Sedbergh and the River Rawthey
Walk date – 16th July 2026
Distance – 8.8 miles
Weather – sunny and very hot, no breeze at all
It was very hot again today which explains the walk we decided on today. We have been wilting like unwatered plants just lately and thoughts of tackling the fells in this heat have not been uppermost in our minds. We wanted to enjoy the good weather but needed to walk somewhere which offered plenty of shade from time to time. A drive over to Sedbergh for a walk along the Rawthey river seemed to fit the bill and apart from a disappointment at our planned turn around point it did just that.
Route
Joss Lane car park, Sedbergh – Sedbergh School – Birks House – Birks – Brigflatts – A683 to Middleton Bridge – Holme Open Farm – High Holme – Abbot Holme Wood – Abbot Holme hamlet – Abbot Holme Bridge – Sedbergh Golf Course – Birks – Sedbergh School – Joss Lane car park, Sedbergh
There were plenty of spaces available in the car park when we arrived so there were no problems re parking. Having got our things together we set off down the hill from the car park, turned left and after a short walk along Main Street we crossed it and turned down an alleyway which led us onto Back Lane. The above shot shows the yard we entered from the alleyway on the left and just before we emerged onto Back Lane. It was just after nine o’clock but it was already very hot with not even a hint of a breeze to cool us down.
I waited on Back Lane for a couple of minutes while J went back for something he had forgotten so while I waited I took a shot looking across Sedbergh School’s playing fields with a view on the skyline of Middleton Fell. An elderly chap coming along the pavement was using one of those wheeled walking frames and the shopping bag it contained held a few items of shopping. He came shuffling towards me and mentioned that it was much too hot for him. “Me too” I replied. “It’ll be hose pipe bans and all that sort of nonsense next, you just wait” he said as he shuffled past me and went on his way.
J rejoined me and as we came to the end of Back Lane and crossed over the road at the end of it I took the above shot looking up Finkle Street with the green slopes of Winder behind it.
We entered a pathway between St Andrew’s Church and Sedbergh School’s cricket pitch. I noticed that the flag on the church’s flagpole was blue and yellow and that of Ukraine. This is England, not Ukraine, and the church should have been flying the flag of St George with its red cross on a white background if it needed to fly anything at all. Tells you everything you need to know about the current state of affairs in the Church of England though.
A left turn from the path had us walking alongside the Sedbergh School’s cricket pitch, pavilion and practice nets. Everything beautifully manicured, of course. A little further on we stopped to allow what seemed to be the entire population of Settlebeck school to pass by us. The Settlebck school is a local state comprehensive comprising about 200 pupils plus their teachers and we must have let every one of them pass us by.
We waited until the very last group had passed us before continuing on our way but we caught up with the last group as they waited to cross Busk Lane. Fortunately most of the school had already crossed the road so we didn’t have to wait too long. Having crossed the road they all turned right along Busk Lane so we didn’t see them again because when we crossed the road we kept to the path directly opposite us.
While we were waiting for the last group of pupils to cross the road I took the above shot of one the school buildings with most of Winder behind it. I wondered how the pupils of two completely different schools, and probably completely different curricula, viewed each other. The fee paying one broke up for the summer in the middle of last week, the state one doesn’t break up until tomorrow. Walking through the grounds of Sedbergh School and its outdoor facilities was an eye opener for J who also attended a fee paying school, although it was a rather less prestigious one than this. He remarked on how good the cricket and rugby facilities were and how he had never played on pitches as good as these were, either at school or in his adult life.
The path through the school eventually petered out and we continued on along a path across open land towards …..
….. Birks House. The path led around the house and brought us out on …..
….. Birks Lane where we had a view of the entrance drive up to Birks House.
As we walking down Birks Lane to the hamlet of Birks we heard the sound of a lorry engine behind us. We looked around and saw that it was a very wide and very long refrigerated truck which took up the whole width of the lane and was so long that it was having trouble dealing with the twists and turns in it. We thought at first that the driver had been led astray by its satnav system but a few minutes chat with an elderly lady resident who was out clipping her hedge told us that this was a regular occurrence. It turned out that at the end of the lane is some type of frozen food goods producer and the refrigerated trucks were delivering their supplies. The truck came to a stop when it met a farmer on a quad bike just at the top of the lane in the above photo. The driver of the quad bike had to pull over to the space at the end of the unwhitewashed house and tuck himself and the quad bike in as far as he possibly could. We had to wait a while for all this to be achieved so we had a chat with the lady gardener while we waited during which we learned that the lane comes to a dead end at the frozen foods place so all the delivering trucks have to turn around there and drive back over the narrow, winding lane.
