Category: UK

I am trying to climb all the Wainwrights (Lakeland Fells). “Isn’t it perverse,” I hear you say, “going to the Lake District to climb peaks when Tassie has so many mountains of its own?” It can seem so, certainly, especially to those who judge a mountain’s worth by its height. If this is your criterion then, yes, forget it. And if lakes are to be judged by volume and impressive dimensions, then forget them too. This is not the country for that kind of importunate drama. However, if you find beauty in subtle shifts of colour and form, in lines and patterns in the landscape, in amusing lumps and bumps as the land progresses upwards; if you love the mixture of verdant green with blue or steely grey, then you might begin to understand the allure.

And if you have a head full of English Literature (especially that of ancient times) as my husband and I do, then you might understand even more.

We adore our lifestyle in Tassie, and the bushwalking we do here, but we also treasure the Lakes and the regime we adopt while there. I am a completer of things I begin, and now that I have commenced this mission to climb every Wainwright, I won’t stop until I’m finished. And then I’ll turn around and begin all over again, just like I do with a good book. These mountains are now my friends and, having got to know them, I want to keep seeing them. Once will not be enough, but I want to taste everything on the smorgasbord before I go back for seconds in any systematic way.

Although the view from a peak in Tassie stretches further in many cases, and although the scenes tend to be more wild and rugged, the view from a Lakeland peak still has the capacity to thrill and to connect the soul to the infinite.

My husband trying hard not to kill himself on the way to Causey Pike. As you can see, there are opportunities for this activity off to the right, especially if you have Parkinson’s Disease. My husband finds ridges like this to be very challenging. Logic says if he fell to the right exactly now, he would not fall down the mountain, but that is not how his emotions feel it.

 

In Tassie, if you are collecting Abels, as said, you must be very strong, as you can’t do it without carrying a heavy pack for the multi-day excursions required to reach some of the peaks. In England, a day pack is all you need. Both types of mountain require map and compass skills.

I love my heavy pack as a symbol of freedom and adventure, but I also love this cushy daypack business for a pleasant break, and I adore being able to move much faster. I feel great pleasure moving quickly, especially in nature.

My husband loves being filled to bursting point every breakfast (which never happens at home), and I don’t mind climbing a mountain or two waiting for the very late – agonising – hour of 8 a.m. when this breakfast is finally served.

I enjoy the fact that on the most horrid of days, in a spot that you think is totally outré, you can still come across a fellow traveller. Of course you have a chat. I love to meet people who are as crazy as I am. They’re my type. You have a short exchange and then diverge, for there are endless possible routes in the fells. Sometimes you just give and receive a smile of complicity, a recognition that here is another person smitten with the same disease and the same penchant of going out into wild nature even when it’s furious – sometimes precisely because it’s so raging, as there’s something fun about being out there when nature is trying its best to destroy you. That is wildness as opposed to wilderness. I love both. So did my “friend” Goethe. King Lear’s rages in the storm suggest to me that even Shakespeare knew what it was like to be out there in the inclement elements. It is exhilarating (not that Lear found it so). Elizabeth Bennett loved it too, and I love her (and Jane Austen, her creator who loved to walk).

In Tassie, the planning has more to do with weather and finding the best route up the mountain, which usually equates to extracting from somewhere information about patches of thick scrub and how to get around cliff lines on the ground but not on the map. In Tassie, other walkers and bushwalk.com are both indispensable. In England, when researching routes, the site I use, which has fantastic information not only about routes, but also has wonderful pictures and information about the best place to leave your car, is the blog put together by David Hall: http://www.walkthefells.net/ . Unfortunately there is no listed way to contact David. I would so dearly love to write and thank him for the fabulous help he has been in my little quest, but there is no email. He has been swamped.

As in many previous years, I used England as a warm-up for my husband – a kind of transition between his semi-sedentary job and the demands of walking all day, every day over mountain passes on the continent.

This year, I chose to go “peak bagging” in the Lake District. I use that verb as a shorthand to describe our activity, but as I look at my four maps of the area, with the routes we’ve done highlighted in yellow or orange in a spiderweb configuration, I realise that it’s far more about ridges and routes than the summits themselves, even though we visited each summit in question. The best views and the most exhilarating experiences of nature’s wonderland are often to be had on the way rather than near the summit cairn.

Before we left, I pored over my existing highlighted routes, plotting the best bases for filling in the gaps that remained. The Buttermere area was a definite, but as that village is either booked out at the cheap end, or too expensive at the other, I selected nearby Loweswater as our first base. Kirkstile Inn, with its wonderful view out our window of Mellbreak, a fabulous fell, was my choice, and we loved our time there.

I didn’t want our whole twelve days in the one spot, so also opted for bases in Patterdale and Skelwith Bridge for variety of peaks and experiences (the latter being chosen more on grounds of nostalgia than access to unclimbed peaks).

We arrived excited to be there at last after 40 hours’ travel. We weren’t really hungry, but had some soup just to call it dinner; we were far more eager to stretch our legs after such a long time sitting, before official bedtime claimed us. Heron Pike didn’t seem all that far away and the evenings are long … off we set, straight up a direct line from Grasmere, where we were spending the first  night.

