Reeth to Richmond Day 10

The path out of Reeth follows the Swale through pleasant farmland before heading northeast to Marrick. Here there is an old priory founded for Benedictine nuns who built the steep stairway between the priory and the village itself.

A little further on is one of those must-visit places on the walk, Elaine's Kitchen at Nun Cote Nook farm. Elaine is a cheerful, engaging Yorkshire woman who runs a busy household of five kids and helps run the farm but has also established a little niche with her kitchen tea room just 200 yards off the C2C track.

In Elaine's Kitchen

A number of these home-based tearooms and wayside honesty boxes have sprung up along the way. For us they not only offer a timely pick-me-up of Yorkshire Tea or a snack but give us a chance to meet some of the locals in their native habitat. This could conceivably get out of hand and spoil the walk with too much commercialisation but so far that hasn't happened. They appear pretty much where you need them and it seems to be as much a service to walkers as it is a supplement to farm income, so it has actually enhanced the walk.

Elaine chatted freely in her broad Yorkshire accent about life on the farm including her prize winning Cheviot sheep flock. She also showed us her kitchen, the ceiling of which was no longer visible due to the many show ribbons and rosettes that hung from it.

Elaine with just some of her championship ribbons

After a look around the old Church of St Edmund the Martyr in Marske (he was a Saxon king put to death by the Danes in 870 AD) we lunched under Applegarth Scar and soon caught our first glimpse of Richmond where we were due to have our second rest day.

A short sharp shower as we entered the town didn't dampen our spirits. In fact it was extra incentive for us to pop into the booking office for the old (and England's only) Georgian theatre in close to it's original state. It was built by the prolific Samuel Butler in 1788, the same year that the First Fleet dropped anchor in Port Jackson. It was closed and used for other purposes for 100 years but has progressively been revived and restored since the 1940s.

As luck would have it we were able to book tickets for a one night show called "The Real Me Is Thin" with the straight talking Arabella Weir (of Grumpy Old Women fame. She also wrote a book called "Does My Bum Look Big In This?". Despite it being a bit of a girl's night we all enjoyed ourselves and had a great laugh.