Fallen Bridge

Yesterday afternoon, Dan decided to go up to the house to play some guitar with his friend who goes by the established rock 'n' roll name of JJ, so I suggested to Abi that we might go out for a walk. At this point, just after midday, she was still in her onesie, having been dropped off by her mum, first thing, and had spent the morning on her laptop. She was not pleased with the idea leaving the house, let alone going for a walk. 

I made us some lunch, we ate, I told Abi to get dressed, and then we dropped Dan and his guitar up at the house before heading across to Barbon. Abi, it's safe to say, was still not happy with the situation. My attempts at conversation with brief responses - "Did you enjoy the 'Star Wars' film?" "Not really" - and my observations about the weather and the area we were driving through were greeted without commensurate credit for the effort that I put into them.

We parked up just beyond the Barbon Inn, opposite the church gates and clambered out of the car. Although this is a lovely walk, it starts with a stinker of a hill, that gets steeper near the top. I chatted and puffed as we made our way up, Abi still quietly seething, and set off down the gentle incline towards the cattle grid. 

It was around this point, perhaps as I was positing strategies for traversing the grid, when Abi started chatting and didn't stop. As we walked along the road that undulates along the valleyside towards the bridge across the beck, we stopped to evaluate and discuss the swollen streams and gushing waterfalls, agreed that we preferred stone built sheep pens to the modern ones, and paused to take in the size of a landslip that had carried a huge amount of rocks and earth across the road.

When we reached the bridge, though, we had a shock: it had collapsed! On one side, anyway. As we stood there contemplating the damage, a couple of runners came along and, confronted with the same problem as us, eventually clambered down the bank and then ran up the bridge to the other side. It all seemed stable enough but I wasn't sure about climbing down so we walked up stream a little way but the body of water coursing down the river's route made it clear that it was the bridge or nothing.

We walked back and Abi lithely negotiated the bank down onto the bridge and skipped up to the far bank. I was a little more ponderous in my descent but equally successful and we stood for a while looking back, sharing, I think, the kind of pride that would have been more proportionate to crossing a slated rope bridge hundreds of feet above the Amazon.

And so we made our way up the valley, back towards Barbon, admiring the waterfalls and landslip on the far side from our new perspective and planning picnics for the summer, when we plan to follow the waterfalls to their source. We made our way 'round some large puddles, which gave us cause to recount to one another our recent crossing of the fallen bridge, and eventually we made our way down the route of the Barbon hill climb, assessing whether one could safely drive down it in snowy conditions. 

Our adventure was completed by tea and scones at the Crossing Point in Kirkby Lonsdale's market square, where Abi correctly observed that we could justifiably spend the rest of the day being as lazy as we wanted, an argument with which I heartily concurred!