Well today very nearly didn’t happen and not even because of Tarrant’s various injuries. She’s actually been seeing a private physio recently because as lovely as the NHS guy was, and as grateful as she was to be seen by someone this side of the apocalypse, all he did was tell her she probably had shin splints and to go and watch some YouTube videos on how to fix that. He wouldn’t even entertain the idea of looking into the issues she’s been having for the last two years so she hurled eye-watering sums of money at a bloke called Matt who, it turns out, works minor miracles.

Apparently her ankles hurt because she’s been using them far too much rather than the other muscles you’re meant to use for walking, like, y’know, your legs. She’s been working really hard to remedy this with proper exercises and she feels ready to tackle a decent length hike. So what nearly had us defecting to the nearest pub for a pint and a good sulk? A shitty trail and a veritable swarm of man-eating horse flies.

It’s not the trails fault it’s shitty to be fair. Someone dumped a literal whole housing estate slap bang on the route Komoot had planned for us and obviously the maps don’t know it’s there yet. It’s so new it’s still got its flags up. There are showhomes. They’re still fucking building parts of it. There is absolutely a new route around the side of the estate because you don’t just build over an established long distance trail like the North Cheshire Way, which is what we’d found ourself on that morning, and not provide an alternative. A proper fucking signpost would have been nice though.

Okay so we eventually got through that mess and emerged into a lovely field. Brilliant. Let the enjoyable walking begi… GET THE FUCK OFF MY BLOOD YOU NASTY LITTLE FUCKERS! The horse flies descended on us and they were utterly relentless. They hurt too, apparently they don’t just poke a tiny little hole in you, they rip out a chunk in order to relieve you of the sticky red shit you generally prefer to store on the inside of your body.

They wouldn’t leave us alone as we made our way across two fields, batting at ourselves. Welts raised up immediately. Well fuck this, this was not fun. We burst onto a road, headed for a rickety style covered with every spiky and/or stinging vegetation known to these slightly damp isles, and crossed a much less bitey-little-shit infested stretch of meadow. Okay cool, maybe things were looking up.

Dear reader, things were not looking up. We crossed a bridge but the other side was literally fucking impenetrable. There was no way through without sacrificing various chunks of flesh. I did have a go and immediately regretted all of my life choices. Tarrant had to unhook me from a bramble as I made my way back, nettles replacing all of my blood with poison. To be fair at this stage, with the nettle stings and the bramble lacerations and the horsefly welts I kind of just wanted to peel my skin off and have it replaced with kevlar.

Fuck this. We decided to abandon the North Cheshire Way and detoured into Mobberley where we picked up a road towards Wilmslow. Maps were suggesting all manner of routes cross country but no. Fuck that. Absolutely not. I’ll take my chances with the Landrovers doing 60mph around blind corners on a narrow road severely lacking in anything resembling a footpath, thank you very much.

Not going to lie, there was a trigpoint to be bagged along this road too so it did sweeten the deal a bit. We did consider a PROW off to the right to get us off the tarmacked death trap but it didn’t look like it had seen a strimmer all summer so we carried on along the road into Wilmslow where we bagged a bit of shade under a tree in the very lovely The Carrs park.

Wilmslow is nice. There are dolla dolla bills y’all in Wilmslow. The Carrs reflects this, it looks well maintained and there are loads of picnic benches albeit in full sun so no thank you very much. In between complaining about the overgrown trails and the horseflies we’d found time to shoehorn in some bitching about how bastard hot it was today too. We’ll just join the insects on the floor in order to apply our lunch to our faceholes and rest our poor feet which very much weren’t expecting a lot of road walking today.

Pretty much from The Carrs onwards though, that’s how long it took us to actually start enjoying the walk today. After Wilmslow we ended up on the Bollin Way which loosely follows the very lovely River Bollin. A group of schoolkids were harassing a lone bovine so we stood and watched from a distance for a while to see if they got gored. They did not, but I do wonder if she’ll go back to her cow mates and tell them all about it and they’ll just say, “They won’t hurt you, they’re not chasing you, they’re just following you because they’re curious.”

Aside from a minor cowocalypse incident of our own (though to be fair I think it was even too fucking hot for them to bother with their “I’m just curious” ruse) the Bollin Way was an utter delight. Well maintained gates, nothing trying to attack us, just a nice, comfortable walk. That didn’t stop us from leaving it to take a more direct route to Adlington though because our brains were cooking in our skulls and we’d take any chance to get back to the car sooner.

One more precarious road walk for about a mile and a half and we swung into the train station car park at Adlington. Absolute sweaty messes. I honestly didn’t think we’d make it for a while there, I was genuinely considering fucking it all off and refusing to hike in the UK ever again.

I might look into adopting a section of a lesser used trail close to home. Pop out there with some little choppy things once a month, try to keep it a bit clearer for folks wanting to get outdoors whilst still retaining all of their skin. I’ll look into it but first, off we fucked to the Travelodge up the road because we’d decided we very much didn’t fancy driving all the way to Slaithwaite just to drive back the next day. Probably the best idea we’d had all week.

STATS
Day: 94b
Day on LEJOG: 53b
Distance walked today: 14.6 miles
Total walked so far: 1188.32 miles
“The Top Half” total walked so far: 74.15 miles
Weather: Hottest day of the year apparently. Nearly fucking melted.

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Knutsford, Cheshire to Adlington, Cheshire, England

Stayed at: Travelodge Macclesfield Adlington, Adlington

Useful shit to know…

• Adlington (Cheshire) train station has parking for £2 a day but you need to use the RingGo app which costs 40p. You should have enough signal there to do this.
• The train to Knutsford cost £12.38 each, changing at Stockport. We booked through the Trainline app which sometimes does cheaper fares by splitting the individual legs of the journey.
• Adlington is a small, unmanned train station. Knutsford isn’t much bigger but it does have a manned ticket desk.
• There are no toilets at either station but Stockport is quite big and definitely has bogs.
• The only other toilets we found today were at the car park at The Carrs.
• They cost 20p and you can pay with cash (no change given) or contactless.
• The Travelodge cost £77.99. Money well spent.