The next morning we were up at 4.30 with the approaching dawn, so set out walking with no particular plan. We just wanted to enjoy being there and to see whatever we would see. I can’t resist going up when it’s an option, so put up with ‘flat’ for about ten minutes before the allure of an adjacent sharp climb dragged me with irresistible pull and we began a steep ascent of Heron Pike from a different approach, through the bracken and up rocky crags. I wondered if I was leading us straight into an impassable cliff face, but soon enough a sheep appeared and we were on the ridge line shortly afterwards to enjoy a much more scenic approach to the summit that we’d had the night before. We climbed two more peaks before dropping down, starving, for a hearty English breakfast. I’m surprised we weren’t rebuked for gluttony as we had multiple servings of everything available, and cleaned them out of prunes, grapefruit and muesli before beginning on the hot food. The English don’t serve breakfast until the late hour of 8 a.m., so this (early walk + edacity) became a fairly regular pattern. Our behaviour was either tolerated or not noticed, and no one saw fit to expel us.

As we climbed over forty new peaks (in addition to many repeat climbs) in our eleven days there, I won’t give an account of each one, but will sect a few favourites from the mix.

In previous trips to this area, we have climbed the peaks (Haystacks, High Crag, High Stile, Red Pike) in the vicinity of Scarth Gap, on the southern side of Buttermere more times than I can remember, as we love that area, but we have never climbed any of the ones on the other (more northerly) side. I’ve always eyed them up and thought them a little imposing; they look very steep and quite sheer from the front. Thanks to the notion of peak bagging, however, we were challenged to try new mountains, rather than keep summiting familiar friends, and I’m so glad to have been prodded to do this.

Whiteless Pike is due north of the hamlet of Buttermere and looks over the lakes Buttermere and Crummock Water, presenting a rather inhospitable face to both. A direct approach is marked on the map, but not exactly visible on the ground. My husband did not dare a direct approach, and I selected a route that went up the Rannerdal Valley beside the crags of that name and that then climbed steeply from that direction. It was a beautiful way, with a fabulous, narrow ridge before the summit that offered extensive views of shining waters below and layers of mountains above. The grass was lurid green. My husband was rather unnerved by the ridge, but tolerated it, whilst opting not to return home in that direction. Once was enough. Still, there were other peaks to climb before that became an issue, and we enjoyed the views from four more before I showed him how he could get down on a less confronting route. I wanted to see the ridge from the uphill direction and see the lakes with a now lower sun, so I arranged his pickup point and set out to climb some more before dropping and joining him. It worked well. The possibilities for that kind of separation make England very suitable for us.

The third peak in this foreshore lineup, Whiteside, lies to the NE of nearby Crummock Water and flanks the other side of Grasmoor, yet another hulk with fabulous water and mountain views. This one we did take head on, with Bruce tolerating the mild level of exposure very well. It was the peak beyond, Hopegill Head that had him challenged as we approached. “Where are we going?”, he kept asking, as I headed him for it. I knew it would be much less threatening at close quarters when he could see the route up, so just kept responding vaguely, “Oh, ahead”, (waving my arm broadly), “in this direction.”

As predicted, the actual route was less confronting than his fears. The next question was: “Are we going back down the same way?”

“No. You’ve done all the tricky stuff now. We’re just going to climb that nice one ahead and then drop back down the valley using Liza Beck.”
He knew Liza Beck from the day before, so gained in confidence. From the top of Grisedale Pike, we could see not only Keswick way below, but peaks that I used to run up from Keswick when I was training there (Cat Bells, Maiden Moor, High Spy and Dale Head). It was pleasing to greet old friends unexpectedly, out of context as it were. I hadn’t bothered to look at the map to see what lay beyond my present focus of interest.

My third favourite peak was also done from our Loweswater base, and was the peak we looked at out our bedroom window at Kirkstile Inn. We woke up seeing it and went to bed staring at it, and said “Hi” to it any time we happened to visit our room. The side that faced it was another “in your face” slope, and I knew there was a route that went straight up that slope, so that was what I’d chosen for our first afternoon there. B attempted to come, but gave up when the route became somewhere near ninety degrees and he wasn’t comfortable with the distance he’d fall if he started sliding. He doesn’t have full control of arms or hands, so it was a good decision. He opted to wait for me on a spot we named below and just enjoy the scenery while I played above.

Before I close my account of the Lakes, I must put in a good word for Ian at the Old Water View, Patterdale. When we arrived there, he told us our daughter wanted us to call her. Ominous. This is not her habit. I jumped to conclusions that were correct. Bruce’s dad, aged 92, had died that day. Whilst the death of a person that old may well be expected, it brings closure on a whole relationship that has been treasured for a lifetime: in the words of a beautiful song by Celtic Thunder, “I never will forget him, for he made me what I am.” Dad was an amazing father – a wonderful person – and his model of how it can be done inspired my own husband, in his turn, to be a superlative father. Naturally, our children wanted to cry over the phone and to talk to us, just to hear our voices at length, as they adored their poppa. Ian made his whole bar area our private quarters so we could send and receive Skype messages and conversations, not only with our daughters, but also with Bruce’s brothers who wanted to talk arrangements. Even after we had checked out, Ian declared his place open to us – just pop by any time we wanted to use wifi and use his facilities. He was very supportive, and refused to appear put out by the fact that most of these conversations were taking place at midnight English time, and that he was being inconvenienced by it. The staff at Skelwith Bridge Hotel, two days later, were similarly very understanding and tolerant of phone calls coming into their hotel (and being conducted in the lobby) at odd hours. (Wifi in England usually only works near the main computer).

I should also mention that, if you’re in the Lakes and wondering about where to park to climb a mountain, or about the various possibilities for climbing, a website that I found indispensable, and which offered wonderful photos without overkill, was David Hall’s site, to be found at http://www.davidhalllakedistrictwalks.co.uk