It was after 08.20 hrs on MOTHERS DAY and it was time to go! We opened the throttle as we ran onto the Skipton by-pass down the Aire Valley at high speed, damp air was forced into the air vents and radiator of both Mistress Mable and Snowflake as we bounded along, stretching C.C’s and filling lungs with morning air, even if it felt damp, another difficult day to judge with tons of low bilious light and dark clouds, I felt certain it was going to rain around here, just as the weatherman promised last night. Slow we went now as we turned off the by-pass and travelled up into Skipton centre, rounding the last bend we saw a glut of shiny Honda Goldwings sitting under the statue. I think we both smiled at the high number of wingers waiting for the start of a good day.

Nigel and Denise from Halifax, Derek and Heather of Guiseley with 1800’s were the first I clapped eyes on and recognised, Mick and Evelyn from Leeds stood with Wakefield’s Tony “the pie” Hudson. Before greeting everyone I put a borrowed book back in the top box of Derycks blue 1800. Cheers mate! Through the bundled up people I saw the hugely grinning Lyn of Castleford, hubbi Mark was just behind. With them was their pal Colin from Doncaster.  Bill and Lorraine from Durham had come today too having stayed overnight at York with Deryck with a Y. “Spanners” and his gay..I mean great pal Alan Mason arrived and declared themselves to have done with the Blue Oyster Club crowd. Welcome back darlings!

The Pudsey Trike purred up slowly with Alan and Missus. Alan is an undertaker (yes he has one of THOSE faces too) But don’t let that lull you into thinking he is a slow coach..except perhaps between Monday to Friday and he is ALWAYS driving around at 1 mph with his other gang in big black cars so on our ride-outs he lets go of his frustration’s and makes the grey trike go like “Billy Fuck”.Wouldn’t it be funny if Alan got his days the wrong way around? To see a black Hearse tear arsing to the Crem and seeing poor old Grandfather Jones in the coffin rolling about in the back, spewing forth flowers and wreaths on every corner! That would be such an unbelievable sight! Mr Plod would eventually stop him with a stinger or three and put his size 10 in it by sarcastically (they all do) asking Alan “…And which fire are you going to then sir?”” Alan would point his thumb to the coffin saying “HIS you pillock” Now that would make the Evening News!

Cheryl and Telford of the bright yellow over “trews” were here again on their 1800 trike to carry on their learning curve and would be keeping with the Pudsey Trike, pushing their trike and themselves to even higher levels of competency.

With pleasantries, hello’s and welcomes done with it was time to mount up and move out, everyone moved carefully from Skipton’s cobbles and onto the tarmac slowly to roll left at the roundabout and away they all went or so I thought…A Gold 1500 Wing sat there on its own with flashing council light. “Barry” I shouted on the CB “Gordon is still here! I’ll wait for him and catch you up” I waited and waited, but still he didn’t show. Well I can’t wait forever I said to myself after all it’s not a school outing!  He knows we are going to Devils Bridge and will be there for 20 minutes to pick up the second group. He will turn up…or not!  So with that I chased after the family.

We made good time travelling nicely along the A65 from Skipton to Kirkby Lonsdale and the bikers meeting place at Devils Bridge to meet the second group. The clouds seemingly hung lower and lower and appeared to be resting on the shoulders of the nearby hills. The drizzle was with us now, I wasn’t bothered we had our wet gear stowed in the back, the temperature was not too low and the day was young.Parking up at Devils Bridge was easy because it was quite empty, don’t you just love Sunday riders? There are some who always call Honda Goldwing riders for being only out in sunshine, yet here we were, a bunch of old gits riding glossy expensive armchairs in the wet dirty cold! APPY WANDERERS do it in the wet…well Yah Boo to you soft pocket rocket riding winkers!

