

So the last part of the hike took us through more woodland and some boardwalk because I was now into green gunge territory, officially known as Cranberry Rough.  It wasn’t just the pingos that were bright green, there was a huge swamp area made up of it and all the plants and trees were growing out of this.  It was quite a contrast to the other watery marshland I’d seen elsewhere on the trail and I did like it because it was so different.  I found the swamp fascinating, ideal habitat for this endangered frog, it was just the type of environment Kermit from the Muppets would have loved!  On leaving this bright green marshy territory it was once again into the Vietnamese jungle, pushing through the dense ferns and dodging the nettles.

And there, on the trail, my North by Northwest moment, a crop field I could dive into for a photo.  There had even been an aircraft overhead earlier, I was both disappointed and relieved not to have to run through the crop field hiding from the plane whose pilot was intent on killing me!  I’m sure things like that don’t happen in Norfolk!

After that, I really was ready for the end of the walk.  This 8 mile walk which should have taken three hours, had taken more than four and I was ready to get back to the car now.  Surely it couldn’t be much further and then I spotted the road in the distance and knew that the end was in sight.  So we pressed on and that was it.  I’d made it.  It was a thoroughly enjoyable walk, one I probably would do again.  Seeing the ponds that had once been pingos during the last Ice Age was fascinating, especially as I have seen real pingos in the Arctic.  And maybe next time the longhorn cattle will put in an appearance for me.

I hiked the Pingo Trail in July 2017.

The Great Eastern Pingo Trail starts in the car park off the A1075 about 3 miles south of Watton, Norfolk.

For more adventure ideas in England, check out these posts.
Yorkshire: Gaping Gill Winch Meet
Wiltshire: Longleat Festival of Light