Tuesday, July 9, 2019

27 June 2019 – Simonside

This is the second walk we do from Rothbury, and is on the far side of the river to Cragside.
It takes us an hour and a half to get to the start of the walk, all of it along the river and then across lovely open countryside
Lady Bridge is a mile from Rothbury, and our regular morning walk when nothing else is planned for the day
Having crossed the river we have good views of Cragside, which is the tree covered hill just behind Rothbury.  
We have our banana stop just before we reach the car park marking the start of the official Simonside walk

From here there is a lovely view of Rothbury and Cragside
The start of Simonside walk is through dense woods, which would be ideal for one of our summer walks in Spain.

Then a steep climb up to large rock formation, which is where we had our picnic lunch
We were fortunate to have a warm and sunny day, all too often it is very cold and windy on this exposed ridge
If you look closely you will see muddy knees on my new walking trousers, caused when I stumbled crossing a boggy patch
This stone slab path is really necessary due to the very boggy ground
In places you can push your walking stick 12-18” into the soft ground either side of the path
It was warm today, but we were not tempted to cool off
The rocky path is useful, but requires care going down
The rock formations are very unusual and attractive
We have now left the official walk and are making our way downhill to Rothbury
It will take more than an hour, so we had a short break to admire the views
This is a lovely, and rightly very popular, walk
It took us six hours to cover the 17km walk from door to door.

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