12.6 miles, via Sandals Meadow, Calder Island, The Thornes Cut, Lupset Pond,
Horbury Fields, Benton Park, Lupset Fields, Roundwood Park, Silkwood Park,
Alverthorpe, Wrenthorpe Park, Red Hall, Newton Hill, Pinderfields, City Fields,
East Moor Fields, and Agbrigg.
My March week off work gets spent Down Country, and deliberately features no walking plans of any kind, which feels unprecedented and certainly marks a break with six years of tradition, but I travelled with the full intent of making myself useful by aiding Mum in sorting through many of Dad's effects, and over the course of five days we made really good progress, filling up eight bags of clothes for charity shops and getting about two thirds of the way through imposing order on the garage where chaos has been allowed to reign for too long. We can now be happy to know exactly what we still have by way of tools and DIY equipment now, before we decide what we actually need to keep, and thus have to return to that pile with purpose in the future, and also along the way, in between fitting in three meals out, we made a trip out to Nottingham to score a pair of CD towers from an old hippy, which ought to keep my storage space viable for a good few years more (someone in this conversation clearly isn't getting into streaming media any time soon). Then we get to travelling back to Morley with furniture in tow, to get my storage reorganised and a whole lot of dust lifted and hoovered away, and then as the weekend comes along, My Mum can travel up to Skipton to pay a day's visit to her lifelong friend from her college days, and I can return to the trail to walk relatively locally, pulling a trip off the reserve list to make it feel like rather too much of my early season wandering has been focussed on the city of Wakefield. So away, finally, to start my first urban circular trip in two years, which ought to give me a whole bunch of fresh perspectives on this city that really has had an unusually large amount of attention lavished on it in this early season going, arriving at Sandal & Agbrigg station under gloomy skies and in the grip of low temperatures, departing at 9.40am, heading down to Agbrigg Road and setting off west for a clockwise circuit. Pass among the Victorian town houses and rural outliers to cross the A61 Barnsley Road and head up Pinfold Lane past the local school and suburban back gardens, getting a feeling that we are repeating my 2014 route as we land on Castle Road, but we don't head on towards the castle again, but instead join the Castle Road West track, which leads around the southern edges of the Portobello estate and around the northern edge of Sandal Meadows, site of the Battle of Wakefield, where Richard, Duke of York, met his ignominious end on 30th December 1460, firing up the most dynamic three months of the Wars of the Roses, which ultimately led to the downfall of the Lancastrian monarchy.
Sandal Castle looms above these fields and will sit on our reverse horizon for a while as we meet the path that leads downhill from the high prominence towards the river Calder, descending it to cross the ditch of Pugney's Drain and enter the fields that surround the eponymous country park, not that our route will be taking us among the flooded gravel pit used for angling and boating as we instead join the riverside path, where the Calder is a good six feet lower than it was a week ago, judging by the level of the debris still clinging to the banks and the low hanging branches of the trees. We pace up to the A636 Bridge, which we rise up to and follow the Denby Dale Road in towards the city, across Calder Island and among the car dealerships and chain restaurants to meet the Calder & Hebble Navigation, which we drop to along the very long descending path, meeting the towpath and switching back westwards, to follow the section of the Thornes Cut that we didn't see in 2012, passing under the A636 and in between industrial buidlings befre we enter a greener climate, past the former floodgate. Feel the sunshine finally arriving as we run on to meet the flood lock at the end of the cut, where we join the riverside route again, carrying on between the Calder and the railway, where the biomass empties are parked on their return trip west from Drax Power station, and that departure will provide some sound as we skirt around Lupset Pond, another flooded pit that has become an angling lake among these low fields around the river. Depart the riverbank as we come upon the M1, tracing a northerly route along side it to pass under the railway and then west under it on the path coming down below the Wakefield golf course, meeting graffiti artists in the underpass doing their colourful thing to the sound of reggae music and the unmistakable smell of burning tyres, before emerging by the Horbury Junction signal box and seeking out the supposed right of way that passes around the Ben Lea Lakes angling ponds. The path across Horbury's open fields is neatly fenced off to keep it free of cattle, and it leads us on among the local playing fields too, where only the dog walker are out at this time of the morning, where we slip back into an urban landscape among the houses of California Drive, a completely athematically named lane on this estate that sits by the side of the A642 bypass below the plot of Horbury Academy. We thus join Northfield Road as it sidles its way toward the city, among the suburbia and looking for the path that will lead us north, which we find up Lacey Street that gives us an older look at this corner of town before we cross the old Wakefield Road and enter the Benton Park development, a mixed use estate of questionable appeal that thankfully has a footpath that leads us through it under the cover of trees, fully accessible to pedestrians despite the signage that claims otherwise.
