A great read. I can confirm that Fletcher House in Kirkby Stephen is a wonderful stopover, one of our favourite place on our C2C 7 years ago. In fact we tried to book it for a weekend in September on our way back from Scotland as we wanted to do Nine Standards again as we had no views at all when we were there before. Unfortunately and as expected they were fully booked, but we stayed at the Nateby Inn which was fine and did a circular walk from there. We got the views this time, but it was still boggy!