The mule’s one drawback from a military standpoint is their tendency to stampede under fire.
The War Office, Animal Management (London, 1923)
AS I STROLLED back up to the Lion Inn to meet Jasper and Jethro, I bumped into a young farmer called Peter Mawson standing in a small yard off the lane. Beyond him was a field with pigs circling round their open metal arcs in a proprietorial way. They were some of the first pigs I’d seen on this entire journey and I told him so.
It turned out that Peter was an ‘incomer’ who had moved to the Yorkshire Moors only a few years ago, when he was already forty. To those who might quibble that forty is not so young, it made him a stripling compared to many of the farmers along the valley who, as he pointed out, were in their seventies. Peter was tall, and looked fit and energetic.
Like almost all the other farmers I had talked to on my long journey from one coast to another, he was also extremely talkative. Farmers have a reputation for being grumpy and taciturn – but given a little encouragement, I’ve always found they can talk the hind legs off a donkey (or mule).
Born on Teesside, Peter had spent most of his working life in first the Air Force and then in marketing for various London-based companies – including National Car Parks. It seemed an odd preparation for what he was doing now. With his partner Nicola, he had moved to this small farm in the upper part of the Farndale Valley to rear rare-breed sheep and pigs.
I was surprised by this.
‘Quite a change. And a very bold leap. If you don’t mind me asking, how did you learn to do all this?’ I gave a wave at the pigs behind him.
‘Internet. You can learn everything on the internet these days. And I didn’t rush into it either. The first couple of years I did a lot of contract work for farmers around here to see how they managed. Learned a lot that way. Both how to do it – and how not to do it.’
I knew that incomers could be treated with some suspicion on the moors. One of Hugo’s friends at the dinner the previous week had told me that when he had moved into one of the small villages there, the local pub had refused to serve him. So I wondered how Peter had found it.
‘I was very, very careful. But I did what I used to do in the military: hang back and not say too much at first. I soon realised a lot of them had fallen out with each other, so I’ve been wary of getting into arguments.’
He certainly hadn’t chosen the easy way to farm. The sheep were Whitefaced Woodlands, an unusual rare breed that Peter had researched as being particularly suitable for these hillside conditions.
A few were wandering in a field in the distance. Their fluffy white faces made them look very pretty. If a Texel was the action hero of the sheep world, then these were more like dizzy blondes, the starlets. And there weren’t many of them around. ‘Only 900 or so in the world,’ Peter told me. His pigs, though, were British Saddlebacks, an old-fashioned type that were becoming more common again.
This meant he could market and sell the meat himself. He talked me through the economics.
‘If I take a lamb to market, I get about £65 for it. If I arrange to have it cut up and then sell the joints myself, I can get three times that. Of course I’ve got to pay the abattoir and butcher about forty quid an animal. But I’m still quids in, by some way.’
And this was where Peter’s previous experience in marketing paid off. He had set up a website and found nearby specialist shops who wanted upmarket, locally sourced meat. He also heavily promoted his ‘hogget’, year-old lamb that was often tastier than the six-month lamb so heavily sold by supermarkets.
It sounded a niche market. I had never even heard of hogget before.
‘Well, there absolutely is a market for it. You just have to spread the net to find it. As Steve Jobs said, “Sell to people who believe in the same thing as you do.”’
It was the first time a farmer had quoted Steve Jobs at me. But what Peter hadn’t done was to try to sell any of the meat directly to customers himself as a farm shop.
‘Because we’re in the middle of nowhere. No one’s ever going to find us. And having a farm shop comes with all sorts of other hassles – like someone always being here to run it, for a start. You were lucky to catch me in the yard. Usually I’m off and away in a field up there,’ and he waved towards the hillside.
He invited me in for coffee to a farm kitchen that was startling in its simplicity and cleanliness. Two Apple Mac laptops faced each other across a stripped beech table, but Peter’s partner Nicola was away beating for a grouse shoot, which she did regularly.
‘You soon discover that’s where the real money is around here: grouse. They’ve started letting a few sheep onto the moors again to get more of a mix – and because they help keep the grouse worms down – but grouse shooting is still what pays the bills. And there are some huge estates up on top.’