This leads us to the fields above the plots of new houses, which offers a perspective over towards Ossett, and we carry on over the M1 again, on one of those over-engineered footbridges that was put in place to maintain a right of way that hardly anyone uses, alighting us on the open fields to the west of Lupset, where we can ascend to a route walked in 2014, finding that this is a changing landscape too as all the fields on the eastern side of the path have been flattened in preparation for a bout of housebuilding. The angled plot down to the motorway will at least keep the rest of Lupset's fields green, and we can look over them as we rise past the 73m tertiary trig pillar, and enjoy the views around to the west, to Horbury and Ossett nearby and to Emley Moor and Woolley Edge further afield before we enter the wild parklands to the north, a prime spot for the local dog exercisers, where our ongoing route gets very vague among the undulations. The alignment reveals itself as we swing eastwards, as does the name of the parklands, Roundwood, like the former colliery and brickworks that once sat by the side of Dewsbury Road, which we come around to as the path leads us past the top edge of the Lupset estate and drops us on the A638 by the Broadway Inn and the miners' terraces, and from here we seek a passage to the north east, rendered more complicated than necessary due to me carrying a hopelessly out of date map. We join Goldsmith Avenue by the Toyota dealership as it leads us into the Silkwood Park trading estate, which maintains its presentable face of gym, car showrooms, pub and wholesalers on its southern edge before getting a whole lot more light industrial as the new roads of Albert Drive and Flanshaw Way decline through it, giving us sight over to Alverthorpe and down to the high towers of Wakefield city centre for the first time as we carry on down to meet Flanshaw Lane. There's tiny hints of a lost village down here, around the Working Men's Club, mostly lost beneath urban sprawl and redevelopment, indicated by the vast Sirdar Plant and the 1960s terraces sitting on older roads, and we pass through the line of the completely lost GNR Ossett branch before we catch sight of St Paul's church peeking over the rooftops of the houses on the Alverthorpe Mills site, where the surviving mill office is as worthy of note as it was in 2014. Follow Wellington Street up to meet Batley Road, and cross by the playing fields, following the ascending footpath that leads up into Wrenthorpe Park, around the edge of the newish estate off Larkspur Way, and describing the route of the old railway as it leads up towards Wrenthorpe Junction, not that anything on the ground would reveal it as such to the casual park user or dogwalker, its true identity only really visible to those in the know.
The Alverthorpe station site has completely vanished and this most lost of lines carries the tarmacked path beyond through the park along just the vaguest of elevated rises, a mere shadow of the former embankments that contained the growth of the Peacock estate to the south of us, but holds the course all the way up to the triangular junction by the contemporary railway to the east, and the park forms a pleasingly green spot to break for watering and a change into my new Spring-Summer hat as the day's heat starts to be felt. There's grand silhouetted views of Wakefield's towers and spires from up here, as is the view over to Silcoates school, to the north of the park and well concealed from all my other treks around these parts, and then views recede as we follow the junction path up its northern branch, disappearing into tree cover and not taking the footpath under the railway that leads directly to Bradford Road, instead favouring the right of way up to Wrenthorpe Road, even though the path seems to vanish and not offer us a way out until we've gone all the way around to the main park entrance. Strike east on the road, where it looks like Spring has sprung with daisies and blossoms colouring the roadside by the council houses, and head under the obviously widened Potovens Bridge before rising up to Bradford Road behind the Royal Spice restaurant, which still advertises its old identity as the Bay Horse Inn on its back wall, crossing the sixth and last of this year's routes as we join Red Hill Lane, a secret green lane that offers a way around to the A650 and A61. It's actually well used for a sneak route, past the impressively ancient Red Hall farm, an absolute charmer of a house in weathered brick, which is sadly having its rural seclusion eaten away as a new build estate fills the fields to the south, and the Snow Hill trading estates grow by the side of the dual carriageway, filling the distinct gap between Wakefield and its suburban villages, and the plots beyond on the Leeds Road side also seem earmarked to be filled with houses too. The Newton Hill portion of the A61 at least has some of the charm of a ribbon of older houses and stores, having expanded with the growing Victorian city on the way out towards Outwood, and we seem to have filled in most of the lost and previously unseen section of the Leeds Country Way as we progress down Newton Avenue to meet the actual countryside that sits above the housing development with the cricket themed naming scheme, feeling like we've hit the summit of the day, despite being barely over 80m up on this hillside at the top of the city.
