The attractions of the Lake District are many despite the overcrowding. Dave Hewitt recommends some quiet times of year and brings us the second instalment of his recent holiday.
I keep promising to write the second half of the I-love-the-Lakes piece begun in early July but distractions such as on-hill rubbish and unauthorised bulldozed tracks keep interfering. Look, you litter louts and land-desecrating landowners, just knock it off for a minute, won't you? I've got other, happier stuff to write about without always having to be bothering about you 'orrible lot.
At least there have been no major developments on the messing-up-the-hills front this past week, so I'll have a dart at the Lakes piece while the coast is clear. (Would that the west-Cumbrian coast around Sellafield was clear but hey, don't get me started on that one...)
Actually, late summer/early autumn is a good time to wander the Lakeland fells, due to the absence of deer and grouse. Or, more accurately, the absence of rich fat tweedy blokes who seem to think that blasting bits off deer and grouse comes under the same "sport" heading as does cycling or the triple jump. It's funny - I must have missed Sue Barker's report on grouse splattering at the Commonwealth Games.
Because of this moorland mayhem, a fair few Scots head Lakeswards (and Waleswards) at this time of year, the absence of midges providing additional encouragement. This of course leads to an already busy area becoming even busier but it does have the great boon of serving up access to hills without the need to worry about the guys with guns and surly scowls.
The genuinely quiet period to go to the Lakes, incidentally, is between Christmas and Easter. At times it can seem no busier than Scotland, especially if you head round into one of the western valleys, Wasdale or Ennerdale. The lack of sustained snow conditions is a discouragement - but then that increasingly applies to the Highlands as well.
By contrast, locals will tell you that the busiest of all weekends in the Lakes isn't, as you might expect, Easter or the Whitsun bank holiday but the English schools' autumn half term break in October. Presumably the place fills up with hassled families and fair-weather walkers taking their last gulp of upland air before turning their attention to the DIY and the video shop during the winter months.
Anyway, enough preamble and asides, on to Ambleside. Here are a few more thoughts on the land of becks and thwaites (which sounds like an order at the bar - a subject that will be discussed another time).
It's like nowhere else Were the Lakeland hills simply a busier version of one of the Highland areas then they would scarcely merit a visit, except out of curiosity. But they're unlike anywhere in Scotland, not just in the extent to which they are lived in and worked in but also in what the creationists would doubtless call their "design". The most obvious difference comes in concentration of hills. It's as though a normal bit of geography has been squeezed into a space around a third too small for comfort, such that the vertical axis is stretched and the horizontal one reduced.
It's not just that, though. There's also a remarkable range of hill-heights, and it's this that make the pleasures of the Lakes so different from the pleasures of, say, Kintail or the Cairngorms. In both those areas - and commonly throughout Scotland - there's a tendency for hills to top-out at roughly the same height. Hence the absence of Corbetts, Grahams and lower bumplets in the Cairngorms or the Ben Alder area, or the lack of Munros in Ardgour/Sunart, and so on. In the Lakes, however, Munro and Corbett sized hills routinely sit right alongside 400m crag-heaps and thus the typical Scottish blank-hillside slog up an uninterrupted 700m slope is almost unknown. (OK, so there's the direttisima on to Kirk Fell but you know what I mean.)
Not only that, but the smaller hills are often every bit as interesting as the bigger ones. On one of the wet days at the start of July I drove round to Blea Tarn and squelched up Lingmoor Fell, the 460m ridge that separates the two Langdales. This is good in itself (it's a fantastic viewpoint for the Langdale Pikes) and I'd been along it before. But what was new that day was Side Pike, the steep little top stuck on the western end of the ridge and relatively ignored due to only receiving brief attention in the Wainwright guides. It's a great spot, with a sizeable crag barring the direct walking route along to Lingmoor itself. I dropped off the side and hugged the corner to save on height-loss and just before reaching the main path arrived at a typical Lakes oddity - a little path squeezing between the crag and a displaced boulder. A bit like a mini-Whangie, this is the kind of feature Wainwright tends to call Fat Man's Agony. I'm sure I read somewhere that a party consisting of Big Brother's Jade, John Prescott and Cameron McNeish once turned back at this point.