Peter spoke, I discovered, as a man whose own farm was only forty-two acres, one of the smallest I had come across on this journey. Although I had learned to be careful when asking farmers how big their land was. It was considered impolite. As Peter said, while he was happy to tell me, ‘it’s like asking someone how much they have in their savings account.’
He was particularly interesting about the old European subsidies that would now be disappearing.
‘Young farmers voted for Brexit. And that wasn’t just turkeys voting for Christmas. It was because they were fed up with the old system where farmers could trundle along without doing much and collect Euro handouts. The whole thing was like a pension system round here. Whereas if we had a level playing-field, then farmers would have to get on with it again. Which means more of a chance for young farmers to come in with a bit of energy and ambition. That’s what they did in New Zealand – get rid of subsidy. Now they’ve got the most efficient farming industry in the world.’
He told me a good story back out in the farmyard, as I was leaving.
‘Some of the old boys had a rough shoot that went over my land. A very rough shoot. And I was just walking across the yard here when I heard shots pinging off the roof tiles.
‘So I went down and told them, “What did I say? You can shoot on my land, as long as you don’t shoot at the house, or over my animals.” I said, “I’m not falling out with you” – I was careful to say that – but I spent two years in the military in Northern Ireland. I didn’t want to end up getting shot in my own back yard in Farndale!’
I suspected somehow that Peter would always be served in the local pub.
Once reunited with Jasper and Jethro, our small mule train headed on from the Lion Inn along Blakey Ridge. But although it was still morning, the sky ahead was turning black. When we came over a rise, we could see why. They were burning the heather. A long line of men stretched away to either side, their pickups left on the Castleton Road. The flames were intense, and sent up smoke so thick that the sun was diffused to a hellish glare of orange and red and purple through the haze.
Jethro seemed unperturbed. He walked on with his head down in a determined way. Our route meant that we would need to walk right through the smoke. It enveloped us like a dust storm in the desert. Sometimes patches cleared enough so that I could make out the silhouettes of men lined up against the horizon, beating the flames. And I had a sudden vision of warfare; of what mules like Jethro had endured on the Western Front.
For while the British might have ostracised mules at home as unwelcome reminders of their Catholic past, they had no objections to using them abroad in the pursuit of war. The Duke of Wellington relied on 10,000 local mules for the Peninsular War in Spain; the rocky terrain made it almost impossible for wheeled vehicles. Mules took part in British Army campaigns in the Crimea, Afghanistan and Abyssinia in the later part of the nineteenth century. So great was the need for them in the Boer War that 67,000 were imported from the USA. Mules played an important part in the many campaigns waged by the British on India’s North-West Frontier. Younghusband took mules with him when he invaded Tibet.
But it was in the carnage of the First World War that mules were used by the British on an industrial scale. A quarter of a million were deployed on the Western Front alone.
There is a monument to animals killed during warfare on one of the lonely traffic islands in the middle of London’s Park Lane. At its centre, two life-size bronze mules plod towards a gap in a stone wall, burdened down with the parts of a gun. It is a rare recognition of the contribution made by mules to British military success – and of the price they paid.
The mules were kept in appalling conditions. One bad mistake was to clip their coats so that, come winter, they had no way of keeping properly warm, as the rough horse blankets they were given quickly became sodden and rank. Many died of pneumonia. The British soldiers asked to look after them had no previous experience of mules – and that ignorance was often fatal. As a result, the War Office decided to include a chapter on mules in the Animal Management book they issued to troops. It remains one of the very few British manuals on how to look after mules, and my old maroon-bound edition had proved invaluable for this journey.
The heavy 2.5-inch steel guns which for over a century were the mainstay of British artillery – and which were romanticised by Kipling in his poem ‘Screw-Guns’ – frequently worked the poor mules who carried them to death. These guns would be taken apart to be carried, usually by a team of five pack animals, so were broken down into the wheels, carriage, axle and other constituent parts; but even in sections, they were an enormous weight to bear. Given the appalling conditions of the war, many mules died before they even came within range of the enemy guns.
