This is the joy of returning year after year to the same spot. It feels good to be able to engender this in my children. A love of walking, a love of the English countryside, a sense of family traditions.
We first chose this walk when they were young enough to be carried. Not too far to walk for little legs and not to far to have to carry them if needs be. It also meant we got to enjoy the steam train out of Pickering for a short journey, to match their attention span and our purses. So, we return once more to that 'Harry Potter' station, though glimpses of Levisham in the films masquerading as Hogsmeade are rather fleeting.
We extended the walk today. For a bit of light relief. And because a new walk from the previous day had taken us just short of where we normally break for lunch on Levisham Moor. It seemed fun to 'join them up' if only because we could.
But it was a bit nippy, and the fun at Skelton Tower less protracted than we have made it in previous years. I had to start running to keep warm, something I have often found myself doing on these stretches of moorland over the myriad visits I have made. Wild abandoned runs after having babies, after friends dying, after other milestones that life has thrown up. Brought on by an almost primeval sense of being at one with nature, of the space and what it can make a tiny, insignificant human feel like, of the wide-ness and wild-ness of our wonderful world and our incredible place in it. My kids never see me run. When it happens on the moors they look at me as though I've lost it. But it always feels as though I've found it.
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