And so to bed (From The Northern Echo)

And so to bed

3:30pm Thursday 24th November 2011 in Backtrack By Mike Amos

Belatedly on the railroad to Wembley, and still forced to walk the last 14 miles, the column follows Spennymoor Town to the Silentnight Stadium.

CONSIDERABLY delayed, and for circumstances beyond out control, the Railroad to Wembley finally left Darlington station at 6.45am last Saturday. Mr Kit Pearson also entrained.

The Railroad has become one of the Backtrack column’s regular departures, an annual excursion around England’s less celebrated (and often less populated) football grounds in the hope that an STL Northern League club may make it, come May, to the FA Vase final at Wembley.

For the past three seasons, Whitley Bay have not just got there but lifted it, a unique hat trick.

This is Barnoldswick Town, they of the Silentnight Stadium, against Spennymoor Town, second round proper. Barnoldswick’s just about in Lancashire, the biggest town in Britain without an A road through the middle – not many may know that – and one of precious few 12- letter communities in which no letter is used twice.

That the odyssey has started rather later than was anticipated is because the FA decided in the summer further to regionalise early round draws in its national competitions, effectively turning them into league cups. Happily, the wider picture resumes next season.

It begins badly; Kit’s lost his ticket.

“Will you take an orange instead?”

he asks the guard, who smiles benignly.

“If I were you, sir, I’d go and hide in the toilets,” he says. “Just like everyone else.”

THE only trouble with the Railroad to Wembley is that Dr Beeching didn’t think along the same lines.

Until 1965, the Skipton to Colne branch had a 1.5-mile spur to Barnoldswick – known universally thereabouts as Barlick – hauled by an engine known, no less widely, as the Barlick Spud. This, apparently, was because it bore a marked resemblance to the device in which the local Coffee Johnny roasted his potatoes.

In the Thirties, there’d been 24 trains in each direction. When the axe fell there was one.

We change at Leeds, are in Skipton before 9am, are faced with the option of the No 28 bus or a 14-mile walk along the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, built in the late 18th Century and carrying coal until 30 years ago.

Forever on the straight and narrow, risibly assuming that you can’t get lost by following a canal, we choose the latter.

There’s a right bank and a wrong ’un. We take the wrong ’un, essay a bovine circumlocution of Skipton cattle market and by walking three hairy miles along the A65 end up in Gargrave, where the Kingdom of Heaven awaits.

IT’S one of those quotes that lives forever in the mind. At the annual cyclists’ service in Coxwold, North Yorkshire, a former Bishop of Whitby had many years ago observed that the Kingdom of Heaven was like unto the cyclists’ cafe in Gargrave. A visit had long been an ambition.

Officially, it’s the Dalesman, squarely on the Pennine Way, a whimsically old-fashioned place with hundreds of sweet jars containing things like eyeballs, slithery snails and, nothing dentured, false teeth.

The menu acknowledges a wider audience. “New York, Paris and Gargrave, but mainly Gargrave,” it says.

The staff are dressed for Children in Need. The lion looks a little fed up, the blonde leopard would look pretty good in a corporation bin bag, but insists that she, too, is anxious to change her spots.

The loo has ancient advertising slogans for Winthrop’s Tyres, Raleigh bicycles (“Champions since 1892”) and for a wide range of Mr Thomas Crapper’s sanitary installations.

We order breakfast buns and coffee.

For reasons which may need little explanation, we are unable to say how closely this resembles the Kingdom of Heaven, but find it wholly ambrosial, nonetheless.

BY now it’s the most glorious November morning, more May than a month before Christmas. Narrow boats with names like Billy Whizz, Lady Piranha, Easy Come Easy Go and Wormcatcher are tethered, hibernating.

How the Water Rat would have scolded them on so wondrous a day.

Another craft has a notice saying “Beware, live snakes inside” – the boatman’s answer to “CCTV in operation – another is called Carpe Diem, which translates as Seize the Day. How very true.

A hunt tally-ho-hoes in the distance, a shoot reverberates, a sole canoeist paddles placidly towards Leeds. There are more locks than Frankland prison.