More mules had constantly to be imported, from the USA and India in particular. British soldiers often became very attached to their charges, the ‘long-eared old darlin’s’ that Kipling eulogised, and valued them for their sense of self-preservation. There were numerous stories of mules that refused to advance into what later was revealed to be a minefield or other form of danger.
Most of the few mules in England after the war were bred by soldiers who had learned their value and overcome the deep British prejudice against them. But as ever, it was the horses we remembered mainly, not the mules.
No one had written a book – let alone a West End play and blockbuster film – called War Mule. Horses were the officer class; mules, the poor bloody infantry, and foreign to boot.
A little further on we passed the so-called Millennial Stone, erected in 2000, but designed confusingly to look like a prehistoric monument: the sort of thing that would puzzle any post-apocalyptic archaeologist of the future. At least no one had needed to wheel it into place like an ancient megalith. Instead, all five tonnes had been lifted by crane from Spaunton Moor and transported by trailer to its current position.
It seemed a bizarre exercise in prehistoric nostalgia. If erecting a monument to the year 2000 AD rather than BC, something modern might have been more appropriate. Perhaps a shining titanium cube? Not least because there are a great many genuine prehistoric artefacts littered over the Moors already.
There was only one appropriate adjective for the moorland that stretched ahead of us: sere, a word meaning ‘dry’ that has wonderful provenance. According to the dictionary, ‘sere has not wandered very far from its origins – it derives from the Old English word sēar (meaning “dry”), which traces back to the same early root that gave Old High German, Greek, and Lithuanian words for drying out and withering. The adjective sere once had the additional meaning of “threadbare”, but that use is now archaic. The noun sere also exists, though it isn’t common; its meanings are “a dry period or condition” or “withered vegetation”.’
A small bird flashed past across this sere, empty land. No, I don’t know what it was. If I had been a serious natural history enthusiast – a Chris Packham or a Mark Cocker, both of whom I admire – I would have recognised it in a glance; or indeed not needed to look, if I could hear the call and knew the likely species in this particular habitat. But like the majority of the public, while I can identify most birds on a garden feeder, I am less good on the small brown birds in hedgerows or on open moorland.
Nothing is more irritating than nature writers who assume universal knowledge of all the species they are talking about, especially rare ones. The most accessible naturalist in the last twenty years has to be the wonderful Bill Oddie, not least for his immortal observation that when someone rings him to say, ‘I’ve seen a very strange bird in my garden’, it will always be a jay; and for his premise that most of us start off knowing very, very little. I was no exception.
George Orwell was deeply suspicious of natural history writing or, as we now brand it, ‘nature writing’: of those for whom ‘the world centres round the English village, and round the trees and hedges of that village rather than the houses and the people’.
In a review of a contemporary natural history book, he went on to say:
There is no question that a love of what is loosely called ‘nature’ – a kingfisher flashing down the stream, or a bullfinch’s mossy nest, the caddis-flies in the ditch – is very widespread in England, cutting across age groups and even class distinctions, and attaining in some people an almost mystical intensity.
Whether it is a healthy symptom is another matter. It arises partly from the small size, equable climate, and varied scenery of England, but it is also probably bound up with the decay of English agriculture … The fact is that those who really have to deal with nature have no cause to be in love with it.
Review of The Way of a Countryman by William Beach Thomas, Manchester Evening News (23 March 1944)
He ended with the damning comment that, for such writers, their ‘ideal picture of rural England might contain too many rabbits and not enough tractors’.
If Orwell had taken this journey, he would not have wanted to write about which birds were in which hedgerows. He would have wanted to talk to people; to take the temperature of the road to Whitby Pier. And like me, I suspect he would been appalled at the disconnect that now reigns in the North, just as it does in the rest of the country. The way in which so much of the middle class are unaware of the depths of the pockets of deprivation, both in the countryside – where they are particularly easy to ignore – and in small market towns like Richmond.