We can look north to see the sprawl of Stanley and Lofthouse Gate from up here before we join the tree lined path that descends around the grounds of Field Head hospital, this towns major mental health facility, which seems to be having some major rebuilding work going on around its site, especially around the southern edge of the site that sits opposite the new road that has been put in between the A61 and A642, which I'm sure has done wonders for increasing accessibility to Pinderfields Hospital across the way. Pacing along to Bar lane my memory banks can't actually recall if the hospital site has redeveloped further since I last came this way (it hasn't, aside from being lit up completely differently), and we get another grand show of towers and spires on the southern horizon as we pace on, past the rural survivor Stoke House and the parade of suburban villas that have all passed into hospital usage, before we land on the roundabout on the Aberford Road, where the landscape has again changed completely from the one illustrated on either of my E289 maps. The fields that sit beyond the Georgian-esque Stanley Hall, and the older Clark Hall are gradually being consumed by the growing housing development of City Fields, which is gradually growing alongside the new Wakefield Eastern Relief Road, and has already habitably grown to fill the fields down to the island that links the road to the A642 to the north, where a circus of houses seems to be developing, and we join the Neil Fox Way to continue to the city's east side (it's named after a local Rugby League player, rather than the DJ/TV guy who immediately springs to mind). It's not too busy a lane at present, this new A6194, but I'm sure all these fields that sit between the East Moor estate and the Aire & Calder navigation channel will gradually be consumed by housing, as turn offs have been placed at the roadside at regular intervals, noted as we progress on down the footway with the view to the landfill site in the former opencast pit in the curve of the Calder dominating the eastern horizon, with the developing plots passing to cleared fields and grasslands as we co. It seems to be the tale of this city as we've seen it today, growing in seemingly all directions, and mostly on green field sites too, despite the presence of the former Park Hill colliery being somewhere down here by the canal, which we run in parallel to as we pass the lane that accesses this side of the enduring estate and catch sight of the footbridge on the river that we crossed way back in 2012, as well as the three arched railway viaduct that offers a much better angle and viewpoint to the walker as we can now approach it on the west bank, moving to pass under the line up towards Normanton via the underbridge that was installed during the Christmas break in 2015.
