20 km
Keep your chin up
- sign at the Station Hotel in Worksop
Firbeck felt like the perfect place to stop walking yesterday, but it was not so easy to get back there to start walking again today, seeing as I had gone back to Conisbrough for the night. It took three buses to get back to Firbeck, taking me round three sides of a sort of lop-sided square of which my trail was the fourth, direct side!
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| Walking route in light blue, buses... all the other colours! |
But I didn't mind because it was a good way to see some more of the area without walking, for a change! And the truth is, I had been dying to take a double-decker bus ever since I arrived in England! 😁
Between buses 2 and 3 I sat outside a bakery in Dinnington, drinking coffee and eating a flapjack (a sugary traditional British version of the granola bar) and watching the city awaken, as the shops began to open and teenagers made their way to school, looking swish in their school uniform of black suits, white shirts and ties.
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| Early batch of Jubilee cupcakes in the bakery in Dinnington |
The third and final bus deposited me in front of the church of St. Martin in Firbeck, a fine church which was, like so many I have seen, closed.
This is partly for security reasons and also an effect of the pandemic : churches are just beginning to go back to their regular functioning now. But the next church I stopped at, in the pretty little village of Carlton, was open, and very lively: three people, plus the vicar, were busy decorating and preparing for a busy weekend with three weddings and two christenings on the programme!
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| The ceiling bosses are particularly interesting |
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| Altar supposedly containing a relic of St. Thomas à Beckett... Sealed into the stone with lead |
St. John's Church in Carlton dates back to Saxon times: around the year 900. The wooden ceiling had to be replaced in 1936 as it was infested with death watch beetle, but the colourful medieval bosses bearing the symbols of important local families were preserved. The church has a special connection with Canterbury, and is thought to have been a pilgrimage destination in its own right, because a stone altar at the top of the left nave is said to contain a relic of St. Thomas à Beckett, sealed into the stone with a lead seal.
I looked around, said a prayer of thanks, chatted with the friendly decorating team, signed the guest book and asked the vicar to certify my passage on my pilgrim passport before proceeding on my way.
Today's walk, like yesterday's, was very green, through farmers' fields, past cows, sheep and horses, and through or over a variety of gates and stiles.
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| "This section may be boggy" said the trail description... |
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| How to get over the wall |
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| ... and the fence |
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| These cows must be the ones that make chocolate milk |
At Osberton Lock I joined the Chesterfield Canal, built in 1777 to export coal, limestone, and lead from Derbyshire, iron from Chesterfield, and corn, deals, timber, groceries and general merchandise into Derbyshire.
I walked the tow path the rest of the way to Worksop, a town of about 40,000 people on the northern edge of Sherwood Forest. The name Worksop is believed to be of Anglo Saxon origin, deriving from a personal name 'We(o)rc' combined with the Anglo-Saxon placename element 'hop' (valley).
Here I am housed in the Station Hotel, built as the station coach house when the railway came to town in 1849.
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| That's a lot of potatoes!! |
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