Tees to South Tyne (Cow Green to B6277)

I had expected today's walk, up a track from the Cow Green Reservoir to the Durham/Cumbria county boundary on the B6277 and the watershed of the Tees and the South Tyne, to be rather boring. How wrong you can be! Whilst accepting that it would get boring if we were walking on tracks like this every day, a few hours of it, through magnificent scenery, made for an invigorating walk. The weather made it even more exciting; it was dry and sunny most of the time, but the over-riding feature was a strong wind and there were spectacular skies and occasional squally showers. Finally, whilst I had thought that yesterday's walk would be the point where we parted company with River Tees, the infant river was in sight for much of today, a silvery ribbon meandering its way below the fells to the west of us, and we crossed one of its feeder streams close to the county boundary, then encountered another little stream flowing the other way. A true watershed!

We parked back at the Weelhead Sike car park by the Cow Green Reservoir (NY812308) and after donning waterproofs to protect us from the wind we set off up the track to the north of the car park. We climbed steadily and, with the wind too, it was quite hard going in places. We passed one building whose windows were boarded up, but which might still be in use from time to time, perhaps for shooting parties; there were shooting butts scattered across the moors. We also passed several ruined buildings and there were signs of former mining in the area, but we only had sheep for company.

There were good views back to the reservoir for a while and off to our left there were also good views to Great Dun Fell, Little Dun Fell and Cross Fell. We could see a little stream in the valley bottom to our left and Richard said that he thought this would be the River Tees. I wasn't sure (I had a feeling that the River Tees was further over and it was too windy to get the map out to check) - but of course Richard was absolutely right. The Tees meandered off towards its source beneath Cross Fell, but we now had the Crook Burn (a tributary of the Tees) for company and we passed over a pretty little tributary of the Crook Burn.

The track looped around to the south east of a swallow hole and brought us out onto the B6277. We turned left onto the road and followed it for about a mile; not a problem because cars were few and far between. We crossed over a cattle grid and Crook Burn and we were now in Cumbria, and the views down to the South Tyne Valley began to open up in front of us. We passed a milestone on the right and knew we were in the area where we had hoped to find a path of some sort down to the left. We found a possible route and stopped to check our location using the GPS function on Richard's iPad. Spot on.

We could see a ruined building a hundred yards or so from the road, with what might be a track near the building, so we decided to follow the path down to the building to check the viability of the route for a future occasion. It was a bit boggy, and the route appears to have been messed up by motor bikes at some stage, but as we went through a gate we found the remains of a footpath sign, and the route of the track from this point was quite clear, even if it was not easy walking. We were in business!

We returned to the road and then retraced our route back to the Cow Green Reservoir. Just as we left the B6277, a female dog walker got out of a camper van and set off down the track in front of us. She was the first walker we'd encountered all day, and she didn't go very far. The walk back was quite hard work (I'm sure that both the wind direction and the direction of the incline had reversed!) and there was a junction that we hadn't noticed on the outward journey so we were not entirely sure that we were on the right path (we were - the other track was just down to some old mine workings closer to the river). There were occasional blustery showers, but we were rewarded by spectacular skies, with the sun shining through black cloud, illuminating the point at which the infant River Tees flows into the reservoir.

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