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Reivers 2: Bellingham to Kielder

Posted on 6 April 201220 February 2021 by Rob Ainsley
I’ll give it ten

A short day today – just as well, after last night’s beer and wine and Radio 3; that Wagner must have given me a fuzzy head – with our destination Kielder and its hostel just 20 grey, damp but easy miles up the road.

Save water, take your whisky neat

Kielder – originally built for workers constructing the reservoir, Britain’s most voluminous, in the 1970s – is a candidate for England’s most remote village. If you ask your short pint to be topped up as I did, and get rebuffed, for example, you have a long drive to complain to someone about it.

So that’s what the OS map symbol means

Anyway, we had lunch at the Castle tea room, looked round said castle, and went for a spin on the well-surfaced gravel roads round the reservoir. You can see red squirrels, ospreys and deer here. Unless you come with me, in which case they’ll all hide, as they did today.

The red squirrels clearly saw us first

A new petrol station has saved locals the irritation of driving twenty miles to fill up. We toasted it with a bottle of Chilean red in the hostel. You could tell we weren’t locals because we kept topping each other’s glasses up to full measures.

Miles today: 20
Miles since Newcastle: 68

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Reivers 3: Kielder to Carlisle →

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