Yak & Natter

Following on from the success of last years two week long holidays [1, 2] in dog friendly accommodation, and to continue the pursuit of visiting the 10 most dog friendly beaches, we decided to head off to the Lake District for a week.  As a child, most summer holidays from 1980 until probably 1990 were spent in the Lakes, staying with my Godfather and his family.  Amongst all of the beautiful spots, one place stood out, and that was Wastwater.  Consequently, that was where I decided we should base ourselves close to.

After a bit of searching, we came across Scafell View:

a three bedroom cottage in the small Hamlet of Santon, in the Western Lake district, a 10 minute drive from Wast Water

This seemed to meet most of our requirements for a holiday home:

• dog friendly (up to 3 well-behaved dogs allowed)
• garden (enclosed)
• well equipped kitchen (shame the dishwasher didn’t work, but otherwise all good)
• double bedroom
• parking (garage parking for two cars with off road parking for a further two cars)
• near a dog friendly pub (less than a mile walk)
• have walks from the house
• have a bathroom with a bath and a shower

…so we booked it.

On our first morning, we headed out armed with an OS map and quickly discovered that it pays to check the gradient of a “short stroll”.  We had walked over the top of a fell and down the other side, which of course meant we had to do the same again in reverse. A lesson learnt. At least the views from the top of the fell were lovely, giving Richard his first view of Wastwater, and reassuring me that it was as beautiful in real life as it was in my memories.

On Monday we headed out to St Bees, somewhere I don’t recall every visiting as a child, and walked a little bit of the Coast to Coast as well as ticking off another of the 10 most dog friendly beaches.

Tuesday found us at Buttermere, following the easy track around the mere, enjoying the scenery, and feeling justified for a stop at a farm cafe for a cream tea before getting back in the car. This was another area that I don’t remember visiting as a child, and another lovely place to spend time.

Wednesday found us fulfilling an ambition I’d had for a while, to walk around Wastwater. Looking at the OS map there was a definite footpath over the screes, but as we discovered, there is no path, more like a set of rocks and scree to scramble over, something that was a bit disconcerting at times. We’d parked at Wasdale head and tackled the walk in a clockwise direction, heading over the screes whilst our legs were still fresh. This was a sensible decision.

We had our packed lunch under the trees at the far end of the lake, looking across it, before heading past the beautiful Wasdale Hall youth hostel and on along the shoreline.

Thursday was the one wet day of our week, so we headed off to one of the more forested areas, Ennerdale Forest, and explored that, trying to keep out of the rain.

Our final full day, and we headed off to see what else we could find. We started off at Mile Fortlet 21 where Skitters had a good run along the beach until she got distracted by the wildlife.

To avoid further doggy distraction, we decided to head off to Dodd wood, and go for a walk in the woods, following the Dodd Summit trail to get some wonderful views over DerwentWater and Bassenthwaite.

Our final morning, before starting the drive back to Brighton, we headed to Ravenglass, just a short drive down the road for a pre-drive walk wandering past ruins of a Roman castle, and along the river banks before walking back through the very pretty main street.

So, a combination of old and new places for me, almost all new for Richard, and probably all new for Skitters. My memories of Wastwater weren’t exaggerated – it is a most beautiful place. And all in all, another great week spent in the UK with comfortable accommodation, and exceptional weather (there is a reason why there are Lakes in the North West!)

See more photos

Last November I blogged about the dog friendliness of a couple of places we stopped on our drive from Brighton to Hull, and back again.

We did the same trip again this Easter, and stopped at 2 completely different places but using a similar strategy to last time – avoiding motorway services.

Elton

On Good Friday we stopped north of Peterborough in the village of Elton and did a 7.5km circular walk from Elton to Nassington and back. It was inspired by a walk named Elton to Yarwell and Nassington which I found when looking for walks around Peterborough.

It was a very pleasant walk, following along the Nene way for some of the walk. There were no amenities where we parked, but we drove past a pub on entry to the village though I don’t know if it was dog-friendly or not.

Saffron Walden

On Easter Monday we headed down around Cambridgeshire and stopped at the pretty market town of Saffron Walden. We parked at the free long-stay car park near the football ground, and managed a 5km circular walk following the walk entitled Park and Gardens Walk, again found on the internet.

Another pleasant stroll, combining parkland and town streets. The Bridge End Gardens looked very nice but weren’t dog friendly so we didn’t investigate. The Audley End Park area was very pleasant and worth a stroll. We spotted a few pubs, cafes, tea rooms etc during our walk and would hope that at least one of them would be dog friendly, but we didn’t stop and find out.

So, as with last time, 2 very different places and 2 very different walks. The Elton walk was more like our normal hikes around fields and countryside, whilst the Saffron Walden walk was much more town and street based.

