Langdon Beck to Cow Green Reservoir

This was the final section of the officially-defined Teesdale Way that we walked. We parted company with the official route (here shared with the Pennine Way) above Cauldron Snout, then climbed up the the Cow Green Reservoir. Several of the streams that would once have fed directly into the infant River Tees now flow into the reservoir, so it seems an appropriate end point. It's certainly better than Dufton, the official end point, which is nowhere near the River Tees. In any case, we had discovered what looked like a much more direct onward route to the north than that taken by the Pennine Way. (Read more about that here and here.)

We were again lucky with the weather and it was a pleasant upland walk, though there was a bit too much scrambling over boulders for my liking. I had again worked in the morning whilst Richard went for a walk in Weardale. We had an early lunch then parked close to where we had parked yesterday, near the Langdon Beck Hotel at NY854313. We were walking by 1.30pm and we started by retracing yesterday's route along Langdon Beck and Harwood Beck to rejoin the route of the Teesdale Way/Pennine Way at Saur Hill Bridge.

Today we followed the route to the west, turning left in front of the farmhouse at Sayer Hill then crossing attractive but rather squelchy moorland, past Widdy Bank Farm and down to the River Tees. There were a group of people by the river; goodness knows what they were doing, perhaps they were on a field trip of some sort.

This was real upland walking, with heather underfoot and the river passing through a gap between higher areas of land (initially Windy Bank and Raven Scar). We were following the river and the walking was initially quite straightforward. However it became rocky in places and on a couple of occasions we needed to scramble over substantial rock falls, something I am not very good at. Progress was rather slow. We passed a couple of men with clip-boards, probably Environment Agency workers.

We passed the confluence of the Tees and Maize Beck, then turned a bend and there was Cauldron Snout. It's a very impressive waterfall, though climbing up rocks to reach the top was quite challenging. We met another walker on the way down.

We parted company with the Pennine Way and followed the tarmac track up to the dam of the Cow Green Reservoir, and round that to the peaceful reservoir. The water level was below its maximum, which surprised me because the river downstream had seemed quite full; I'd forgotten that the flow of the Tees is controlled at least in part by the Cow Green Dam. We followed the track around the reservoir, admiring the sugar limestone (limestone that was 'baked' by contact metamorphism when the magma that cooled to form the Whin Sill intruded into the overlying rocks) and three distinctive hills in the distance, one with a building of some sort on top of it.