Category: Lake District
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Kentdale
The Kent valley must be the quietest of the Lakeland dales. Hidden from the main tourist route with very few places to park and a ‘dry’ valley with no pub. This ruined sheepfold and barn is on the Garburn Pass, an ancient drovers’ route from Troutbeck, overlooking the middle section of the valley. Kentmere Tarn…
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Broad Stand
The last few decades of the 19th-century has been referred to as the ‘golden age of climbing’ in the Lake District and one of the eminent exponents of rock climbing during this time was Walter Parry Haskett-Smith. Haskett-Smith was 23 years of age when he began to pioneer the early routes on many Lakeland crags.…
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Borrowdale
January 2011 and a smidgeon of snow persists in the gullies of the Central Fells. I’m at about the 670m contour on the north-east slope of Ullscarfe. Just below a knoll that’s named High Saddle. Below is Borrowdale, and the settlement of Stonethwaite which was, in the 13th-century, a medieval vaccary for Fountains Abbey, over…
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Pike o’ Blisco
O the month of May, the merry month of May, So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green! O, and then did I unto my true love say: “Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my summer’s queen! A poem by Thomas Dekker (c. 1572–1632) Descending out of the mist and heading for Pike…
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The Battle of Rannerdale
Nicholas Size, in his 1930’s novel ‘The Secret Valley’, tells the story of Norman attempts to quell the armed resistance of the Norse settlers of Lakeland. In the 1070’s Boethar the Younger chose Buttermere valley as his base to defend Lakeland and to carry out guerrilla attacks against the Normans. Before the modern road around…
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Loft Crag from Pike o’ Stickle
The Langdale Pikes is perhaps the best-known skyline in the Lake District. From Great Langdale, the towering pikes of Harrison Stickle, Loft Crag and Pike o’ Stickle are dramatic and majestic and were an early attraction for the first tourists. One such tourist was Joseph Budworth, a soldier and writer who travelled to the Lake…
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Dow Crag and Goats Water
The great buttresses of Dow Crag in the Coniston Fells down which the vindictive Geoffrey Westcott fell to his death after attempting to shoot Rowf who had been making his way along the foot of the crags. Perhaps not the best panegyric for a fellwalker but Mr. Westcott is a fictional character and Rowf is…
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The Priest’s Hole
The view from the Priest’s Hole, a cave high on the side of Dove Crag and long-established bivouac but so especially since the BBC included it on their series “Secret Britain“. Access can be a little tricky and there has been at least one fatality as a result of the programme. When I was there,…
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Derwentwater
I wanted to post a photo of Castle Crag today, the smallest Wainwright, but I couldn’t find a decent image, just a long-range shot from Swanesty How near Grange. Instead, I found this photo of Derwentwater taken, by coincidence, on the same day as my photo of Honister Pass posted four days ago. It actually…
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Honister Pass
Looking back on a long slog up to Littledale Edge from Gatesgarth on a glisky autumnal morning. 24 hours earlier the Lakes had been inundated by a tumultuous downpour with 75 mph winds forcing the abandonment of the 2008 Original Mountain Marathon (OMM) that “could have ‘turned mountains into a morgue’” according to one sensationalist…