After our chat with the lady gardener we continued on up the lane, rounded the bend and met up with the Rawthey river tumbling over the rocks and boulders in the river bed.
On the opposite side of the lane were the premises of the frozen foods producer which to me, with my Yorkshire upbringing, seemed more like a mill than anything else. I discovered as I did a search that it had indeed started life as a cotton and woollen mill about 1792 by James Upton. By the 1880s it had become a bobbin mill and utilised the nearby Rawthey river as a source of water power. In the late 20th century it was repurposed for egg-packing and now in the 21st century it has become a frozen foods provider.
We passed the truck which had caused the delay as we passed by the yard where it was being unloaded/loaded. It was a big truck for such a narrow and winding lane.
We continued down to the end of the tarmac and began our walk above the Rawthey river taking a few shots along the way …..
We had to climb an embankment which had formerly held a disused railway line and then, naturally, had to climb back down again through a very tall patch of nettles which lined the path. We were both wearing shorts so the nettles were bashed down before they could even think about peppering us with their stings. Just after the path down the embankment came a view of the railway bridge over which trains used to travel. At the top the embankment we had climbed the vegetation was so overgrown that we didn’t even know this bridge was there until we reached a clearing beside the river. We decided this was an appropriate place to stop and have a break.
Another view of the Rawthey just below the railway bridge …..
….. with a view of the far end of the bridge. We didn’t realise it at the time but we were to climb the embankment on that side of the bridge later on in our walk. I found out later that it is a Grade ll listed building.
Another view of the Rawthey as it tumbled along.
As we were approaching Brigflatts J spotted this circular grass turner propped against the fence. This would have been attached to a piece of machinery along with several other similar ones and then the piece of machinery, with its circular rakes rotating, would be towed along by a tractor across a field of cut grass which was waiting to be turned and allowed to dry evenly. We’ve seen plenty of those being used during our summer walks over the years. The cut grass will dry out quickly during this present hot spell I would imagine.
Passing behind a house at Brigflatts and pretty soon after we hit the tarmac of the A683. We walked along the road for a short distance looking for a footpath which would take us back down to the Rawthey again and over to Holme Open Farm. A local resident came out of her garden when she saw us referring to our map as we were looking for the footpath and she did not have good news about it. She said it was marked with a signpost, which we noticed when we reached it, but that it wasn’t well used and although it was marked as a ford the river bed was very stony and the water level might be too high to cross. We thanked her, continued along the road, found the signpost, marked deep ford, and made our way down the path. Sadly she was right about the path not being used much these days and it was very overgrown. We managed to get down the vertical drop at the end of the path to the riverside but once again we decided against crossing it. It was quite wide at this point, the river bed was indeed rocky and covered with smooth green vegetation, just the thing to slip on. The shoreline was covered with varying sizes of rounded stones so walking over it was not easy, the water was flowing quite quickly and there was no way of knowing just how deep it really was. How it could be marked as a ford when there was no possible way for a wheeled vehicle to get down into the river, or getting out of it up the steep banking on the opposite side was puzzling. Anyway, after some deliberation we decided that discretion was indeed the better part of valour and made our way back up the footpath and onto the road again. This was followed by a good section of road walking where the only things worth photographing were …..
….. this bank of foxgloves lining a section of road on the opposite side …..
….. a section without any accompanying trees on the A 683 which gave us a view of Winder over on our left but no shade …..
….. and a road bridge giving us a view of the Rawthey river below.
We eventually reached a turning, signed for Holme Open Farm, and walked along the narrow lane. We passed a sign for this farm but it wasn’t the one we were looking for so we pressed on.
Eventually we reached the farm we were looking for and through the maze of buildings finally found the path we had been looking for. When we found shade beneath some trees we decided to stop and have a drinks break. I had a sandwich while J did some scouting around and came back with the news that at last we were back where we needed to be.