One year ago today we brought Skitters home from Shoreham Dogs Trust. Over this time we’ve enjoyed getting to know our 4 legged friend, and building up a relationship with her, and both Richard and I were surprised at just how quickly she became one of the family and how attached we became.

We’ve had 2 holidays together, one in Filey, East Yorkshire and one in Gower, Wales, both in self-catering dog friendly places. We’ve seen more of Sussex than in the previous 7 years discovering places like Abbots Wood, Friston Forest, the Downs Link, Lancing beach at low tide etc clocking up in excess of 1000 miles of walking each (and much more than that for Skitters).

I’ve uploaded 314 photos of her to flickr, there are currently 400 photos of her and she even has her own camera (thanks to the Goulbourn family who bought it as a Christmas present) which she wears on some of her walks and uploads photos from to her blog.

She has generally shown herself to be a smart, affectionate dog who loves running around, playing fetch and trying to chase after rabbits. She has a problem with people coming to the house, turning into a bit of a guard dog, and never fails to bark at the postman. She also doesn’t really like bearded chaps (as Danny found out one day). We have spent quite a bit of time training her, but we still have a long way to go – her recall is good in safe areas, but once she gets a sniff of rabbit, squirrel or small bird there’s no way she’s coming back. We also have to work on her door manners and stopping her barking at every new visitor.

As a result of discovering the fun to be had on Brighton beach at a low tide, Richard wrote a twitter feed to show the low tides every day, which is published at 6.30am, just as we’re thinking of getting up to take Skitters out for her morning walk.

It has been a great year.

Following on from my retro-blog the other week about A week in Filey, I thought I’d follow up with a review of our September holiday in the Gower Peninsular.

As I mentioned last time, we’d seen the Britain’s 10 best dog-friendly beaches list, and there, hogging the limelight at #1 was Rhossili Bay, Swansea which it described as

Let’s start with a real classic. This spectacular sandy beach offers miles of pristine sand at the tip of the Gower Peninsula in west Wales. There’s enough space for dogs to run free and there’s usually a good selection of kites to bark at. The beach even has its own shipwreck – the remains of the Helvetta, wrecked in 1887.

Well that sounded pretty good, and coupled with the fact that Rhossili Bay, and nearby Oxwich Bay also made it into our Time Out Seaside book, a book which had previously resulted in us enjoying visits to Bedruthan Steps, Praa Sands, Kynance Cove and St Ives Bay in Cornwall, and Saunton Sands in Devon, it sounded like an area that we could happily explore for a week.

Our criteria for accommodation was similar to last time, dog-friendly (obviously), a decent kitchen (after eating in quite a lot in Filey), a bathroom with a bath (we only have a shower at our house so a bath is a lovely holiday luxury), a garden area and opportunities for walks from the front door. After quite a lot of searching around, we settled on Three Elms, in Middleton. This was a large house, much bigger than our home in Brighton, with a really pleasant feeling to it. There was bookshelf after bookshelf of books, and good books too. The sofa in the living room was long enough to lie out on and while away a few hours reading one of the books, or having a well-deserved afternoon nap. I say well-deserved as most days found us out walking Skitters along beaches, or moors, or both. The only thing we’d forgotten to check was the dog-friendliness of the nearby pub (a 10 minute walk away). It wasn’t, so we ate in most evenings, or stopped off on our way back after a walk. There was also a lack of grocery shopping for anything other than absolute essentials, resulting in us heading to Swansea to find
supplies. The grocery shop at Scurlage stocked enough for us to top up on things like bread, milk and basic vegetables, and the fish and chip shop next door, Chips Ahoy, provided us with a good helping of fish and chips.

We visited both Rhossili beach and Oxwich bay and can testify to them being beautiful and long and clean. But my favourite beach was actually Whiteford burrows. We approached this area through the pine plantation, walking through trees with sand surrounding their roots and trunks. Really beautiful, tranquil and there were very few other people around. Definitely worth an explore if you’re ever out that way. The scenery is a bit reminiscent of Cornwall, only with all the beaches being much closer together – for instance you can walk between Oxwich Bay and Three Cliffs Bay along the beach when the tide is out, visiting two beautiful areas at once. It is also much less crowded than Cornwall, at least in early September. A week is long enough to visit the majority of the dog friendly beaches, and to take in some really good walks. It is an area that I can definitely see me returning to after a few years for another week of exploration.

As usual, there are lots more photos on flickr.

On Tuesday evening Richard and I headed off to the Hotel du Vin for our first Geek Wine thing in quite some time. This one was the second of the new format Geek Wine Things, now being organised and orchestrated by Fergus De Wit and James Reina from Majestic Wine.

There were 8 wines for tasting, 4 white and 4 red, made up of 4 classics and 4 bright young things.