Carry on past the sewage farm as the road curves with the river, feeling clever to snare a train picture as one crosses the bridges and then get the bonus of getting a steam train excursion heading eastwards too, and it's BR 70000 'Britannia' hauling 'the Brexit Express', which is probably running late and not a gig that old girl really deserves, and there's surely a joke in there somewhere about those who'd want us out of the EU celebrating by utilising the best of British technology from the 1950s... Politics be damned, we've got a walk to do, catching the site of Belle Vue stadium's floodlights on the southern horizon and seeing the towers and spires of Wakefield returning to the skyline as we come around the lower end of the town as they appear beyond the escarpment on which the East Moor estate sits, meeting the bridge that takes us over the Calder and over the site of Wakefield Power station, which has completely altered since I wandered across it in 2013. It has since been scoured completely flat, betraying no trace of the landscape that lay fallow there since its demolition in 1991, with only the water outlets at the riverbank remaining in situ, and now it's ripe for commercial redevelopment, filling the whole site down to Doncaster Road, and also claiming the site of Wakefield engine shed (56a) along the way, and we alight by the A638 to see that only the Electricity board house and the railway access bridge off the Pontefract line have endured as remnants. It shows that the world keeps changing whether we like it or not, and we head in towards the town on the main road among the bold terraces and out-of-townhouses before we reach the Agbrigg Road corner and strike on to close today's circuit through the district of Agbrigg, naturally, a region of very modest terraces that feels a little down at heel but still bustling and vibrant thanks to its largely immigrant population. I feel that the legs have had enough of trekking as the hot final stretch of the day takes us past Agbrigg Park and the Duke of York inn, failing to get the kick on in these closing stages as we go around the bend of the road to find the slightly more upscale terraces that sit of the eastern side of the railway line that owns our finish line, the station that has always been named to serve the distant social cousins of Sandal & Agbrigg. As expected doing this loop in four and a half hours was beyond me, rising to the station nearly ten minutes behind schedule, but then find that the train I'd been aiming for is also late, so elation is due as I scurry up to get on the party express to Leeds at a whisker before 3.20pm, not that getting home in a hurry is really necessary as My Mum is being a dirty stopout this evening and staying in Skipton to have tea with her friends, rather that with me (no matter really, we've got a carvery date booked for Mother's Day on Sunday).
5,000 Miles Cumulative Total: 3742 miles
2019 Total: 91.6 miles
Up Country Total: 3348.9 miles
Solo Total: 3455.7 miles
Miles in My 40s: 2335.8 miles
Next Up: Another Crossing of Kirklees District, from South Yorkshire to the Holme Valley!
My March week off work gets spent Down Country, and deliberately features no walking plans of any kind, which feels unprecedented and certainly marks a break with six years of tradition, but I travelled with the full intent of making myself useful by aiding Mum in sorting through many of Dad's effects, and over the course of five days we made really good progress, filling up eight bags of clothes for charity shops and getting about two thirds of the way through imposing order on the garage where chaos has been allowed to reign for too long. We can now be happy to know exactly what we still have by way of tools and DIY equipment now, before we decide what we actually need to keep, and thus have to return to that pile with purpose in the future, and also along the way, in between fitting in three meals out, we made a trip out to Nottingham to score a pair of CD towers from an old hippy, which ought to keep my storage space viable for a good few years more (someone in this conversation clearly isn't getting into streaming media any time soon). Then we get to travelling back to Morley with furniture in tow, to get my storage reorganised and a whole lot of dust lifted and hoovered away, and then as the weekend comes along, My Mum can travel up to Skipton to pay a day's visit to her lifelong friend from her college days, and I can return to the trail to walk relatively locally, pulling a trip off the reserve list to make it feel like rather too much of my early season wandering has been focussed on the city of Wakefield. So away, finally, to start my first urban circular trip in two years, which ought to give me a whole bunch of fresh perspectives on this city that really has had an unusually large amount of attention lavished on it in this early season going, arriving at Sandal & Agbrigg station under gloomy skies and in the grip of low temperatures, departing at 9.40am, heading down to Agbrigg Road and setting off west for a clockwise circuit. Pass among the Victorian town houses and rural outliers to cross the A61 Barnsley Road and head up Pinfold Lane past the local school and suburban back gardens, getting a feeling that we are repeating my 2014 route as we land on Castle Road, but we don't head on towards the castle again, but instead join the Castle Road West track, which leads around the southern edges of the Portobello estate and around the northern edge of Sandal Meadows, site of the Battle of Wakefield, where Richard, Duke of York, met his ignominious end on 30th December 1460, firing up the most dynamic three months of the Wars of the Roses, which ultimately led to the downfall of the Lancastrian monarchy.