As we took to the path again I noticed a couple of the Howgill fells beyond Winder one of which is probably Fell Head.
After crossing a couple of fields once again we climbed an embankment although we didn’t know at the time it was a similar embankment to the one we had climbed earlier although it was now on the opposite side of the river. The stone blocks that can be seen in the shot is part of the railway bridge’s support structure but I was concentrating on the downward steps, plus the stile at the bottom, not to mention the barbed wire just above the handrail of the wooden fencing so I wasn’t really aware of what it was until we got down to the bottom of it all.
I hadn’t expected to find a golf course at the bottom of the embankment either, and when J said there was a good view of the railway bridge I really didn’t appreciate that it was the same bridge we had seen earlier …..
….. until I could see it, so here it is from the other side of the river. I wondered if anyone was still responsible for its upkeep, as the combined effect of foliage, abundant branches and countless tree roots must be having some effect on the structure. We’ve noticed that tree roots eventually cause the collapse of dry stone walls so why would it be any different for a bridge?
I wondered how many golf balls had found their way into the pond beside the golf course? The path became very overgrown and eventually we crossed a small bridge and emerged beside the smooth green grass. Here we met a golfer who was looking for two stray golf balls in the long grass. He described the stroke he had taken for each one, declaring them both to be exactly the same, and that they hadn’t bounced into the nettles further back so therefore the missing balls should be close together. As he was was explaining all that had happened J found one of them and then the golfer found the other one very close by it. We asked him if we would be OK walking by the edge of the course and he replied that all we had to do was watch out for other golfers who might appear and send a golf ball heading our way. We left him happy to have found his missing balls, so he resumed his solo game of golf and we continued on our way.
We kept seeing parts of the golf course as we walked on to this pretty little cottage at Abbot Holme. Just out of shot ahead of us was Abbot Holme Bridge spanning the Dee river and which flows into the Rawthey only a short distance away …..
….. as we were walking towards the bridge we came across this bunker with rake propped up beside it. The green was at the top of the hill so even if you got the ball out of the bunker there was still plenty of rough grass to avoid in order to get on to it. I suppose the golfers eventually get used to the odd layout of the course as there were several tee-ing off points all numbered with matching hole number. I wondered how you were supposed to know in which direction you were supposed to hit the ball from them. I’d need a gps and still wouldn’t be able to find my way around this course. We carried on through the golf course and eventually …..
….. came to the bridge across the Rawthey and back on terra firma at the former mill/frozen foods producer. From there we had a short walk back up the lane to Birks where we had a repeat of this morning’s truck performance.
I was just about to take the above shot when two walkers appeared from around the corner, while behind me appeared another very long refrigerated truck. We all moved over to one side but meanwhile a large white delivery van had come around the corner. The driver of the delivery van spotted the refrigerated truck just appearing around the bend in the road and immediately reversed back around the corner and into someone’s driveway. Unfortunately he had a bit of a wait as the long truck was also followed by a van. Eventually things quietened down as the vehicles carefully made their way along the narrow lane. When we reached the path going around Birks House it had turned 2 p.m. but J had only paid for the parking ticket until then and was now wondering if a big fat ticket had been stuck to the car windscreen. So instead of returning via our outward route we walked back down Birks Lane and made our way back to Sedbergh that way.
From Birks Lane we did have a view of the School’s rugby pitch where the rugby posts were now in position ready for the new term in September. The posts weren’t there when we passed in front of the building over on the right this morning so the groundsmen had been busy. J declared the new rugby season to be now open! We couldn’t see what purpose the building with the curved roof was used for when we passed it this morning but it is big enough to be used as some kind of sports pavilion.
Back in Sedbergh town I thought that this outdoor display of plants in front of the flower shop was the best of what was on offer outside the various shops and a shot of that brings us almost to the end of today’s walk. There was no big fat parking ticket stuck to the windscreen of the car when we arrived back at the car park at half past two which J was obviously pleased about. The inside of the car was as hot as an oven so we opened all the doors to allow some of the heat to dissipate. I sank down into the passenger seat only to jump out of it as quickly as possible when the hot leather began burning into my skin, and the pair of us downed a bottle of water between us. We could have done without the section of road walking we had to do in blazing sun but everything turned out well in the end, as it always seems to do.