It was a great evening, and as when in the Hunter Valley recently, I made a series of notes. These are made up of “wine facts” and tasting notes. Some of the more useful are:

• The Spanish wine system is really focussed on the aging process – so Reserva and Gran Reserva have clearly defined meanings on a bottle of Spanish wine. This isn’t the case when these words are applied to many other nations wines
• Good vintages for Rioja are 2001 and 2004
• The younger a red wine, is the more breathing time it is likely to need
• When thinking about wine and food matching, a good hint is to choose the kind of food that is served where the wine is made
• If you buy a Spanish Reserva or Gran Reserva, then you’re probably on to a winner

Out of the white wines, my favourite was the first we tasted. This was Albariño Martin Codax 2008 Rias Baixas. Albarino wasn’t a wine that I’d knowingly tasted before, and is indigenous to that particular area of Spain. It was described as being a good halfway house between Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay.

Out of the red wines, there were 2 that I really liked. These were Emilio Moro 2006 Ribera del Duero and Muriel Gran Reserva 1996. The Ribera del Duero is an up and coming wine area, and the Emilio was a lovely drink. The recommendation was to buy two bottles, drink one now and bury one in the bottom of your garden for 3 to 5 years to age further. Apparently Robert Parker gave it a score of 92 – which marks it out as being a good buy. The Muriel is ready for drinking now and was a lovely smooth wine. As Richard said, if either of these were served to us we’d be delighted.

Apparently, Majestic are running a promotion on Spanish wines next month, so I’m sure we’ll be heading down there to pick up some of these for our drinking pleasure.

As our blog was broken from around the time we got back from our holiday last July, I never got around to writing about it. So here’s a few quick thoughts about it.

This was our first holiday with Skitters. In recent years we’ve often spent our summer holidays in the UK, preferring to head further afield for snowboarding holidays. This year we would do no different. But, we did need to consider some new things. We needed it to be dog friendly (obviously), we needed it to have a garden of some description, and ideally we needed it to be somewhere we could walk the dog.

As a child I spent summer holidays on the East Coast, mostly in Bridlington but often with day trips further afield to Whitby, Robin Hood’s Bay and Filey. I remember these trips with fondness, and have always had a particular soft spot for Robin Hood’s Bay. Richard had visited a few of these places with me and my family years ago, but neither of us had really explored under our own steam. Filey has a very long, sandy beach which is mostly dog friendly (only the bit closest to Filey itself isn’t) and stretches from Filey down to Hunmanby.

We found ourselves a lovely house in The Bay estate (on the grounds of the old Butlins camp) which was so dog friendly it even had dog bowls. They had a no dogs upstairs restriction which was fine as they’d provided a child gate to put on the stairs – without this we might have struggled somewhat

The Bay estate is still being worked on, and looks to have quite a lot of space still available to it. The pub was open, and a couple of shops but there are still quite a few opportunities for development which I believe to be underway. The walk from the house to the beach was about 1km and this delivered us at a good dog-friendly stretch of beach (as long as the tide was out – at high tide there is no beach at all).

Our adventures took us all around the area including a visit to Dane’s Dyke beach (listed on the Times list of Top 10 dog-friendly beaches) , a walk into Dalby Forest (I remember a school trip there as a child), visits to Staithes, Robin Hood’s Bay, Runswick Bay and even along a bit of the Coast to Coast walk. It was a great trip and an excellent first holiday with a dog in tow.

More photos of our adventures can be found here

Whilst I was walking along the South Downs with Richard and Skitters early today, I was struck by how much I love living in Sussex, and how much more I’ve seen of it in the past year.

We first moved here in 2001, and at that time our priorities were being close to a train station, and being in the centre of town – both because, at that time, I was commuting into Farringdon on a daily basis. Over the first year we made excursions out and about, especially when we had visitors.

Over the next few years, we did quite a bit of mountain biking, and discovered lots of lovely trails which could be accessed either directly from the centre of town, or by getting on a train.

These days we load the dog and ourselves into the car (mostly) and head off in search of views. Over the past 9 months, we’ve visited many areas of Sussex, from Camber, to Friston Forest and the Seven Sisters, to the River Adur. This weekend has seen us walk around Devil’s Dyke and around Stanmer – both accessible by public transport. This afternoon I lost myself in the hills, and dales, the valleys, the trees, and was happy.

Last weekend we visited my parents in Hull.  Rather than breaking the journey up at Motorway Services we planned in stops at places which had dog-walking potential. So, armed with a road atlas, and an idea that we wanted to stop between Cambridge and Peterborough, we identified and tried a couple of spots which were only just off the route we travel.