That big country house on the top of the hill, whose owners arrive at the weekend in an SUV laden with shopping bags, could be a thousand miles away from the small cottage at the bottom, whose occupants may rely on a moribund bus service. And there is no longer any reason for the two sides to meet. The wealthy couple in the big house feel no sense of responsibility for what happens in the rural community. They are merely visitors. And this is not just because they do not want to be engaged: many of the old focal loci of the countryside – the church, the gathering for the harvest and even the beleaguered rural pub – have faded. The closest contact its inhabitants sometimes have is on a country lane when the wheels of their cars or buses swish past each other.
We turned down by Rosedale Head and the old shooting box at Trough House, a cottage for day use by estate owners, which looked a good deal more substantial than some that their tenants enjoyed for the whole year. I felt we were beginning to head for home. The path curved away past the strange jumbled tumuli of Great Fryup Head, named not after the great British breakfast but the Norse goddess Freya.
I saw a man ahead with a small gun dog. What was unusual was that the dog had two saddlebags strapped round it. I caught up with the dog’s owner, Paul, but before I could ask him about the saddlebags, he had his own question, which he asked in an agitated way.
‘Did you see it?’
‘See what?’
‘The adder. There was an adder just back there, coiled up on the track. A big one. I almost stepped on it. It was lucky that Millie was walking behind me as she quite often goes in front. Because if she had got to the adder first, she would have worried it and that could have been nasty.’
I had not seen the adder, although I was pleased that an advance party had flushed it out. It was obvious Paul had been doing the full Coast-to-Coast, as he had a large backpack and a determined expression. He was also wearing a balaclava, which would have been sinister on some people, but which his benign features made less threatening.
He told me that he was doing the Coast-to-Coast as a way of recovering from a stroke. This struck me as ‘kill or cure’. Paul added that his gun dog, Millie, was carrying all her own supplies in the little saddlebags. Although not that little. They were about the same size as Jethro’s.
‘The trouble is, she’s very young. It’s fine when we’re walking, but if we stop for a moment, she feels she has to defend me and that causes problems in campsites. So I’m just camping wild wherever I can.’
We reached a small rise from which we had our first view of the sea. But Paul didn’t linger to take it in. He pushed on, as he wanted to reach Grosmont by nightfall. And I had my own plans for that same night.
Hallowe’en. With remarkable accuracy, I had timed our arrival near Whitby for the annual Goth Festival which takes place in the town Bram Stoker used as the English setting for Dracula. I even had my black leather costume in the horse van. But I could not persuade Jasper to attend – nor for that matter, Jethro – so I lit out for the territory that night on my own.
Whitby at dusk had the most dramatic of silhouettes. The twin piers stretched out their embrace around the inky pool of the harbour. On the headland above, the ruined abbey called out for a full moon, the creaking of a coffin-lid and the whoosh of Dracula’s cloak as he made his way down to the quayside; although the Count would have been disappointed by some of the tawdry fruit-machine palaces now lining the waterfront.
What might have given him more pleasure were the costumes. The town was full of pilgrims to the annual Goth Festival, which had grown and grown in popularity since its inception in 1994. Dark figures in heavy brocaded frock coats brushed past me as I made my way against what was still a brisk and chill northerly wind.
The fish and chip shop on Silver Street was packed with black-uniformed Goths eating their lightly battered cod with silver and purple varnished nails. They looked like crows tearing at the white flesh. A woman with her back to me had a row of silver steel spikes coming out of her padded shoulders, like an armadillo on steroids. A man had a chain with a locked padlock round his neck; I wondered if he had put the key in a safe place. There was a curious slithering noise in the shop, like fish that had been caught in the bottom of a trawler; it took me a while to realise that it was wet PVC clothes rubbing on benches.
As I sat at my own bench to open up a styrofoam tray of fish and chips, I found it disconcerting that no one was talking. The Goths were all locked in silent tableaux, like some old German Expressionist film in black and white, gazing intently either at each other or at the fish and chips in front of them.
Two teenage girls broke the silence. They were dressed in startling symmetry: one in white leather jacket with black trousers, the other in black leather with white trousers. Both had red lipstick that could have stopped traffic at fifty yards.
‘I just wanna tell her to fucking man up,’ said one, loudly.
