Over the hill.

My brother Alex and I are starting to feel our age, due to various aches and pains but, are we over the hill? Not quite yet!

On the campsite at Usha Gap we saw folks our age walking the Pennine Way and the Coast to Coast Walk or cycling the Tour-de-Yorkshire route and we felt nothing but admiration for them. Then we met Debbie from Canada and her Swedish husband Perry Ekstrand. These guys never stop cycling and you can check them out at "Retired Without Borders" on the web. When we met them, they were at the point of giving up cycling when they discovered e-bikes. They traded in their tourers for a pair of amazing new machines that even impressed the bikers who were camping next to us, and so a new set of adventures began for them.

Going "over the hill" from Muker offers several tortuous routes on foot, by bike or by car. My favourite is the road from Crow Trees by High Oxnop and down into Wensleydale at Askrigg, but the more famous route is the Buttertubs Pass from Thwaite to Hawes. We took this route on a hunt for red squirrels and returned by the third option which is from Kirby Stephen back to Keld via Raven's Seat.

Beyond Hawes, on a remote hillside, lies a rather dull-looking conifer plantation. Its isolation is a key reason for why the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust chose it as a site for re-introducing red squirrels as there is no woodland nearby that would provide a corridor of access for American grey squirrels.

Snaizeholme Wood has a very small car park so the Trust prefers visitors to use the bus from Hawes. On our fist visit we used the bus and the driver told us that, if we didn't see any squirrels, we should come to his house in Hardraw where he sees them every day. That is the secret of all re-introduction programmes: you have a hot-spot or core area for releases while the population becomes established in the wider area. That's just what has happened in the Dales, with the squirrels spreading over a wide area that takes in the northern edge of the dales and the adjoining part of Cumbria. The villages all display red squirrel signs and you can get lucky anywhere along the route.

Despite the recent spread of red squirrels, I would still say that Snaizeholme offers the best chance of success given just an hour or so of effort. This year we arrived to meet a few disappointed photographers who were leaving, so I was quite worried that we had wasted our journey. My brother has trouble with his legs and so he decoded to wait at the little car park to avoid the steep steps. I joined three other people and we found our first squirrel within ten minutes, but against the light on the edge of the wood. "Never mind," I said, "the feeding station is the best place". And so it was. Only one squirrel appeared but he was very obliging for us.

I felt guilty for leaving my brother alone, so I didn't stay very long, but I needn't have worried as he found plenty of people to chat to and saw two red squirrels at a bird-feeder outside the cottage that abuts the car park.

Pendragon Castle.

Having gone over the hill, we headed to the Cumbrian bit of the Dales via Garsdale Head, to Pendragon Castle which is another red squirrel site. We failed with the squirrels but found three woodcock on the lawns there. It's always a magical place to stop for a look around. The ruined castle is set in a dramatic narrowing of the valley with steep, bare, forbidding fells all around. The harsh effect of the landscape, as in much of Cumbria, is softened by the lines of old walls and the random spread of alder, oak, ash and birch along the route of the River Eden.  The Settle to Carlisle Railway runs along the hillside above, but it is almost invisible for most of its length here.

After a well-earned stop for a beer in Ravenstonedale we headed out into the wilds of Sunbiggin Tarn for a bit of botanising. Mid July is a bit late for the specialist flowers that grow there, but we found marsh orchids, alpine bistorts and a some birds-eye primroses still in flower.

The rare, and very pretty, birds-eye primrose.

Our route back to Swaledale took us along narrow lanes to Kirby Stephen, then up over the hill to Raven's Seat where the Yorkshire Shepherdess farms, down past Keld, through Angram and Thwaite and back, tired and hungry, to Usha Gap.