On an overcast, but dry day, 7 of us left the coach in the Barnard Castle (Barny) car park.  After visits to the loo, we headed down the main street then continued towards the River Tees passing the castle on the way.  We then turned NW alongside the river with an excellent view of the castle and river behind us.  Crossing a stream via a bridge we then joined the Teesdale Way.  In my description of the walk for the website I wrote that being a named walk, the footpath should be fairly good although I hadn’t walked it before.  How wrong could I be, the path was muddy, very narrow in places, up and down and sloping towards a significant drop into the river on a good number of occasions.  Sound like a good walk?  Well, we had little option but to carry on, as the valley sides were very steep and not possible to ascend.  One good point was that we had good views of the river although with the very dull sky, even these views were not as good as they might have been.  A coffee stop, while sitting on some fallen tree trunks was a welcome break. 

While, after Tees Bank, the map showed a path climbing the valley side, I couldn’t see any evidence of it on the ground.  Eventually, we arrived at a track gradually climbing back up the side of the valley.  Arriving at the top of this track, we were very pleased to see a level grassed surface.  Easy walking at last.  After passing West Home House, the path was slightly diverted with some kind of excavations taking place on the rhs.  Shortly after, as we circled around an earthwork I made an error following a more obvious path heading towards a gate to the north.  Reaching the gate and checking the MM software on my phone, I realised we should be heading alongside the wood to the NW so we made the appropriate detour and headed to Cotherstone Crag.  Soon after, we crossed a footbridge over the Tees and a second bridge over the nearby R Balder and made our way into Cotherstone village.  Finding a seat, four of us sat for lunch while the other three sat on a nearby wall.

After lunch, we walked through Cotherstone before turning SE onto the Tees Railway Path (TRP).  After a short distance, the footpath was detoured around some private land attached to  a house, but then we were back on the straight line of the TRP.  Reaching a stream (Common Sike), we turned off the TRP onto a bridleway heading E.  This brought us to an intersection of paths with a No-Entry sign on the path I intended taking.  After some consideration, I decided that the path was a RoW, so passed the No-Entry.  At the time, I was trying to contact Heinrich re the difficult Teesdale Way path and obviously wasn’t concentrating, because, after the sign, the good track bore right while my RoW headed N.  Anyhow we continued on this good track for some distance before I realised, so we continued until we were able to join the Teesdale Way on the west bank of the R Tees.  We headed SE on a not very interesting route past Towler Hill and through Pecknell Wood.  This brought us onto a tarmac path close to the river so much more interesting.  From a distance we were able to see the metallic structure of the footbridge crossing the river into Barny.  So we crossed the bridge, but instead of heading straight into the town, I advised the group that we were going to walk past the castle and then into town.  This brought a few moans of “but we are tired” but nevertheless they followed me as we walked below the extensive and high walls of the castle.  Joining the A67, we then headed into town, losing some members as we passed the pub while the rest of us cut up to the coach park.

Not the best of walks by a long way, with very dull weather, some difficult paths, uninteresting scenery and a couple of mistakes from me.