It was here that we met the final group that would make up today’s APPY WANDERERS. We met with Ian and M Jones and their friends George and Millie who rode down from Cumbria. Phil and Pam Bowker came on the “Bowker Beast” with Ruby the little black spaniel dog, she had her little hut nailed to the back of their black 1800 trike and was extremely keen to say hello to anyone who showed interest…a bit like me really! A character with an old 1500 trike and sidecar joined us here too, we spotted him a few miles back, they had stopped to pull on their waterproofs, this was Mr Stephen Fenton and son Dan I took great pleasure in following from the back, just four bikes away as young Dan leaned to the left and right on every corner, they kept the pace up really well, the 1800 just behind dare not let a large gap form in front of him, I grinned all the way to Cumbria!

The showers came again as we set of up the squiggly A683, all the way up to Firbank we went before joining the M6 to go the rest of the way to Penrith. The showers cleared, the grey stuff lost interest in us to be replaced by windy wispy white clouds under a pale sky.

At the A66 just before Penrith we turned off and headed toward Keswick, all was going splendid even when the last six bikes got sliced from the group by an approaching police car from the rear with flashing lights but no siren, a rather odd thing I thought, I pushed through from the back trying to usher the guys to one side to help, but without his siren the guys must have wondered what the hell I was trying to do! I tried to keep the lead group in site telling Barry the score on the CB and hopefully hanging back enough to let the last group see and catch up. This worked a treat and once clear of Keswick we were as one again. Derek and Heather were doing a splendid job as the middle link for Barry and I. I could spot him frequently due to their orange bibs. This is one of several reasons why only Marshalls wear ORANGE dayglo bibs on our ride-outs. When you are there on the day its so obvious, right guys?

We were soon on the B5289 twisting and turning rising and falling on the narrow belt of tarmac, stone walls and overhanging tree branches were covered in green moss as time stood still, just the odd rambler or three passed through…..and eighteen Honda Goldwings! Derwent Water passed by on our right then we were climbing up. Here is some information of the pass and the mine.

The Honister Pass, also known as Honister Hause, is a mountain pass, It is on the B5289 linking Seatoller in the valley of Borrowdale to Gatesgarth at the southern end of Buttermere. The pass reaches an altitude of 1,167 feet (356 m), making it one of the highest in the region, and also one of the steepest, with gradients of up to 1-in-4 (25%).The Honister Pass is one of three passes that link the tourist area around Keswick including Derwent Water and Borrowdale, with the valley of the River Cocker including the lakes of Buttermere, Crummock Water and Loweswater. From north to south these passes are the Whinlatter Pass the Newlands Pass and the Honister Pass.
In 1870 very substantial underground workings existed under Honister Crag with lesser workings on the opposite side of the valley at Yew Crags. There were also smaller-scale underground workings on Dubbs Moor, together with a small opencast quarry — opencast quarrying had been carried on at Honister since the late 17th century. Slate from the Honister workings was at one time dragged on sleds down steep paths that traversed the cliffs to the top of Honister Pass (The Hause), but packhorse teams had been used to remove finished product from the opencasts for a great many years prior to 1830. In 1879 new owners installed self-acting inclines to serve both the Honister and Yew Crags mines; these were remarkable and costly feats of engineering but they enabled far more efficient production. The incline serving the Dubbs Quarry was cleverly designed to lift product up the side of the valley from the quarry, and then lower it down the other valley side to The Hause. The company leased and operated other quarries in Borrowdale.  In the mid-1920s, brilliantly engineered aerial ropeways served the Honister and Yew Crags Mines, though the external Yew Crags incline continued to be used until the late 1960s. Connection to the Hause/slate works from both incline and short aerial ropeway was by petrol-driven loco on a railway bridging the Seatoller-Buttermere road. This bridge was removed for scrap in the early 1970s.By 1891 production had reached 3,000 tons a year and more than 100 men were employed. Dubbs mine was ‘smaller metal’ (metal being the terminology for slate), in that smaller pieces of slate (thus smaller slates) were obtainable due to geological changes; this did give rise to some instability. Dubbs Quarry ceased production around 1932, largely due to the difficulties and slowness of transporting finished product. In 1997 the mine was reopened by Mark Weir who developed the quarries into a thriving tourist attraction, and at the same time producing small quantities of roofing slate. Mark was sadly killed in a helicopter crash at the mine on the evening of 8th March 2011.

