Brass Castle and West Morton

The morning had looked overcast but no rain so far so we were good to go. Gail and I met up at Monica’s as we were going on a walk which started near enough to where she lives.  It was a Bradford Council self-guided walk which Monica had down-loaded from their website.  Exciting adventure.

The walk started by going along the path towards the old Isolation Hospital (well grounds there’s no hospital there anymore now). We walked into the grounds but the path wasn’t the one we wanted to so we had to back track.  We turned up along the canal and came across a family of teenage swans eventually turning up a path to take us up through fields onto the tops and popping out onto the busy Silsden Road (there wasn’t a car in sight)

After walking along the road for a couple of hundred yards we took a gate on the left which led us up onto Morton moor.  The paths were not as muddy as I thought they would be up here. 

 The path eventually curved around and we were faced with going through a field with bulls.  Monica said we should just stay calm, no sudden movements as that would spook them.  

We followed the track down eventually coming to a track running across our pathway which was just covered in slurry – about 6” deep all the way down it.  Unfortunately we read the directions wrong here as we gamely trudged through this slurry coated track.  

When we got to the bottom and we read the paper again we realised we would have to go back the way we had come.  Luckily there was a gate which we hopped over into the field which ran alongside and we retraced our path up to the top in the field.  At the top we scrambled over the wall and back onto the path we should have taken. From here we dropped down into a farmyard which was no better than the track.  It was pretty mud/silage and manure laden – we just had to keep going up to the gateway which led into a boggy field. 

Going down we eventually came out at West Morton where the path ran alongside a bungalow with the warning notice – do not enter the paddock if the dogs are loose.  The dogs (huge bull mastiffs) were going crazy in the yard by the house.  Even though the fence was 6 feet high they could see over.  We hopped through the paddock pretty quickly.

Here we wandered around as the directions seemed a little vague we walked down a field and found where we needed to cross the beck – with no bridge – Gail was an absolute star she grabbed stones and created a stepping stone path across it which Monica and I just followed.

The rest of the walk was straight forward back to the path by the old hospital and on to Monicas for a well-earned cup of tea.  With all the backwards and forwards walking we clocked up somewhere between 7 and 8 miles a good afternoon with a lot of laughs.