Backtrack: Wild Barlick

It was a memorable day, not least because my mate Kit couldn’t find his train ticket and offered the conductor an orange instead.

“If I were you, sir,” said the conductor, “I’d just go and hide in the toilets like everyone else.”

Known locally as Barlick, the town long lay in Yorkshire, is now thought to be in Lancashire and in truth has had a sort of pass-the-parcel existence, like Berwick-upon-Tweed before the English and the Scots found something else to fight about.

It’s also the largest town in England without an A-road through the middle – not many people may know that – and one of precious few 12-letter place names which doesn’t use the same letter twice.

Kit again turns out on Saturday. As before, the plan’s to take the train to Skipton and then walk 14 miles along the Leeds-Liverpool canal via the cyclists’ café at Gargrave.

The train’s quiet, the trans-Pennine route closed beyond Leeds. Not much in the popular prints, either, though The Times carries a grovelling apology to Sir Ian Botham, the Squire of Ravensworth. “It was a mishearing,” they insist, though what they thought they heard won’t be repeated here.

Last time we’d achieved the seemingly impossible feat of getting lost along a canal tow path. This time we’re a bit more circumspect.

“I don’t know if we might not have seen that bridge before,” says Kit, an interesting construction – the English, not the bridge – perhaps indicative of a racing man who likes an each-way bet.

The weather’s pleasant, the canal busy with narrow boars with names like Nutmeg, Norfolk and Noah. A banner on the south bank promotes something called a Bone-anza, which turns out to be a dog show. Very south bank, that.

A passing bargee, who seems to resemble the washerwoman in The Wind in the Willows, asks if we’re enjoying the walk.

We tell her that we are. “Fancy that,” she says. “Most people reckon they hate it.”

AN earlier train trip to Skipton, ten years ago this week, had been for a chat with Simon Grayson, now Sunderland’s manager but back then boss of a Blackpool team that had gone a club record 12 games unbeaten. He had a lot more hair then, too.

He’d taken over at Bloomfield Road in November 2005, when the club was third bottom of League One, had won one game in ten and were relegation favourites. The following season, via the play-offs, they’d reached football’s second tier for the first time in 29 years.

“People in their 60s and 70s are still shaking my hand and saying they’ve never known better days. It’s been a long time, anyway,” he said.

Bedale boy, he himself was somewhere close to the Leeds-Liverpool, a few hundred yards the right side of the North Yorkshire border, though with a Burnley postcode.

“I earn my money in Lancashire and spend it in Yorkshire, that’s a pretty good arrangement,” said Simon – a thoroughly agreeable chap.

IT was about 15 years ago, at the annual cyclists’ service at Coxwold in North Yorkshire, that the sermon began with the immortal observation that the Kingdom of Heaven was like unto the cyclists’ café at Gargrave.

Officially called the Dalesman, it’s a calm and comforting little place equally popular with Pennine Way walkers and which stocks jars of old fashioned sweets like fried eggs, yellow-belly-jelly-balls and psychorats (which admittedly sound a bit more 21st century.)

It’s 10.45, five miles into the walk, and we’re breakfasting on egg and bacon sandwiches with very good coffee. The music machine quietly plays Beethoven’s Ninth, better known as the Ode to Joy. It seems rather appropriate, really.

NOTHING much happens for the next nine miles, save that a wayward cow is being pursued along the towpath by a farmer bearing what Victorian schoolmasters used to call a switch.

It would be good to report that the gentleman calls her a silly moo, but the expression seems rather more ruddily rustic.

It was hereabouts last time that we became so disoriented that Kit asked a woman the way to Osbaldwick, which is a village near York, and seeing her puzzled expression added that it was the place with 13 letters.

This time he tries to seek assistance from one of those clever app maps, but is roundly reproved for cheating.

The county border a couple of miles behind, we finally reach Barnoldswick, where we ask an old crone for directions to the football ground. She talks right, points left and winks with both eyes simultaneously.

It’s called the Silentnight Stadium, the town’s biggest employer sub-titled “The secret of a good night’s sleep.” In truth the secret of a good night’s sleep is a 14-mile walk along the Leeds-Liverpool Canal.

We arrive at 2.30pm, the clubhouse able only to offer the generally execrable Worthington Smoothflow. After five hours on the straight and narrow, it still tastes pretty much like nectar.

FA CUP extra preliminary round, Barlick are playing Ebac Northern League side Jarrow Roofing, a club formed 30 years ago by Richie McLoughlin who remains chairman, manager, groundsman and money tree.

Club secretary David Ramsey’s missing because Richie’s car’s broken down. “Someone has to take the engine out,” it’s explained.

Back in 2000, the Tyne Tees Television “Obsessions” programme featured Richie and his then wife Rose, the bleep machine frequently employed to camouflage some of Richie’s more colourful expressions.

He’d warned that he might use the “odd” swear word, that “one or two” might slip out. “I counted ten bleeped out words in the pre-watershed screening,” wrote Steve Pratt, the Echo’s television critic.

These days he’s grown older and, some would say, wiser. “He used to be in front of the FA every other week,” says Jan, his second wife. “Now it’s hardly once a year.”

ROOFING kick towards the clubhouse in the first half, a large flag identifying it as the Sewer End because of the sewage works out the back.

Six years ago, we’d supposed it the first meeting in football history between the Sewers and the Moors. That the Sewer End banner is next to the designated press seats is, presumably, coincidental.

There’s also something called a media tower, a scaffold that might despatch the unwary, though players on the adjoining cricket field watch the football from atop the pavilion.

Roofing lead through Dennis Knight’s 25-yarder after 21 minutes. It seems a good time to essay a photograph of Richie – “Smile, please”; he does – though the picture’s a little darker when they’re trailing 2-1 at half-time.

The manager’s response is equally measured, what Jarrow lads call sotte voce, when a second half penalty wraps it up for Barlick.

Forsaking the Worthington Smooth, we hobble off to a real ale bar in town, then catch the X43 back to Skipton. Fourteen miles along the Leeds-Liverpool canal is completed in approximately as many minutes.