We had lunch here and saw the first sunshine of the day, though clouds hung around by the dozen and threatened us with showers. “Spanners” began messing with the lights on his 1500 again, they first began playing up at Devils Bridge, he looked intent on fixing the problem now, his gay…I mean great mate Alan looked on in admiration as Spanners bent over to see what he was doing.

It was time to go but we had lost the W.O.T, where the hell was she, come to that where was Julie, she had vanished too! I went in search and found them in the “Tat Shop” buying some tat. “Wait a minute” was all I could get out of the pair of them, so I left them to it, eventually they returned and donned their lids and we got sorted to move on down the valley.

The exit is not the best of exits so some care would be needed so I pulled out and stopped on the road ready to ask the traffic to wait a minute until all the bikes had tottered off the bike unfriendly vehicle park, bumping down onto the tarmac on the brow of the summit before sharply tipping left and down the valley, Julie encouraged everyone one forward as it was safe and thanked the waiting mini coach driver for his patience.The next few minutes were spent craning necks left and right at the high crags and to appreciate this little part of Great Britain, the little road flowed like a stream down the lumps and bumps and round clusters of house sized boulders. At the bottom of the valley and just around the last bend we saw Buttermere. I paused for a minute to capture the atmosphere on camera, to see the light paint lighter shades of grey and green on the velvet like landscape just had to be captured! Between myself and Julie we managed this today, sometimes great shots are missed when on the bike as steep sharp stone walls and Sunday drivers take up all my attention!  Then of course the next ten minutes are spent catching up with the guys. Julie had air between herself and the seat once or twice over the next ten minutes as we bounced along at an exciting pace and she took several “great” photographs of nothing but the sky!

The valley soon flattened out as we moved north west  towards  Cockermouth. The next couple of villages were a peculiar lot. Practically every house sat along the roadside as if just made up of “The High Street” all had coloured walls, with wide cream edges atop the door and window frames. Some sported soft pastel shades some had garish colour schemes, a really deep blue and of course that bloody awful pink one. It reminded me of the houses in Ireland, though they seemed more in keeping with the area somehow. I have passed by here three times in the last two years, both during the week and at the weekend and never have I seen more than three or four folk in either of these odd villages. These were the villages of Rowrah and Frizington and Cleator if I recall. They were odd so very odd.Now we were on the roundabout at Egremont and going south on the A595 and passing the brightly coloured head gear of the FLORENCE MINE on the left through the trees.

The Sellarfield Nuclear facility dominated the skyline towards the coast near the town of Seascale. I gave a moments thought to the poor souls in Japan and thought for a moment…”nothing like that could happen here…could it?” We cut back inland to skirt around Muncaster Castle.

Derek began to get excitable now because we were near to the bridge that gave birth to a nickname of his…”Derek the Bridge Troll”.  During the Help 4 Heroes job in 2010 we had to put somebody substantial at a small bridge with traffic lights at both ends, the visibility poor as the bridge was smothered by shrubs and trees so not easy to control, hence we needed someone with the ability to project ones will on others….Enter Big Derek! He and Heather began to chatter on the CB as we closed in, other marshalls of that day remembered that mad busy day.

Remember it well because we are NOT doing that job again, however honourable the cause..and they all are..because APPY WANDERERS do not do charity jobs we are a motorcycle riding group, and that day was a one off!

