Poorly marked, terribly overgrown — we battled our way through nettles, brambles and thistles. We fought an array of insects and horseflies. It was hot and the air close. It was not particularly scenic nor was it particularly beautiful. Our grand finale was a golf course and the Stagecoach bus station. This was, possibly, the most shit walk ever, but it is in close competition with the now legendary 26-mile-because-we-got-lost ramble from Haye on Wye, or our first memorable encounter with horseflies on the Mersey estuary in a terrible walk from Hale. Still, it had a ruined priory so it comes in third.

The bus timetables were all wrong online, and this was was fatal given how the service to the moors is so limited. I’m finding this to be quite common, you have to download the damn app in every city you go to, to be sure you have the right bus schedule. Our original plan to get to the moors and the Hole of Horcum had to be switched, and this is no easy feat in unfamiliar territory. We took an absurdly expensive bus to Cambreck, which was once a reformatory school and is now residential. We took our lives in our hands and crossed the motorway. We walked along a pleasant path beside the river Derwent, only to find the clearly marked footpath on our Os map is no longer in existence. We backtracked, and that always hurts. We followed the path to Kirkham Priory, with a plan to end in Malton.

This was reasonably beautiful, and the highlight of the walk beyond doubt though the strange clouded day made photography difficult. An Augustinian priory founded in the 1120s, had a fairly uneventful, though wealthy, existence until Henry VIII. Winston Churchill was here among the ruins to watch vehicles practicing for the D-Day landing. It’s hard to imagine, it is a small river, a small space. There is not a lot left.

What followed was also pretty all right for a while. We walked through fields of wheat and potatoes — quite uncertainly, it must be said, but we were indeed on the right track

And then the true purgatory began. It was lit up for a brief moment by an incredible small patch of wetland filled, absolutely filled with dragonflies. I have never seen so many. They were beautiful.

But most of our track looked like this:

We were both bleeding. Mark had great red welts across his calves from the cleggs — my bites didn’t come up until I was back at work annoying everyone else, and myself most of all, by scratching them. Splendid river view? Not so much:

Irises though, we did also get to see irises close up.

Oh look, the footpath continues:

Finally we emerged all too briefly into some woodland, that faded all too quickly into gold course.

We chose not to take this ‘footpath’ and walked down the fairly busy lane instead

I know councils have limited funds and have made hard choices and I do blame the Tory government first and Stagecoach second but…damn it. What a terrible plan B.