Stravaiging

What we did on our holidays

Christmas 2024 was spent in Swaledale in the Yorkshire Dales (in northern England). We booked a week in a wee first floor apartment with woodburning stove on the southern edge of the green in the village of Reeth. We have visited before, together and separately, but never stayed a night.

I deliberately did not look at the weather forecast - didn’t want to know. We always travel with wet weather gear anyway, and lots of ‘dog’ towels as well as, in my case this trip, knitting and stitching supplies, a complex jigsaw and a new real book, with more on my ipad.

We travelled there uneventfully, hauled all said gear upstairs, had a quick cuppa and then headed out into the darkening afternoon with Bruce to explore. He’s an excellent traveller and quickly settled in his bed afterwards.

There are myriad marked footpaths in the Yorkshire Dales, so it was just a matter of which to start with the next day. An easy loop incorporating the pedestrian suspension bridge over the River Swale and back past the cycle shop/cafe sounded good.

So, don’t miss Dales Bike Centre if you find yourself in Swaledale. Coffee good, baking selection and portion sizes awesome :)

Later we wandered round the village, checked out the excellent craft co-operative (I succumbed to yarn by @janetandbluebell) and the toy/model shop (Hugh succumbed to a model of an off-road vehicle for training purposes...)  All three of us visited the pub that evening. Bruce lapped up the attention and dog biscuits and would happily have helped with our substantial fish pies.

Woke to a smattering of snow the next day. Every hill and hollow, every field boundary and barn outlined in glorious monochrome. The marks of man exposed. There’s nowhere to hide in winter.

We had a chilly short walk before wiggling our way down and across the dales to reach Farfield Mill at Sedbergh. I knew this was the last day the mill would be open before a festive shutdown and I am so glad we went. I haven’t been for a few years and I was delighted to see it looking busy and bright and welcoming.  As ever on our travels, cafes feature. We enjoyed excellent soup and I was much taken with the idea of scone trios - might have to try that sometime with sets of three different mini scones baked together.

There’s so much to show about the textile exhibitions that I will make a separate post but let me tell you about Stuart Wilkie. 

I wandered into Stuart’s studio space at the mill, after viewing an exhibition of his mainly landscape lino prints elsewhere in the building. There I found so many covetable etchings of wildlife that I had to go and retrieve Hugh (back in the cafe!) to see them. Stuart kindly demonstrated his venerable 1951 Albion press, running off a little print. My fine husband offered to buy me a Christmas present and we agreed on a larger framed etching of a wren on brambles. Wrens and herons - little and large - are my favourite birds, and we certainly have wrens and brambles in our garden so it was a given.

Hugh had hunted out a secure dog field and booked us a slot so the next day we headed north to give Bruce an opportunity to run about and explore obstacles and sniff for every other dog that had ever visited there. He was unimpressed with the ball/soft play box and rather too big for the maze but otherwise had a grand time. 

Back home I visited Reeth’s ice cream parlour, approximately 40 steps from our door, for supplies to pop in the freezer for Christmas Day. I’d go back any time for their ginger one...

Christmas Eve was very mild. We were overdressed for our morning outing and lost a layer or two before driving over into Wensleydale and the village of Hawes. Goodness me, it was busy - we hadn’t appreciated how peaceful Reeth was. It’s here we spotted Santa paddleboarding in the centre of the village, artfully positioned to raise funds for Yorkshire Air Ambulance. More coffee was consumed and socks were purchased - we like to spread our patronage between dales.

Christmas Day itself included a longer walk before the real indulgence set in. In other news, I finished the 1000 piece jigsaw despite really poor light in the apartment, minimal dog-free space, the questionable assistance of our annual bottle of port, and having to kneel up on a cushion on the floor to work on it. Very proud of myself. 

Boxing Day weather was bright and beautiful and we enjoyed our last Reeth walks before packing, cleaning the apartment and heading back to our Scottish Borders home. Sad to go but so grateful to have been blessed with kind weather to explore a favourite part of the country.

My knitting, stitching and book all returned home untouched. My yarn stash grew by two skeins.

I’ll share images from Farfield Mill in another post.