Pendle Hill and Boulsworth Hill (Lad Law)

Putting my reputation as a fair-weather walker in jeopardy, we set out from the car park in Barley this morning in pouring rain. We could have sat it out, but, based on the frequency at which squally showers had been passing through all night and into the morning, we felt sure that we would be caught at some point in the walk even if we delayed our start, so off we went regardless, in the direction of Pendle Hill.

The steep, engineered path up the hill suggests that it’s a very popular place, and even early on a Sunday morning we were in company as we left the car park. The other groups headed off in different directions (it transpired that the people parked next to us walked the same circuit as us, but in the opposite direction), and even though we could see people ahead of, and behind, us as we huffed and puffed our way up, we had the summit entirely to ourselves. Moreover, after walking initially through rain, and then through falling snow, we topped out with blue skies and excellent visibility in most directions:

Our circuit took us south off the hill, to walk past Ogden Reservoirs. There’s no engineered path on the hill in that direction and the ground had suffered from the amount of rain that fell last night. Likewise, the side-streams which are probably usually single-step-across trickles were fair rushing by today.

The car park was almost full by the time we got back, and cars were lining the streets of the village, so we freed up a space and headed off to … well, to a steep little lane that’s not very near to any significant area of habitation.

Variously in hail, snow and sunshine, we took a track across some glorious moorland, before setting off to yomp up to Boulsworth HIll. We later discovered that, if we had continued to the end of the track, there’s a trodden path up the hill from there, but the route we took wasn’t arduous.

We were in total agreement that, after the unpromising start, it had proved to be a good day for walking after all, as we enjoyed the views from the top of this lovely hill:

Having spotted the trodden line back to the track, we took it - and found it to be very soggy indeed!

The track sped us back to Colin, where we arrived having covered 3.8 miles with 600’ of up on this outing (Pendle Hill was 4.9 miles with 1200’).