Alphin Pike

28/08/23

Alphin pike was a nice little Ethel close to home, we did this one just to get our legs moving again after completing the White to Dark Way the last 2 days. (You can find the blog post for this on our website.)

We managed to park up for free on the road further down from the reservoir as this was close to our end point. We walked up to the reservoir and through the carpark. This is where we came across the lovely Tara at Dovestone_Coffee_Box (On Instagram) We ordered a banana smoothie and had a lovely conversation with her regarding her coffee box and the area she was in, If you are in the local area I would recommend giving Tara a visit and help a small business! The Coffee box is cute and adorable and sits in the centre of the carpark. Something I know many small business owners will be very jealous of!

After enjoying our smoothie we carried on our walk around the reservoir and up the right hand side of the little river. This started out as a path but then turns into a less used path! We sort of made our own path and then afterwards realised there was a stile we could of taken, although it was heavily overgrown! I think I preferred the way we went after finding out there are orange spiders that live in all the overgrowness haha. We all know by now how much I hate spiders!

We thought we were following a path, turns out we were but it was the wrong path! Which was in a way lucky that we did as the route my Komoot wanted to take us up as a scramble was not a scramble it would of been a proper rock climb with a nice big drop under it! So I am glad we made our own way. Although our own way wasn’t the best. We came across a section we had to get over that was a straight up hill on lose soil….Tom didn’t love that as his feet were going from under him so I was finding my own way up through the heather instead just to have something to hold on to! It was fun and it wasn’t fun at the same time! Poor Tom was carrying our bag full of food and water too.

We finally got to the top of the lose soil and found another path to take, that took us up to a small waterfall and onto the scramble. Now I love a good scramble and this was a fun little scramble! There are a few different routes up it you could take depending on your level and the weather but it has definitely got to be your only way up to the top! Choosing another way would just be long and boring! We had loads of fun doing this scramble and it helped wake the rest of our body up after the last few days we had had!

The Sun was strong by this point and it was really warm! Tom stopped to enjoy some of the water from the waterfall on his face. After doing a few waterfall poses while I took photos, we carried on.

The top was just behind the waterfall, so we did not have very far to go. As we got to the top, it all opened out to the beautiful view you can see below, we stopped to have some lunch on the rocks, took some photos while Tom tried to concur a fear and put his legs over the edge before decided to roll back down the rock edge so he could stand back up lol and of course I took photos! You can find them on our socials!

After some lunch we headed over to the trig point got our pictures in the wind and headed headed off quite quickly.

Coming down started off rather easy…..Which obviously did not last! My route decided to take us off the path we were on, which wasn’t the easiest of paths on your knees, to a nice steep down! Walking poles out we headed down the steep to the heather….coming across a couple at the bottom that we had seen before we turned off….So yes, we could of just carried on down the original path but o well….Got to make it fun and scary I suppose!

From here we headed through some empty fields before coming up to a field with one horse and one Shetland pony. The horse was staring at us from the hill it was stood on. We eventually decided to go through it. The pony ignored us completely. The horse on the other hand scared the life out of us. It kept an eye on us the whole time, and when we got about 15 feet from the gate, it decided to run over to us! First it ran over and ran behind and past us. Then it decided to start walking over to us very quickly, I stopped to try and stay calm with the horse while Tom carried on walking. Both myself and the horse got skiddish as I went to stroke it. I pulled back and at the same time the horse did one of those sidewards push aways with both of its left legs and nearly ended up on its side it moved that quickly. The type of thing you would normally only see in a cartoon! I didn’t even know horses could do that in real life.

Something like this but much more on its side.

As soon as the horse ran away, we got out of that field as quick as possible, annoying thing is…That is a public foot path! Not one you should be putting horses like that in!

We made our way back to the car which was parked on the main road just seconds away and had never been so happy! Alphin Pike is fun to scramble up but I am not sure the rest of the hike is any fun to be honest! This is not one I will be repeating any time soon I reckon!

You will find many more of our interesting hikes on here, on our socials and on our YouTube! You can find everything on this link: https://linktr.ee/Acasualhikersguide Come and join us and see where we head off to next!