stile style

So on yesterday's walk I was wearing a serviceable jacket but my sweatpants soaked through pretty quick and were really uncomfortable. However, I was willing to suffer a bit in honour of my first 5-mile drenching. I was wearing my old boots and it was very slippery underfoot, so I was careful through the paths and fields. I really notice it now in comparison to my wonderful new boots, which have terrific traction.

Neka & I took a footpath along a hedge through some farmer's fields that I've not taken before. It started with a stile, which was fine because the gaps between the horizontal wooden slats was large enough for Neka to hop through. We have a few stiles on our various walks and there's always a doggie way through - whether it's through, under or that ingenious contraption some stiles have of a loose vertical board that you lift up to create a kind of dog-flap. For bigger dogs, lift higher. Very clever. Just need to be careful not to drop the board prematurely because then you have a kind of primitive & blunt guillotine.

Anyway, in spite of the rain hammering down at times, I was enjoying the new path and the sheep & their lambs were staying out of our way. Neka was a model of good behaviour with them, looking but not alarming them in any way. Then we came to another stile. This one had been reinforced with barbed wire and so there was no way through for Neka. There was a small space underneath that might have been hollowed out by a fox or something. Big enough for, say, a Westie, but although she tried a few times, too small for Neka. It was pretty high, too, so I couldn't lift her over - at 16.5 kilos, she's a bit too heavy to lift anyway.

So I tried to get her to climb over by jumping up on the step, but she kept just hopping from side to side over the step, which is what I've trained her to do previously with other obstacles - jump over them. Of course, all the while she was getting more and more excited and barking her head off. I think she was worried I would leave without her. For about 15 minutes I tried to get Neka to jump over that stile some which way. She's a clever girl, and very fit and agile, so I'm sure she would figure it out eventually. But we were getting wetter and wetter, and the bottoms of my sweat pants were starting to drag on the ground they were so soaked. The sheep were getting more and more worried about all the barking. Although the noise had nothing to do with the sheep, I had visions of a farmer storming down the field waving his shotgun.

So I gave up. We turned around and retraced our steps. Dejected, soaked, under-target with the mileage but behind schedule, we just returned home.

Just about wherever we walk in the countryside we are going to come across stiles. There's some walking on back roads and country lanes, but let's face it, the best walking is through woods and wilderness. Where there's woods and wilderness there's fields and where there are fields, there are stiles - and they are many and varied in design. Remind me one day to tell you the story of the 6-foot stone wall.

In the meantime, I need to teach Neka to climb a stile. That's going to take some time. And patience.

And possibly earplugs.

I was going to supplement the morning walk with another few miles this evening, but now my car is dead and I have to wait for the recovery people to come and recover it. So this morning, we took all the dogs on the usual backroads-fields-stream-home route and the weather was positively glorious. If I'm not very much mistaken, spring has definitely arrived and with a little bit of summer thrown in for good measure. Is that just asking for it to start raining again?


Distance - 2.5 miles
Time - 45 mins
Dog(s) - all
Weather - sunny
Could I do another 5? - yes