I winced, as did the Count Dracula lookalike opposite me on the bench. It is always painful when the young use a split infinitive.
‘That’s what she should do. Fucking man up. I mean, what does she think she’s on about with the fake tanning? You only have to look at her hands to know what’s happening.’
A little further up the hill, and the wind and driving sleet got so bad that I took refuge in a pub, the Elsinore. It took me a while to de-mist and get my bearings, but when I could focus on the other inhabitants they seemed subtly different from the Goths I had seen in the chippie. For a start, they were not all wearing black. Many looked more like they belonged to the set of a Jules Verne or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang movie: Victoriana with a twist. One man at the bar was wearing a bowler hat with a red sash, a pheasant feather and what looked like a small ormolu clock stuck jauntily in the brim. He was talking to a buxom lady in a bright red corset with arm-length fishnet gloves, who was unostentatiously and with a complete lack of embarrassment tucking herself back in where she had popped out a bit at the top.
When I ordered a drink, a lean, grey-haired man wearing cinder-goggles, a tartan waistcoat and calf-length boots looked at me appraisingly. He had a slightly cadaverous face that reminded me of gruff Inspector Blakey from that old TV series, On the Buses.
‘So is this all part of the Goth Festival?’ I asked, hesitantly.
‘Goths!’ the man spluttered. ‘They don’t come in here at all. We’re not Goths! We’re steampunks. This is a steampunk pub now. It used to be Goth.
‘The Goths hate us. Particularly the über-Goths. They’re the worst.’
He slowed and stared at me as he sipped his bitter. I sensed he was the sort of man who would get a pint to last as long as he could.
‘But then the über-Goths hate everybody … In fact, quite often they hate each other as well. That’s what happens when you wear black and only come out of your bedroom at night. And listen to darkwave.’
Blakey relapsed into morose silence. A woman nearby wearing head-to-toe tartan and a bowler hat came to my rescue.
‘Yes, steampunks are much more cheerful. We like to get out and about.’
She introduced herself as Lady Elsie, and I discovered she was a stalwart of the Victorian Steampunk Society.
‘We’ve been a splinter group of the festival for the last ten or so years. I think the Goths are a bit annoyed that we’ve been growing. In fact, many of us used to be Goths but then got bored with taking ourselves so seriously.
‘Steampunk is all about time travel with attitude. So it can be Victorian but it can also be post-apocalyptic, like Mad Max. You see those replica cinder-goggles everyone’s wearing round their hats? I’ve got some of the originals. Worth a lot now. They were what you wore in third class on Victorian railways, as you were in open carriages behind the engine so you needed them to keep the ashes and smoke out of your eyes.
‘We’re not as coded as the Goths. I mean, these days most department stores even have a section called “Goth”! For teenage girls who are into emo and all that stuff. Black eyeliner, white make-up, a bit of PVC or leather. Whereas the whole point about steampunk is that you dress in stuff you can’t buy in a department store. I’m a costume designer in real life, so I know all about dressing up.’
She was wearing a fabulous Victorian necklace, or rather set of necklaces draped over each other.
‘Do you have a Nerf gun with you?’ asked Lady Elsie suddenly.
I had to admit that I didn’t.
‘Don’t worry, you can get them two for one at Toys R Us. We like to accessorise Nerf guns with a lot of metallic paint and other stuff. They can end up looking amazing. Then you could join us for the steampunk versus zombies battle we’re holding tomorrow.’
I felt the conversation was accelerating out of control.
‘What’s a steampunk versus zombies battle?’
‘We try to survive the zombie apocalypse when they come at us. Although usually there aren’t any survivors. The zombies attack en masse. It’s hard to get away or shoot them fast enough. Unless you’ve got a good aim with a Nerf gun and have practised. Also, you need a lot of ammunition. The zombies just have to touch you and you become one of them.’