The Lakes has an extraordinary number of odd little places and odd little hills - eg on the last morning of the recent trip, with the weather finally having improved, we set off for a quick circuit of the low-level paths above Coniston and ended up climbing the Bell and the Scrow, two craggy outliers of the main southern fells. Again these are near-disregarded summits but again they're full of interest, both on the ground and in their views. A walker based elsewhere in the Lakes could no doubt come up with an equal number of interesting corners around, say, Borrowdale or Glenridding.
The whole district is a ragbag of scraggy hills and rocky clefts. If forced to find a Scottish comparison I'd say (a) there isn't one, and then (b) oh all right then, if you insist, it's a bit like a version of Assynt and Coigach with all the gaps between the hills taken out and a load of roads and fields and farms shoved in. But then not really. Often - more and more in fact - the hillsides themselves remind me of the roughest parts of the Scottish west coast, Knoydart and the like. There's an extraordinary amount of rock on display in the Lakes, both in the form of big coherent crags such as Honister, Gimmer and Dow, and - especially - in screes and mini-crags scattered over pretty much every fellside.
The incredible shrinking hills The plethora of paths, the relatively dry ground and the telescoping of a lot of hills into a small area means that traditional rules concerning height/distance/time don't really work in the Lakes. William Wordsworth yes, William Naismith no. Naismith had us believe that three miles and 2,000ft in an hour is a reasonable rate of progress (it's usually now converted to 5km and 600m in an hour) but while that's true enough in Scotland it's too stingy down in Cumbria.
The difference surely comes from the fact that time taken over any hill route is predominantly governed not by ascent but by distance. This might sound odd when faced with a 600m reascent halfway through a hill day but it's relatively less time-consuming than, say, a 5km stretch of horizontal moorland. It's much easier to envisage and then attack an ascent, to dispose of it in a fairly short time.
Now think of the Lakes and you should see why Naismith doesn't strictly apply. There are good paths everywhere, such that connecting traverses can be reeled in at a steady 4-5km per hour regardless of ascents along the way. Others might disagree but my feeling is that in the Lakes Naismith minus 20% is a better estimate than Naismith itself (or, alternatively, whatever your own normal Scottish figure is minus 20%).
This has happy consequences. Big days can be concocted and unlikely summits reached without leg-trashing effort. To return to the Coniston to Scafell Pike effort mentioned in the earlier piece, this occupied six hours 50 minutes to England's highest point, six hours of which were spent walking. I reckon the distance was around 19km with around 2,100m of ascent. I went steadily but didn't rush.
By Naismith, 19km+2,100m requires getting on for seven-and-a-half hours on the hoof. And before you say Ah, but Naismith requires the whole day to be plugged in to the equation, not just the outward half, note that it took a further three hours to complete the fiddly, zigzaggy, intermittently rough return to Great Langdale. This is around 11km distance with 200m more ascent, ie no less than two hours 30 according to Naismith, and was treated as a stroll in perfect early-evening conditions. So the whole round knocked at least an hour off Naismith's estimate. Put another way, it could have been done at a pace substantially below that which Naismith envisaged and still have dipped inside the old Victorian sandwich-eater's time.
The Lakes aren't much fun in poor weather This sounds like a truism, and is, but it's more true here than elsewhere. The very things that make the fells such fast hills in good weather (the paths, the dry rockiness of much of the ground) make them purgatorially slippy in the wet. One wet day a few years ago I made the mistake of using what looked to be a quick path from Seat Sandal down to the top of Dunmail Raise. Gah, nightmare.
The path hugs the side of the beck in a steeply cut and loose stony staircase. After a few ankle-risking minutes I headed out across heathery-grass slopes to the left but the valley is a deep indent and these side-slopes are also steep, so in the end I cut back to the path, preferring just to fall over than to actually fall. There are plenty of places like this in the Lakes and there's an argument that the paths, in general, ought to be avoided in the wet.
