A Walkers Tale

With rain continuing to keep the ground wet across most of England, we are back on the canals today - and continuing to tick off sections of the Liverpool and Leeds Canal - which runs for 126 miles between Liverpool and Leeds. On our last visit to this canal, we had walked a fairly urban section of the canal from Burnley to Blackburn - and today we get a more rural section, walking from Blackburn on to the outskirts of Chorley. On the following day we will resume our walk and then finish in Appley Bridge, having walked to and through Wigan. And after this we will have completed almost one hundred miles of walking along the canal - with two final days remaining, to complete the journey to Liverpool. For now though, we are finishing up a rather picturesque train ride into Blackburn - with our route including a particularly pretty section of train line that runs between Todmorden and Burnley. But having reached Blackburn, we must now make our way to  the canal - and with town plann...

In recent weeks the weather has pretty much limited me to canal walks , as I have been forced to seek out paths that don't sink beneath you when you step on them - but aided by a mix of sunshine and frozen ground, I have decided that today is the day to head back into the hills. More specifically, I plan to walk over Ikley Moor and Skipton Moor, following the Dales High Way between Saltaire and Skipton. The Dales High Way  in it's entirety runs between Saltaire and Appleby-in-Westmorland, along a route that generally runs over the Yorkshire Dales. But today's section sits outside the Yorkshire Dales - with the trail not entering the national park until after it passes through Skipton. Trains to Saltaire are, however, fairly infrequent, whilst trains to Shipley are more common - and so our walk begins as we get off the train at Shipley train station - and head down to the  Liverpool & Leeds Canal , which we follow round to Saltaire, and to the start of the Dales High Wa...