For the meantime, Elsie invited me to a fringe musical event the steampunks were holding at a venue dubbed ‘Steampunk Central’, just by the car park. As the alternative was to go to the main Goth concert and listen to The Mission, Heaven 17 and Sigue Sigue Sputnik – all eighties bands who only ever played in my nightmares – I happily joined their group as they trundled up from the pub. They were walking slowly, as you do when wearing steel-studded calf-length boots with four-inch heels. I noticed a large amount of cross-dressing going on; the men in corsets and high heels were finding it particularly hard work getting up the hill.
‘You should have been here during the day,’ said a woman, I think, who looked like Anjelica Huston wearing a bright red wig. She was trundling three chihuahuas in a pram, all wearing diamante dog collars. ‘There were so many Goths and steampunks crossing the bridge down by the quay that they almost had to close it. A lot of the locals don’t like the festival. But it brings a lot of business here. And who else would come to Whitby at the end of October?’
She had a point. The wind was whipping in from the North Sea so hard that some of the frock coats were blowing vertical, revealing either fishnet stockings or military Sergeant-Pepper-style trousers. I was the coldest I had been all trip, even dressed in my old motorbiking leather jacket and trousers which, I now suspected, were a fashion mistake. What if any of the steampunks mistook me for a Goth? I should have done my research and accessorised more. My daughter Daisy had once told me that my dark glasses were steampunk, as they were round glacier goggles – but I could hardly wear those at night, stumbling along the cobbles.
Up at Steampunk Central, things had cranked up. There were enough corsets on display to start a burlesque club. One striking woman in a black fishtailed whalebone dress sashayed down the aisle towards her man who had mutton-chop sideburns and was propping up his chin on a bone-handled cane. A karaoke group called ‘Brass Zeppelin’ were massacring some old heavy metal songs with cheerful aplomb. Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’ was having the life thrashed out of it.
The barmaid recommended some Theakston Smooth Dark, which sounded like the right sort of drink for the occasion, and I settled into a table behind two bald men wearing angel wings. Towards the end of the musical entertainment, one of them noticed Lady Elsie, who was making her way to the stage in order to announce some forthcoming steampunk events – and to prepare her troops for the battle against the zombies the next day.
He stood up, blocking her way so that his angel wings were waving in front of her. ‘I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but I don’t suppose you know any taxidermists in Whitby?’ he asked. ‘Or even Scarborough? It’s a bit urgent.’
Not for the first time, I thought how very strange the English could be.
It was our final day and we were heading towards the coast and Robin Hood’s Bay, the traditional end of Wainwright’s walk. The sun was shining and the sea was almost in our sights. Did the breeze already have a tang of salt spray?
We had got Jethro out of the horse van with some elation that morning. Was it my imagination or had he danced down the ramp with more than usual elan? Certainly, he looked every inch the pack mule. Over our journey, the Colorado riding blanket had even acquired that faint sheen of equine sweat, which was the difference between a fashion ornament and a working garment. He still wasn’t carrying much in his saddlebags – but to be fair to him, by this stage of the journey there wasn’t much to carry.
Jasper seemed in jaunty mood as well. His beret was set at a rakish angle. He spotted some peregrine falcons in the distance.
‘Quite late in the season for them. Although someone once said that a pigeon can look a bit like a hawk at a distance. Well, in fact, I once said that.’
Passing High Hawsker, a friendly fellow popped out of the village hall to say hello. ‘Have you got a carriage for him?’ he asked, pointing at Jethro.
This was the first time anyone had suggested hitching Jethro up to some wheels. I wasn’t sure he was ready for it.
It turned out that the man once had a donkey called Trudy, and had used her to pull a small cart; she had lived to the ripe old age of thirty, although she never liked the cold and sea spray of the coast. Given his experience, I introduced him properly to Jethro and explained that we had come 200 miles from the other coast, in Cumbria.
‘So what are you going to do when you get to Robin Hood’s Bay? Because you’ll have to get Jethro all the way back again. And he’ll be double fare on the bus.’
‘Well, he’s only eight,’ pointed out Jasper, in his best and most beguiling Irish accent. ‘He should get a half ticket, by rights.’
‘I tell you what, though,’ said the man. ‘The hotel down by the water’s edge in Robin Hood’s Bay should give you a free drink for getting a mule across. Worth asking at least.’