Poor weather also highlights the difficulty of navigation in an area where (a) there are more paths than there are train lines coming out of Crewe and Glasgow Central combined, and (b) the jumbled topography of the ridges and valleys means that very slight errors of navigation can have long-lasting consequences. One of the most notorious of this relates to "the two Esk Hauses" - a split-level col not unlike the Bealach Bhearnais above Glen Carron but with the added complication that both bits comprise major crossroads. Indeed, the entire route from the Scafells back to Great Langdale seems to be forever turning sharp corners and arriving at path junctions. This makes for interesting walking but also opens up plenty of potential for errors.
The plethora of paths also contributes to what is arguably the most confusing place on any English hill. (The most confusing place on any Scottish hill is, I reckon, Glen Ceitlein off the side of Glen Etive. Once, in perfect weather, I wandered up completely the wrong ridge from here, the Meall Odhar spur of Stob Ghabhar rather than the intended Meall nan Eun. In due course I wrote about this, and within a week had heard from five more hillgoers, all more experienced than me, all of whom had done exactly the same thing. Weird.)
The Lakes example isn't quite so subtle, in that it would be hard to go wrong without the aid of mist (although people do try). Basically, what happens is that a walker traversing the Coniston Old Man to Swirl How ridge arrives at the bump of Great How Crags, half a kilometre south of Swirl How and around 30m lower, and assumes it to be Swirl How itself. There's a slight dogleg in the ridge here and GHC has just enough prominence to pose as a main summit in poor visibility. And - crucially - the tempting spur running off to the east is on more or less the same bearing as the Prison Band path leading from Swirl How down to Swirl Hawse - a popular and sensible escape route, although itself quite steep and rocky. So off everyone goes down the GHC spur and in due course the crags themselves arrive.
It's feasible to get down here but the majority of daytrippers out for a daunder along easy paths aren't ever likely to try, so they either go back up the way they came or stay put and call for help on their mobile. The ones who do go back up further erode the blind-alley path, making it look even more like the main route from the top of GHC. This in turn lures yet more hapless walkers down into the crags and so it goes on.
I speak from experience here. My connections in Coniston are with members of the rescue team and before I first crossed these ridges some years ago I was warned about the GHC trap. Ha, not me, I thought. I don't do that kind of thing. So off I trotted over Wetherlam in the steady rain, over Black Sails (a more obvious navigational blackspot but less hazardous as it demands concentration). Then down to Swirl Hawse and up Swirl How in impressive shredded-cloud conditions.
Here I switched off and assumed it was a straight and straightforward line to the Old Man - and before I knew it I was 100m down the GHC spur wondering why Seathwaite Tarn (it was actually Levers Water) was looming straight ahead. I was more sheepish than the local herdwicks on realising that I'd done exactly what I'd been told not to do.
I've been back here numerous times since, often in mist and the mistake is extraordinarily tempting even when you know. It's also instructive to notice that it works whether coming from the south or, as in my case that first time, the north. The local MRT sees a remarkable amount of action up here, to the extent that the phrase "the usual place" can be used when speaking to team members with no risk of confusion.
Great How Crags can also be called as a significant witness in the cairn-kicking debate. I don't intend to fully go into that here but a good example of why it's not a simple issue is shown by the small wall which Coniston MRT once built across the false path off GHC, to try and reduce the number of strayings down that side of the hill. This was duly kicked down by zealots unknown and the callouts returned to their previous levels. It was built again, and kicked down again.
Consequently I suspect that anyone arguing the fundamentalist all-cairns-must-go position in the Sun Inn is liable to get decked by a Coniston MRTer tired of having teatime after teatime disrupted by navigational incompetents needlessly straying down into the crags below the wall.
The cairning debate is a complex thing however and more on that another time.
Dave Hewitt
1/8/2002
Dave can be contacted at dave.hewitt@dial.pipex.com
