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Gunnerside’s Literary Institute is dated 1877, then the village housed hundreds of people, mostly lead miners. A lively and probably hungry shrew had left its tunnel and was braving the Dales sunshine on a mown village verge, the Kings Head was shut after a hot night but there was a nice fresh cuppa at the Ghyllfoot Tea Room round the corner.

You need something for the climb, but not a car, because, should you brave the unusual electric gate the first hairpin corner will rip the floor off your Ferrari. The metalled lane screws up 500 feet in half a mile. Next to it, every couple of hundred yards, are house and outhouse combinations, either fixed up, half-fixed, in ruin, or diminished.

The reward for the climb is a good Swaledale view and an ace landscape above the thousand foot line.

Earlier in the year the colour of the valley floor would have been hay meadow yellow, but that was a sodden season. And, falling between two floral stools, we were a little early for the purple of the heather. But even at this altitude there was good rich shade on the south facing slopes. The moor pierced by the arch of a mine entrance and divided by turf that held puffballs.

We kept height. Three crows joined with four and swung down to the valley, a bird of prey held rock steady in the wind, and big black gnats, the sort that fly with their legs hanging down, were mating in tail to tail fashion on anything they could land on including us.

There's a spacious plateau of rough grass, and after crossing that some tracks of various sorts down to the trees.

We hadn’t seen anyone, and hardly a waymark or fingerpost.

You touch the main Swaledale road at the hamlet of Low Row, here there is a substantial and quality refuelling stop at the recently reopened Punch Bowl that is run by the same people as Arkengarthdale’s CB Inn.

Not that you need much for the rest of the walk, a digestive stroll up river. A sign points to Crackpot, to see much water beyond the bridge you must peer, bar floodtime, I saw a duck.

We came into Gunnerside past its big Wesleyan Methodist Chapel that has an exuberant finial and is threatened with closure. The faithful may have abandoned Swaledale but walkers have not, filtering in late afternoon every five minutes, in pairs, one at time, a group, and the Kings Head had surfaced.