Near Bootle we stopped for another tea stop with tea and cakes, it’s a quant clean little concern and run very well by a group of old ladies and schoolgirls, we do the done thing and stay outside, it wasn’t really cold and we were able to be free with our colourful chit chat! The old girl came out and took our orders with a smile quickly and efficiently. I for one am more than happy to return here. On a cloudless day unlike today the views are vast and soothing.

A farmer drove up and released a mother and two daughters into the field to join the rest of the flock, they were so small, in fact Ruby the dwarf dog of the “Bowker Beast” was much bigger than the two little sheepies, one black and one white! It was time for us to move again, the cheap and cheerful loose chippings and shale that made up the car park made for another careful exit, only this time the exit views were long and clear and we got out as one with no fuss, the approaching car slowed and beckoned us out. “Thank you” I mouthed and Julie waved too.

We turned inland again up the long hill and twisted down the edge of the wood and shrub dotted land at the bottom, and there  lay the infamous bridge, its local name is Duddon Bridge but to us it will always be known as “The Troll’s Bridge” Oh how happy to be home were our two Guiseley lovers Derek and Heather. “Though shalt not pass” takes on a different picture these days to many of the Wanderers!

On we went enjoying the clouded countryside, cloudy it may be but raining it certainly wasn’t. We turned onto the wiggle A592 and ran down the edge of Windermere, we travelled the last five miles or so under the green barked tree cover, a coach struggled to get out of the way of a couple of Sunday drivers, we waited patiently for them to sort themselves out and gazed through the trees at Windermere and the beautiful properties dotted here and there along the shoreline. Barry led us to a coach car park where the attendant let us park in a coach spot in the corner for our short stay here.

Ruby scrambled out of the “Bowker Beast” and stretched her four little legs, the rest of us stretched our two legs and the Mothers Day Rideout to the Lakes was declared over.

Ian and George said their thanks and goodbyes until the next time, they turned off with the girls towards Carlisle and home. Deryck had a long ride back to York so left also, he was to do over three hundred miles today, whilst Jan had a cooing day with the grandkids, well done that man!We went for ice cream and a short walk, others gathered round and chomped on supplies from their top boxes.

Today had been a great day and now we had to make our way home to the likes of Bradford, Keighley, Halifax, York and Doncaster to name just a few. A group of us headed toward Skipton. As we turned off the M6 to head back towards Kirkby Lonsdale yet more Wanderers left the group homeward bound we were loosing folk all evening as they peeled off to their respective beds.

It was a nice blast for the last group along the familiar A65 we got held up here and there as lazy traffic crawled home as though on their last legs! We zipped past them when safe to do so and probably woke the buggers up I’d wager!

The evening was quite warm and the sun gave justice to the view across Keighley Moor to our right and Rombalds Moor high to our left, we had said goodbye to the last of today’s APPY WANDERERS at Skipton minutes earlier and had skipped through the Vietnam bends on the A629, Barry, me and Nigel rode quite fast along it, we may well even have reminded folk of those spaceships on the road in that old Speilberg movie film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” We said goodbye to both Barry,Tina and the Corby’s at Keighley and we climbed away over the tops through Cullingworth to miss out Keighley centre, a few minutes later a UFO came up behind us, it was the Corby’s! They had come through the town after all.

We rode together a few more miles before they turned towards Halifax. Julie and I rode on through Queensbury, Stone Chair, before dropping down to the M62. Picking up the pace we rode the motorways to Doncaster and arrived home in Hatfield at about 2030 hrs. Today was a long but enjoyable twelve hrs on the road covering about 270 miles in great company along some of the finest English landscapes.

We complain about the many days of rain I know but to be honest it’s the rains that give us such lovely countryside isn’t it?It had been an easy eventless day for me at the back except when the police car cut the last half dozen of us up entering Keswick when I had to try and elasticise myself between the last man of the main group and the first man of the last six, if you know what I mean! All in all it had been a really nice day.
Tilateronthen

THE WANDERERS SCRIBE

P.S Thanks to Heather and Tina for extra photographs from the front and middle of the rideout today x