Darlington to Middleton-one-Row: E2 Day 63

Low point today was walking through liquid mud, high points were lunch and Devonport hotel.

As forecast the day was overcast, grey with showers of rain as I alternated between urban landscape and dull green fields of grass and leafy crops. Yet cherry trees in pretty pink blossom painted splashes of joy, and bright yellow drifts of daffodils on the roadside raised my mood. A forsythia bush which escaped pruning in the winter produced an explosion of yellow in a village garden, and an avenue of blackthorn, in white blossom funnelled me along a muddy path.

Cherry blossom on Stapleton green.

Daffodils beside the trail.

While many sections of path were in good condition and much of today's route was on quiet roads, in a few places, where hedge and fence forced people onto a narrow path, recent rains had created a quagmire of liquid mud. My new boots, bought specially for this trip, soon lost their pristine appearance beneath a coat of brown slurry.

Initially, after my return to the Broken Scar picnic area, the path followed the river closely. Now that the speed of the maturing river had slowed, it was dropping its pebbles to form islands. At one point the eroded riverbank, showed a layer of pebbles left by an earlier channel below layers of silt deposited as the river moved elsewhere across the floodplain. Later the Teesdale Way moved away from the river following quiet roads and tracks over low hills, before rejoining it at the end of the day on a steep wooded slope, where the river was wide and free of rocks.

After leaving the sprawl of Darlington I visited a number of red brick villages: Stapleton, Croft-on-Tees, Hurworth-on-Tees and Neasham. In Hurworth I lunched the Mustard Tree Café, located in the Methodist Church. As I ate a chickpea and avocado wrap, the half dozen people on the next table were all working on the same crossword, ending by exchanging answers, between greetings to other villagers passing their table. I felt I had trespassed on their little community.

My walk ended at the Devonport Hotel at a village with the curious name of Middleton-one-Row. Low grade pain from my knee during the day made me glad to have arrived at this settlement above the river bluff. I have a large room decorated well in a restrained manner with a powerful shower for which I did not have the usual wait for hot water. I can look out from my room onto the daffodils gracing the roadside. A simple stone sculpture, part of the Tees Sculpture Trail, is just out of view.