The only other problem is that both of us reads a map like a trainee pharmacist might read an arthritic GP’s prescription, that is to say with the greatest difficulty.

Finally, Kit approaches a lady on a horse, forgets where it is he’s meant to be going in the first place, enquires if we’re headed in the right direction for the place with 13 letters.

The equestrienne looks puzzled.

“You know,” says Kit, “Osbaldwick.”

That the lady looks yet more confused is possibly a) because Osbaldwick is near York and b) Osbaldwick has ten letters and Barnoldswick 12.

Ready for bed, we reach the Silentnight Stadium at 2.15pm.

UNTIL 1974, when some twollop with no sense of history and little more of geography re-drew the local government map of England and Wales, Barnoldswick had spent many centuries contentedly in West Yorkshire (and no matter that the telephone exchange was Burnley and the postal address Colne).

It was then hijacked, carried off screaming from its mam, and woke up next morning to find itself in Lancashire.

The same administrative absurdity put Skipton in North Yorkshire.

Barlick squeals still, as unsure of its true identity as a foundling on the steps of the cottage hospital. The football club remains affiliated to the West Riding FA but plays in the North West Counties League, they of Stone Dominoes, Runcorn Linnets and Ramsbottom United.

In the clubhouse they’re serving hotpot. “Is it Lancashire hotpot or Yorkshire hotpot?” I ask. “It’s hotpot,”

says the lady, diplomatically.

Once it was cotton milling country, sheltered beneath Weets Hill.

Now Silentnight Beds is the biggest employer, though there’s a Rolls Royce factory in one of the old mills.

We pass it near journey’s end. I’m Rolls Royce, Kit’s the silver shadow.

The FA Vase is characterised by camaraderie, never more evidently than at Barlick Town. Lovely, generous, people. We lunch on home made pasty, mushy peas and gravy – beetroot optional – for £1.50. It’s wonderful.

You’d walk another 14 miles, no bother, for one of Barlick’s pasties.

SPENNYMOOR Town are followed from south Durham by two coachloads of fans. One’s the official supporters’ club bus, the other – for reasons none can explain – is known as the Wenger Bus.

The second disgorges the column’s old friend Paul Hodgson, British and Commonwealth All-comers Dole Draw ing champion and a man who claims to have suffered vibration white finger from excessive signing on.

They’ve been in the pub since 7am, ring Barnoldswick at 8.30 to see if the fog’s lifting, are in Wetherspoon’s in Skipton by ten. Hodgy’s been chatted up, it’s reported, by a bloke with pink-painted fingernails. Also among the visiting ranks is a stuffed tiger formerly known as Tigger, but now wearing a shirt bearing the name Sophie.

“I’m gutted,” says Neville Markey, the owner. Tigger may feel much the same. Tim le Poidevin, Spennymoor’s only Arsenal fan, is already happy.

The Gunners have won by 2.45pm.

Another hears about the walk.

“You’re as mad as a balloon,” he says, insanity subject to inflation.

The Silentnight Stadium not only has a Sewer End but painted banners which officially, unmistakably identify it. “You’ll see the sewage works round the back of the stand,” says one of the Barnoldswick lads. “If you’d been here at dinner time, you’d have smelt it as well.”

This thus becomes the first instance in football history of Sewers playing Moors, the teams both fifth in their respective leagues, almost identical records and with games in hand of their leaders. This one will sort the Weets from the chaff.

Barlick are in blue and yellow; Spennymoor, forever black and white, play in red. The fans, boisterous, but inarguably behaved, sing about Jason Ainsley’s black and white army regardless.

Though Leon Ryan’s header hits the post early on, it’s almost halftime before Sonny Andrews puts the visitors ahead.

The second half’s different, four goals in 15 minutes, the third an early Christmas present when goalkeeper Torrington fancies himself as Charlie George, watches numbly as Andrews takes the ball from his toe and rather resembles Charlie Chaplin, instead.

It ends 5-0, the clubhouse power supply twice briefly failing thereafter.

“Quid in the meter, you want a quid in the meter,” sing the Moors men.

The Wenger Bus drops us off at Skipton before heading exuberantly back towards Durham. Neither a silent night, nor a particularly holy one, seems likely to be in prospect.