Graftham Water

We stopped at Graftham Water on our way up to Hull on Friday afternoon.  From wikipedia:

Grafham Water (TL 150 680) is a reservoir with a circumference of about 10 miles (16 km). It is located between the villages of Grafham and Perry in the English county of Cambridgeshire (Huntingdonshire District).

We parked in the car park near Perry, paid our £2, made use of the amenities (toilets, cafe etc) and managed a reasonable walk

Monks Wood

On the return trip we stopped at Monks Wood. From Natural England:

Monks Wood NNR is one of the best examples of ancient ash-oak woodland in the East Midlands.

There is no car park as such, but there is parking in a layby off the B1090. There are also no amenities. But, there are a couple of marked walks – we followed Butterfly amongst all the trees, stopping for a spot of dog distraction training (lots of interesting smells that a certain young dog was fixated by).

So, 2 very different walks, both much better places to stop than at a Service station. The amenities at Graftham Water were really good but cost us £2 for parking whilst the walk was better at Monks Wood, we got free parking but had to stop at a Little Chef for toilets and cafe.

It is 8 weeks since we brought Skitters home and she has settled in well. In that time, we’ve become really interested in low tide times (because sand appears near the West Pier and Skitters can have a great run), we’ve tried out lots of treats and come up with a short list (dried liver, sausages and schmackos), Richard has taught her to fetch, and a combination of me and Richard’s Dad have taught her to shake hands.

Skitters has visited Hull, and met my Dad, and she’s been to Margate and met Richard’s family. She travels well, and settles down and sleeps in the back of the car.

We have both increased our exerise, I’ve decided not to run the 10K I was planning to in July because I just don’t have the spare energy at the moment. I’ve tracked a lot of walks on my Garmin Forerunner watch and know that I’m averaging about 20 miles per week. Some of the favourite spots are Stanmer Park and the woods beyond (1, 2, 3, 4), the River Adur (1, 2), and any beach (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

We’re on to leads number 3 and 4 after she chewed her way through 2 retracting leads. She now has a shortish lead, that matches her collar, for when she’s the dog-around-town, and a 10m long line for when we’re out and about and there are too many interesting smells around to let her off the lead. Yesterday we lost her for a while as she’d gone sniffing in amongst some brambles, she seemed to have got stuck and we were trying to work out how to get her out, when Richard spotted her running off. Somehow she’d managed to get out of her harness, without undoing it (the straps have been tightened up now!). She ran off and ended up in a field of horses before trying to find her way back to us – which she did, covered in mud and looking absolutely exhausted. But this goes to show that she’s not ready to be off the lead all the time yet – she still prioritises rabbits, squirrels and birds above us.

So, in 8 weeks I’ve spent less time at the keyboard, spent a lot of time learning how to take photos of a small dog, and have had a lot more exercise and seen the beach in a morning a lot more. It has been great fun.

Richard and I have long talked about getting a dog, but it never felt like the time was right due to work commitments, the size of our garden, our work patterns etc. This year we decided to give it some proper thought and in January decided to go to our nearest Dogs Trust centre in Shoreham to find out more. When we talked to one of the staff they told us that there are dogs which can suit all manner of house sizes and that we should fill in the form and take it from there. We decided to do this, but to wait till after our snowboarding holiday in Morzine (on which probably more in another blog post).

Last Sunday we headed off with our completed form in our hands and handed it in. The next stage was to go and look at the dogs in the centre and see if we there any we liked the sound and look of (each dog has an information sheet telling you whether it can live with children, and if so what age, whether it gets on well with other dogs etc). Although we didn’t need a dog that can live with children, we have family and friends with children ranging from 2 to 13 and so the children rating was important to us. We spotted a couple of dogs we liked the look of, one beagle cross and another one, and then headed back to the front desk where Emma, one of the assistants, was waiting for us. She told us more about the dogs, and neither of them were suitable, but she did have “one in the back” that we could find out more about. This dog, Skitters, had been brought back that day as the chief exerciser in her new family had been taken ill and they couldn’t look after her any more. She had been handed in to Shoreham as a stray in February, had then been adopted by her new family and handed back 3 or so weeks later. We took her out for a walk, and got on well with her. She matched our questionnaire well and we decided to adopt her. She is a Jack Russell Terrier crossed with something a bit larger judging by her size. Having made our decision the next stages for us were to take her out for a second walk, have a house visit from animal welfare who provided all sorts of helpful information including a helpful map of Brighton places which are and are not dog friendly, and attend a rehoming talk.

Having done everything necessary we went yesterday and collected her and brought her home to Brighton. We had a lovely long walk along the beach (does anyone know if sea sponges are toxic for small dogs? because she loves them…) and no sooner had we got home than she fell asleep on my lap. After lots more exploring and sniffing around the house she seems to have settled down well and is currently snuggled up on Richard’s knees looking completely at home.

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