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| Agbrigg Road, Sandal |
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| Sandal Meadows & Castle |
Sandal Castle looms above these fields and will sit on our reverse horizon for a while as we meet the path that leads downhill from the high prominence towards the river Calder, descending it to cross the ditch of Pugney's Drain and enter the fields that surround the eponymous country park, not that our route will be taking us among the flooded gravel pit used for angling and boating as we instead join the riverside path, where the Calder is a good six feet lower than it was a week ago, judging by the level of the debris still clinging to the banks and the low hanging branches of the trees. We pace up to the A636 Bridge, which we rise up to and follow the Denby Dale Road in towards the city, across Calder Island and among the car dealerships and chain restaurants to meet the Calder & Hebble Navigation, which we drop to along the very long descending path, meeting the towpath and switching back westwards, to follow the section of the Thornes Cut that we didn't see in 2012, passing under the A636 and in between industrial buidlings befre we enter a greener climate, past the former floodgate. Feel the sunshine finally arriving as we run on to meet the flood lock at the end of the cut, where we join the riverside route again, carrying on between the Calder and the railway, where the biomass empties are parked on their return trip west from Drax Power station, and that departure will provide some sound as we skirt around Lupset Pond, another flooded pit that has become an angling lake among these low fields around the river. Depart the riverbank as we come upon the M1, tracing a northerly route along side it to pass under the railway and then west under it on the path coming down below the Wakefield golf course, meeting graffiti artists in the underpass doing their colourful thing to the sound of reggae music and the unmistakable smell of burning tyres, before emerging by the Horbury Junction signal box and seeking out the supposed right of way that passes around the Ben Lea Lakes angling ponds. The path across Horbury's open fields is neatly fenced off to keep it free of cattle, and it leads us on among the local playing fields too, where only the dog walker are out at this time of the morning, where we slip back into an urban landscape among the houses of California Drive, a completely athematically named lane on this estate that sits by the side of the A642 bypass below the plot of Horbury Academy. We thus join Northfield Road as it sidles its way toward the city, among the suburbia and looking for the path that will lead us north, which we find up Lacey Street that gives us an older look at this corner of town before we cross the old Wakefield Road and enter the Benton Park development, a mixed use estate of questionable appeal that thankfully has a footpath that leads us through it under the cover of trees, fully accessible to pedestrians despite the signage that claims otherwise.
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| The Calder at Calder Island |
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| The Thornes Cut, Calder & Hebble Navigation |
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| Lupset Pond, with biomass train |
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| Horbury Fields (forever?) |
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| The accessible path, Benton Park |
This leads us to the fields above the plots of new houses, which offers a perspective over towards Ossett, and we carry on over the M1 again, on one of those over-engineered footbridges that was put in place to maintain a right of way that hardly anyone uses, alighting us on the open fields to the west of Lupset, where we can ascend to a route walked in 2014, finding that this is a changing landscape too as all the fields on the eastern side of the path have been flattened in preparation for a bout of housebuilding. The angled plot down to the motorway will at least keep the rest of Lupset's fields green, and we can look over them as we rise past the 73m tertiary trig pillar, and enjoy the views around to the west, to Horbury and Ossett nearby and to Emley Moor and Woolley Edge further afield before we enter the wild parklands to the north, a prime spot for the local dog exercisers, where our ongoing route gets very vague among the undulations. The alignment reveals itself as we swing eastwards, as does the name of the parklands, Roundwood, like the former colliery and brickworks that once sat by the side of Dewsbury Road, which we come around to as the path leads us past the top edge of the Lupset estate and drops us on the A638 by the Broadway Inn and the miners' terraces, and from here we seek a passage to the north east, rendered more complicated than necessary due to me carrying a hopelessly out of date map. We join Goldsmith Avenue by the Toyota dealership as it leads us into the Silkwood Park trading estate, which maintains its presentable face of gym, car showrooms, pub and wholesalers on its southern edge before getting a whole lot more light industrial as the new roads of Albert Drive and Flanshaw Way decline through it, giving us sight over to Alverthorpe and down to the high towers of Wakefield city centre for the first time as we carry on down to meet Flanshaw Lane. There's tiny hints of a lost village down here, around the Working Men's Club, mostly lost beneath urban sprawl and redevelopment, indicated by the vast Sirdar Plant and the 1960s terraces sitting on older roads, and we pass through the line of the completely lost GNR Ossett branch before we catch sight of St Paul's church peeking over the rooftops of the houses on the Alverthorpe Mills site, where the surviving mill office is as worthy of note as it was in 2014. Follow Wellington Street up to meet Batley Road, and cross by the playing fields, following the ascending footpath that leads up into Wrenthorpe Park, around the edge of the newish estate off Larkspur Way, and describing the route of the old railway as it leads up towards Wrenthorpe Junction, not that anything on the ground would reveal it as such to the casual park user or dogwalker, its true identity only really visible to those in the know.