It was exactly the incentive we needed. We set off with added sprightliness to our step.
I asked Jasper if he agreed that Jethro was looking unusually frisky today.
‘Well, he’s got fitter, like all of us.’
‘Do you mean to say you weren’t fit at the start of all this, Jasper?’
‘Well, not as fit as I am now! I mean, people always ask, do I train for these long-distance walks? But to be honest the best training is just actually to do them and play yourself in.’
I agreed. ‘Yes, particularly as walking only makes you fit for walking. You can be a champion jogger and be a rubbish walker.’
Jasper wondered what Jethro would make of the sea again, given it was many weeks since we had seen it last; whether he’d be confused and think it was the same sea, and we had just gone around in a big circle. ‘What was the point of that trip? The stupid idiots.’
‘I mean, we’ve all muddled along and got to know each other better on this trip,’ added Jasper. ‘And I’m sure Jethro thinks he’s trained us, not the other way round.’
It was true that we were walking at mule pace a lot of the time. A bit brisker than a normal human one, like being on an exercise machine. And for this last section of the walk, we found a fine bridle path, an old cinder track which had once been used for a railway, so we were motoring.
Our first sight of the sea was not as revelatory as might be expected. Given the haze and cloud, it was difficult to make out quite where air ended and water began, although a distant ship gave us some bearings. Then a lovely hedge of gorse and hawthorn shielded it from us completely.
We reached some houses on the outskirts of Robin Hood’s Bay. The descent into town was steep, and had to be negotiated past a great deal of traffic. A lady called Linda, who was out walking with a friend, spotted us and asked if we had been doing the Cleveland Way with Jethro.
‘No, no, we’ve come a lot further than that. We’ve done the Coast-to-Coast, or at least a version of it, with bridleways.’
‘He hasn’t done the Coast-to-Coast?’ she said, pointing to Jethro. ‘Really! Right, well, listen, if you go down to the bottom by the sea, there’s a pub down there called the Bay Hotel. It’s my pub! There’s a book for you to sign …’
‘What’s his name? Jethro? Then maybe Jethro should put in a hoof print,’ interjected her friend.
‘… There’s a book for you to sign,’ continued Linda firmly. ‘Tell them Linda said that Jethro can have a certificate on me for nothing.’
‘I thought you were about to say we could have a pint on you for nothing,’ I said.
‘Ooh, I wouldn’t go that far. Don’t be ridiculous! A publican giving out a free pint! There are rules, you know. I’d never hold my head up high again. But Jethro can definitely have a free certificate. I’ll ring them now and tell them.’
A thought occurred to her and she suddenly looked worried. ‘I mean, obviously you can’t actually take him inside.’
We carried on. Another lady asked, for the very final time on our walk, whether Jethro was a donkey or a mule, and what was the difference anyway. A sign in the local greengrocer’s shop said that, ‘Due to a very naughty blackbird, no fruit and veg can be displayed outside’. Jethro was spooked by seeing his reflection in the greengrocer’s window and started backing up, which was alarming given the narrow road and traffic. I realised he had never seen a mirror before. But Jasper and I managed to calm him.
A few more turns of the cobbled streets and we were down by the North Sea. We led Jethro to the edge of the waves, which were dancing up the launching ramp for the trawlers.
‘Shall we try to get him to dip his feet in the sea?’ I suggested.
Jasper gave that same funny whistle he had done many weeks before in the Lake District to get Jethro to dip his head. Jethro ventured forward until an incoming wave lapped at his hooves.
‘Well done, you’ve done well, Jethro. Well done, Jasper. We’ve all done well. And there’s the pub right here with that pint which has got our name on it.’
‘Several pints, with our names on them,’ said Jasper.
As if she had heard our voices, a barmaid materialised at the door of the Bay Hotel. ‘I’ve just been informed by Linda that you’ve done the Coast-to-Coast with a donkey.’
‘Is that the certificate to say he’s done the Coast-to-Coast?’ I asked. ‘Because if you’re filling it out, can you put “Jethro the mule” not “Jethro the donkey”? Or he might get upset.’