Following in the Drovers Footsteps

Today we set off for the moors at last. Britannia was really excited about doing some proper British moorland letterboxing. We choose one of my favourite routes, an old drovers road. This is a very ancient road going north to south through the country and about 15 miles of it is in this area. Part of it is still used today by modern transport but several miles are unsurfaced and much like the drovers would have known it when they herded their cattle, sheep, and pigs down it to market in the 18th and 19th century. They drove geese to the market too and the geese used to be fitted with cloth 'boots' to protect their feet from the walk!

It was this unsurfaced bit that we were starting out on, full of potholes and puddles from the rain. The first part of the track is edged with stone walls and surrounded by farmland, but this starts to change when you reach a farm called High Paradise. The name of this farm has always fascinated me - High Paradise - it must be a marvellous place to live :-)

Here the land on the right hand side of the track becomes moorland, and today we disturbed some sheep, who looked rather startled to see Britannia riding high on rucksack. I wonder if any of them are descendants of the sheep driven by The Drovers so long ago.

Next the old road becomes more grassy as we enter a forest, walking through it and coming out the other side into open moorland beside Steeple Cross. Steeple Cross is not the remains of a moorland cross as it's name suggests, but rather a rough boulder standing on what was once an important crossroads. Strangely enough this point has also been marked in modern times, by a wooden signpost pointing out The Cleveland Way. The Cleveland Way is a national long distance footpath and all long distance footpaths are marked with this white acorn on a black background.

Britannia was fed up with being perched on objects for photographs, she had hopped down and was busy searching for a nearby letterbox about the cross. She found it easily enough, and was delighted to also find what she called a Hitchhiker inside it. I explained that in Great Britain we called them Cuckoo Boxes, as she would find out when we returned to the car park. We were very busy for a few moments stamping everything up correctly, before returning the box to it's hidey hole. Then we set off back to the car.

Before getting into the car I suggested we visit the Cuckoos Nest nearby. Britannia was most puzzled as to what a Cuckoos Nest could be. Following the clues we found it carefully camouflaged and when we opened it up Britannia immediately realised it was what she knew as a Hitchhiker Hostel! This was the first Cuckoo Nest in Yorkshire, and probably in all of Great Britain, although I can't vouch for Dartmoor. I had seen all about Hitchhiker Hostels on Atlas Quest and thought they were such a good idea that I planted one to try out over here. Of course as our moving boxes have always been called Cuckoos, I had to change the name to something to reflect that, and after discussing it with the local letterboxers we decided Cuckoo Nest was the most obvious name. A great deal of stamping up had to be done then, and we were able to swap the Cuckoo we had already found for one in the box. We just got everything stamped up and wrapped back up in the proper bags when the rain started to pour down. It had been looking very black for a while so we were lucky to be so close to the car.