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WALK 2

The Cheviot

Start/Finish	Car park east of Langleeford
Distance	8½ miles (13.6km)
Total Ascent	2028ft (618m)
Grade	4
Time	5½–6 hours (7 hours in adverse conditions)
Maps	OS 1:25 000 Explorer OL16, The Cheviot Hills OS 1:50 000 Landranger sheets 74, Kelso & Coldstream, and 80, Cheviot Hills and Kielder Water Harvey 1:40 000 SuperWalker, Cheviot Hills
Parking	On the grass verges before Langleeford, GR 953225, before the small bridge
Accommodation	A range, from hotels to youth hostel, in Wooler

Whatever the weather this walk will be a challenge, perhaps best described as beauty and the beast.

No walking guide covering the Borders would be complete without at least one pilgrimage to the summit of Muckle Cheviot, the highest mountain in the Cheviot Hills. This is a circular walk requiring map-reading and compass skills in poor visibility. Good boots and mountain clothing are essential and walking poles do help. Underfoot expect farm lanes, dirt tracks, narrow, rock-strewn and bracken-shrouded peaty paths, paths through naked peat, stone slabs on Cheviot’s summit, and grassy paths on the final descent.

At the south end of the main street in Wooler turn right, signposted ‘Middleton Hall and Harthope Valley’, to travel 5 miles (8km) southwest to Langleeford. Start on the road walking southwest for 200yds (183m) towards Langleeford to reach a signpost reading ‘Scald Hill 1¾ miles, The Cheviot 3½ miles’. A good path to the right rises rapidly through bracken and acres of bonny blooming heather to the flat and grassy summit of Scald Hill, 1797ft (548m). Leave Scald Hill via a stile to join a conspicuous permissive path alongside the fence running south-southwest, going over a wet and peaty saddle, later to rise steeply as a blackened and badly eroded wound in the east side of Cheviot. The final assault of 500ft (152m) is via a choice of distinct pathways – grass, peat and scattered stone – left of the southwest ascending fence. Once the plateau rim is reached the path weaves through a scatter of rocks to the prominent ladder-stile leading to Cheviot’s flat and blackened summit. At this point the slabbed pathway over Cheviot’s summit to Cairn Hill is met, and on a fine and clear day you will surely consider this to be the finest of walks. In low cloud with squally rain pulsing in on a fractious wind, you may question your sanity. To the uninitiated the summit of the Cheviot 2676ft (815m) may be something of a shock – five square miles of featureless and seemingly endless peat hags.

Langleeford Surrounded by oak, beech, rowan, hazel, ash and silver birch, Langleeford was first referred to in 1552 in connection with the need for night watches because of marauding reivers from Scotland. In 1791 that most romantic of Borders walkers, Sir Walter Scott, took a holiday at the farmhouse, enjoying the fishing and the walking, and was particularly taken with the pretty milkmaid who brought him goats’ milk every morning.

The Cheviot Locally called Cheviot, the Cheviot is the highest mountain in the Cheviot range. The area was fashioned some 400 million years ago by intense volcanic activity, followed by lava flows, a process that was to continue for many millennia. More recently, in 1728, Daniel Defoe ascended Cheviot on horseback and was ‘much afraid’ he would find the summit a ‘knife edged ridge’. His guides, local boys from Wooler, were greatly amused at this, assuring him ‘an army could stand upon the top’. The first Ordnance Survey was carried out in the early 1800s by the military, and a trig point placed on Cheviot’s summit. No less than two trig points have since disappeared into the peat. The present monolith is mounted on a concrete plinth supported on an 11 foot pile, but many experienced ‘Cheviotiers’ are under no illusion but that the present trig point is in the process of joining its predecessors.

The route to the Cheviot’s trig point follows the prepared path of stone slabs winding west through the peaty wilderness, with the guiding fence always within sight on the walker’s left. The summit should be reached within 3 hours of the start, and from its peaty surrounds Cairn Hill 2545ft (776m), a small mound with an accompanying cairn, is clearly visible to the southwest. The walk to Cairn Hill is, for most of the way, along the stone slabs to the right of the fence. Avoid at all costs the left, i.e. south, side of the fence, where two menacing ponds await the unwary. Beyond the slabs to the stone pile of Scotsman’s Cairn by Cairn Hill’s summit requires care. Leave Cairn Hill and the guiding fence by the stile close to the cairn, descending on a waymarked peat pathway south-southeast for some 500yds (457m), initially alongside a fence on the right. Continue across a wilderness of heather, mat grass and gargantuan peat hags before swinging half-left towards the valley floor, which is met by the bare cleft of red earth that cradles the infant Harthope Burn.

Follow the burn east, with the running water on the right. As the burn gathers strength it is crossed several times as the path becomes more obvious, and eventually the walk in the narrow valley between Cheviot and Hedgehope Hill assumes a mantle of tranquillity. Small and stunted silver birch, and later alder and rowan, cling precariously to the steep banks, home to ring ouzels, dippers and many primroses, as the noise of gushing water assails the ears. Beyond a crumbling sheep stell (shelter) Harthope Linn (waterfall), with its main cascade plunging through the narrowest of gorges, is compelling, but take care when hunting for that extra special close-up.

Harthope Burn and Harthope Linn The burn rises on the southwest flank of Cheviot and tumbles down the Harthope Valley to Langleeford and beyond. A geological fault caused the steep-sided valley to be formed, and later glaciers from Cheviot scoured and shaped it into the picturesque valley we know today. Several small waterfalls of peat-laden amber water tumble merrily down the upper reaches, the largest and most spectacular being Harthope Linn, with a cascade of 25ft (7.5m), 2 miles (3.2km) upstream from Langleeford.

From the linn it is but a short 2 miles (3.2km) to Langleeford. The route goes via the renovated farmhouse of Langleeford Hope, along a pleasant farm road and over more stiles, then to the tree-lined, white-walled buildings of Langleeford, the end of the adventure.

Harthope Linn