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| Lupset fields, not as rural as they used to be. |
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| Roundwood park, looking towards Ossett |
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| Silkwood Park industrial estate. |
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| Alverthorpe Mill redevelopment and St Paul's church |
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| Alverthorpe station site. |
The Alverthorpe station site has completely vanished and this most lost of lines carries the tarmacked path beyond through the park along just the vaguest of elevated rises, a mere shadow of the former embankments that contained the growth of the Peacock estate to the south of us, but holds the course all the way up to the triangular junction by the contemporary railway to the east, and the park forms a pleasingly green spot to break for watering and a change into my new Spring-Summer hat as the day's heat starts to be felt. There's grand silhouetted views of Wakefield's towers and spires from up here, as is the view over to Silcoates school, to the north of the park and well concealed from all my other treks around these parts, and then views recede as we follow the junction path up its northern branch, disappearing into tree cover and not taking the footpath under the railway that leads directly to Bradford Road, instead favouring the right of way up to Wrenthorpe Road, even though the path seems to vanish and not offer us a way out until we've gone all the way around to the main park entrance. Strike east on the road, where it looks like Spring has sprung with daisies and blossoms colouring the roadside by the council houses, and head under the obviously widened Potovens Bridge before rising up to Bradford Road behind the Royal Spice restaurant, which still advertises its old identity as the Bay Horse Inn on its back wall, crossing the sixth and last of this year's routes as we join Red Hill Lane, a secret green lane that offers a way around to the A650 and A61. It's actually well used for a sneak route, past the impressively ancient Red Hall farm, an absolute charmer of a house in weathered brick, which is sadly having its rural seclusion eaten away as a new build estate fills the fields to the south, and the Snow Hill trading estates grow by the side of the dual carriageway, filling the distinct gap between Wakefield and its suburban villages, and the plots beyond on the Leeds Road side also seem earmarked to be filled with houses too. The Newton Hill portion of the A61 at least has some of the charm of a ribbon of older houses and stores, having expanded with the growing Victorian city on the way out towards Outwood, and we seem to have filled in most of the lost and previously unseen section of the Leeds Country Way as we progress down Newton Avenue to meet the actual countryside that sits above the housing development with the cricket themed naming scheme, feeling like we've hit the summit of the day, despite being barely over 80m up on this hillside at the top of the city.
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| Wrenthorpe Park & Junction |
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| The colours of Spring on Wrenthorpe Road |
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| Red Hall farm, Snow Hill |
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| Leeds Road, Newton Hill |
We can look north to see the sprawl of Stanley and Lofthouse Gate from up here before we join the tree lined path that descends around the grounds of Field Head hospital, this towns major mental health facility, which seems to be having some major rebuilding work going on around its site, especially around the southern edge of the site that sits opposite the new road that has been put in between the A61 and A642, which I'm sure has done wonders for increasing accessibility to Pinderfields Hospital across the way. Pacing along to Bar lane my memory banks can't actually recall if the hospital site has redeveloped further since I last came this way (it hasn't, aside from being lit up completely differently), and we get another grand show of towers and spires on the southern horizon as we pace on, past the rural survivor Stoke House and the parade of suburban villas that have all passed into hospital usage, before we land on the roundabout on the Aberford Road, where the landscape has again changed completely from the one illustrated on either of my E289 maps. The fields that sit beyond the Georgian-esque Stanley Hall, and the older Clark Hall are gradually being consumed by the growing housing development of City Fields, which is gradually growing alongside the new Wakefield Eastern Relief Road, and has already habitably grown to fill the fields down to the island that links the road to the A642 to the north, where a circus of houses seems to be developing, and we join the Neil Fox Way to continue to the city's east side (it's named after a local Rugby League player, rather than the DJ/TV guy who immediately springs to mind). It's not too busy a lane at present, this new A6194, but I'm sure all these fields that sit between the East Moor estate and the Aire & Calder navigation channel will gradually be consumed by housing, as turn offs have been placed at the roadside at regular intervals, noted as we progress on down the footway with the view to the landfill site in the former opencast pit in the curve of the Calder dominating the eastern horizon, with the developing plots passing to cleared fields and grasslands as we co. It seems to be the tale of this city as we've seen it today, growing in seemingly all directions, and mostly on green field sites too, despite the presence of the former Park Hill colliery being somewhere down here by the canal, which we run in parallel to as we pass the lane that accesses this side of the enduring estate and catch sight of the footbridge on the river that we crossed way back in 2012, as well as the three arched railway viaduct that offers a much better angle and viewpoint to the walker as we can now approach it on the west bank, moving to pass under the line up towards Normanton via the underbridge that was installed during the Christmas break in 2015.
