Intake Head walk – some guide map checking

Time to walk off some more of those mince pies (I made them, pretty good as it happens), so Joe (Robin to my Fatman) and I headed out again this morning to walk one of a set of new routes marked out in some soon-to-be-printed leaflets. A while back I helped the Marsden Walkers Are Welcome group check rights of way /paths in one particular OS grid (as part of the national Walkers are Welcome initiative) and these new maps are part of that. I think there will be six in total initially. I volunteered to check two of the routes before the 9th Jan deadline (when I think they go to print) and report back any errors / confusing path descriptions etc. Today’s route was “Intake Head’. Next weekend I’ll be doing ‘Swellands’.

Actually, I ‘unofficially’ did one of the remaining four a couple of days ago with some of the family. The short (ish) but splendidly named Cat Holes walk. [Delicate nature? – feel free to skip the rest of this paragraph .] Certain words have historical resonance and for me (and Mrs K) Cat Holes sounds very close to my  Yorkshire Gran’s favourite expletive of ‘CatArse’ (I know, horrible, sorry). Said when ever she disapproved of anything (which was often). I’ve no idea of the origin of that expletive but she said it with real (often quite alarming) vigour. We spent some of that (very lovely) walk above Marsden imitating my sadly departed Gran’s fave turn of phrase. Ever the puerile humour.

Anyway back to sunnier subjects. Actually – we were lucky on this walk (the Intake Head walk) as we had a break from days of rain and were dry the whole time. That said, with saturated ground and crossing a lot of farmland the four miles or so were much slower going than they would be in the summer. A lot of (very welcome) new Board Walks and stiles have been placed on parts of the route but even with them it was a tad boggy in sections.
The Intake Head walk (to quote the W-a-W site) is : “A 4 mile walk with some short  steep ascents and descents. It explores the outer fringes of  Marsden on its west and south, visiting Tunnel End and Butterley Reservoirs with good views over the village from the edge of the moors.”

Intake refers to land taken in / from the moors and Intake Head house / cottage was the birthplace of an old dialect poet, Samuel Laycock (although much / all of his dialect poetry was Lancashire based).

I won’t post a route description or a copy of the map as I believe they need ‘signing off’ before publishing (hence me and others checking the routes now). So here are some photos I took on the way round.

One photo you won’t see  is that of the large Ram we came across part way round (with open (?!) gate to his field of choice). Seeing as he was beginning to move towards us, I decided not to stop to capture a shot of him. In fact I moved faster than I needed to with Brodie.. burning off those mince pies at speed, headed for the gate we could see across the field. I misheard son Joe’s “it’s okay he’s not moving now” as “he’s moving!!!”. So I kept jogging. I haven’t run like that for a long time! Joking aside, a large Tup like that can cause some real damage and Brodie is just daft enough to have stood and admired him whilst he charged her.