The Saturday of our annual pre-Christmas get together and we were once again back at Gearstones lodge and once again faced with a rotten forecast for the weekend. The Eternal Weather Optimist and the Madman were, of course, out early conquering every peak in the region in the pouring rain. The Dormouse stayed in bed (she may not have been the only one). The Tower Captain was with us and he joined a younger contingent for an impressive looking hike over into the upper reaches of Dentdale and back again. I suggested a lower level option – a walk from Dent essentially along the river Dee and then back again. Carefully chosen, obviously, to reflect the weather conditions and the needs of the party and nothing at all to do with my ongoing obsession with the River Lune and its tributaries.
Dent is a very picturesque spot, with a substantial church…
Of course, I wanted to have a peek inside.
I took photos of all of the stained glass windows. Here’s a couple, this one because it has St. George in the middle (I assume it’s him)…
There are a couple more sword-wielding saints in here, I wonder who they are? This one sneaks in, just because I like the colours, particularly the greens…
It was one of those days when it was either drizzling, raining, or just about to rain.
Still, it was a highly enjoyable hike. Some of the party weren’t exactly brimming over with enthusiasm. It was necessary to maintain the fiction that we could turn back at any one of three footbridges which would take us across the River Dee and onto our return route, but we persevered until the final bridge, which was always what I had intended.
There are caves and potholes all along the river here and at some point the river must disappear underground leaving a much smaller stream…
We could often see showers not too far off, but we seemed to miss the worst of it most of the time.
There are a number of cottages in the vicinity of Gibbs Hall, a roofless old building, and it was presumably from one of those that we were joined by…
…a very friendly white cat.
Do you see what I did there? I’ll get me coat.
The waterfall at Ibbeth Peril is very impressive. A little online research suggests the cave here is impressive too, but it’s only safe to explore when the river is running low.
The general consensus was that the shelter of the trees here made for a good place to eat lunch. I hadn’t brought any (breakfasts and evening meals tend to be large meals on these weekends) so spent some time wandering around in the trees.
The cat decided to join me.
There were lots of large toadstools scattered about amongst the trees.
The next section of the walk was the wettest.
Following the beck, back to the river, with the path hemmed in by a fence was surprisingly tedious going.
There are two pubs in Dent, we watched a customer leave one and walk the short distance to the other. Shuttling between the two strikes me as a very fine pub-crawl, one I should like to get around to at some point.
Our friend J cooked-up a delicious chicken curry, and in a move well above-and-beyond the call of duty, she also produced a quiz of several rounds.
The quiz was highly enjoyable, almost as good as the curry, but our team were doomed to failure since we were terrible at the anagrams round. Take the first question, it has 22 letters. There are 22! (22 factorial) ways to arrange 22 letters, which is to say 1,124,000,727,777,607,680,000 different arrangements. Let’s be generous and round that down, to a mere sextillion. If we were systematic and tried one arrangement every second, it would only take us 30 trillion years to get through them all. It’s a wonder that we got any of them at all!
Beating The Bounds 
Ah I recognise that pub!
A bit remiss of us to walk past, but I was driving sadly. Another time!
I only fairly recently discovered the feature of Finter Ghyll which climbs south west straight out of Dent. – I wonder if it is something you have also missed over the years? My visit in 2018 produced what I think, I hope without boasting, one of my better posts. Sorry, but no mathematics involved.
https://conradwalks.blogspot.com/2018/04/finter-gill-dent.html
I have walked the Finter Ghyll path, but it was a very long time ago, so its long overdue a visit. No maths, but Sedgwick and Darwin, I didn’t know about their disagreement, and yes, a fascinating post.
The 3rd one is The Dark Knight, but that’s the only one that jumps out to me!!
Oh, good shout! None of them jump out at me! You can be on my quiz team.