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| Pinderfields Hospital |
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| Stanley Hall |
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| The growing City Fields development. |
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| Neil Fox Way and the landfill site |
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| The Calder Viaduct and the new bypass bridge |
Carry on past the sewage farm as the road curves with the river, feeling clever to snare a train picture as one crosses the bridges and then get the bonus of getting a steam train excursion heading eastwards too, and it's BR 70000 'Britannia' hauling 'the Brexit Express', which is probably running late and not a gig that old girl really deserves, and there's surely a joke in there somewhere about those who'd want us out of the EU celebrating by utilising the best of British technology from the 1950s... Politics be damned, we've got a walk to do, catching the site of Belle Vue stadium's floodlights on the southern horizon and seeing the towers and spires of Wakefield returning to the skyline as we come around the lower end of the town as they appear beyond the escarpment on which the East Moor estate sits, meeting the bridge that takes us over the Calder and over the site of Wakefield Power station, which has completely altered since I wandered across it in 2013. It has since been scoured completely flat, betraying no trace of the landscape that lay fallow there since its demolition in 1991, with only the water outlets at the riverbank remaining in situ, and now it's ripe for commercial redevelopment, filling the whole site down to Doncaster Road, and also claiming the site of Wakefield engine shed (56a) along the way, and we alight by the A638 to see that only the Electricity board house and the railway access bridge off the Pontefract line have endured as remnants. It shows that the world keeps changing whether we like it or not, and we head in towards the town on the main road among the bold terraces and out-of-townhouses before we reach the Agbrigg Road corner and strike on to close today's circuit through the district of Agbrigg, naturally, a region of very modest terraces that feels a little down at heel but still bustling and vibrant thanks to its largely immigrant population. I feel that the legs have had enough of trekking as the hot final stretch of the day takes us past Agbrigg Park and the Duke of York inn, failing to get the kick on in these closing stages as we go around the bend of the road to find the slightly more upscale terraces that sit of the eastern side of the railway line that owns our finish line, the station that has always been named to serve the distant social cousins of Sandal & Agbrigg. As expected doing this loop in four and a half hours was beyond me, rising to the station nearly ten minutes behind schedule, but then find that the train I'd been aiming for is also late, so elation is due as I scurry up to get on the party express to Leeds at a whisker before 3.20pm, not that getting home in a hurry is really necessary as My Mum is being a dirty stopout this evening and staying in Skipton to have tea with her friends, rather that with me (no matter really, we've got a carvery date booked for Mother's Day on Sunday).
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| The Brexit Express is probably running late. |
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| The last remnants of Wakefield Power Station, by the Calder |
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| Poser station access bridge and house, Doncaster Road. |
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| Agbrigg Road, Agbrigg. |
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| The first and last terrace of the day, Agbrigg Road |
5,000 Miles Cumulative Total: 3742 miles
2019 Total: 91.6 miles
Up Country Total: 3348.9 miles
Solo Total: 3455.7 miles
Miles in My 40s: 2335.8 miles
Next Up: Another Crossing of Kirklees District, from South Yorkshire to the Holme Valley!
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