Ingleborough

After driving up in the morning we stopped of at Greenclose to pick up my Scurion charger which I had left behind last a fortnight before and John Cordingley had left in a jiffy bag for me to collect.
We left the car near the CRO Depot in Clapham and headed up towards the church and then passed through the short tunnels leading to the rough track called “Long Lane”.
“Long Lane” passes along a drystone wall above the path from Clapham to Ingleborough show cave, the entrance of which could be seen below.
Where the lane ended at a gate leading to open pastureland, we followed a curving route which brought us to the stile near Bar Pot on the usual route to Gaping Gill. As it was quite windy although bright and sunny, we headed for Gaping Gill and made use of whatever shelter we could find in the large shakehole to have lunch.
Afterwards we continued on the well-worn path leading up towards the summit of Ingleborough. At one point we had to dive onto Karen's newish Tilley hat as it was about to be blown away!
We had a short break making use of the limited shelter offered by a low cairn at the top of Little Ingleborough still a kilometre or so from the main summit. Because we had only stopped off in the Dales on our way to Alston in the North Pennines, we decided to forgo the extra two kilometres to the main summit and back and dropped down a feint path leading from near the top of Little Ingleborough via Newby Moss to the village of Newby and just before entering the village itself, we followed a surprisingly narrow bridleway marked as “Laithbutts Lane” on the map.
Soon we reached the minor road connecting Clapham with Ingleton and walked the remaining few hundreds of metres back to where we had started.
After a short visit to Ingleton for a meal in Bernies, we set off for the Alston Outdoor Centre at Alston to join others for a few days of visiting the mines of Nenthead and surrounding area together with some walking.