Skiddaw

Sunday 11th April 2004

On this walk I climbed a fell that I had failed to climb the year before due to bad weather. Skiddaw is a three thousand foot high mountain that dominates the scene around Keswick and draws crowds of people up its wide footpaths. The previous year I had tried to climb Skiddaw by the Edge, a narrow ridge that passes over Ullock Pike before rising to the heights of Skiddaw Man. After being thwarted in my efforts then due to the bad weather (although my inexperience may have really been why I turned back – a few years later I would have probably gone up), I was now determined to get to the top so I decided to take the wide tourist route. Most tourists would have actually driven a least a third of the way up, to the car park at the end of Gale Road before starting their ascent, however since I didn’t have a car to use and I preferred a more honest starting point, I started from the Youth Hostel in Keswick crossing Fitz Park to Spoony Green Lane and began with a lovely climb through woodland around Latrigg.

I didn’t divert from my intended destination by being distracted into going to the top of Latrigg, but followed the clear path beyond steeply up the hillside. Eventually the steep climb eased as the path turned to the north-west to reach a fence on Jenkin Hill. I didn’t cross the fence, but turned off the main path keeping the fence to my right while on my way up to Little Man, a prominent mountain that suffers from its close association to Skiddaw, and is even sometimes named after it: Skiddaw Little Man. The only reason I was going to the top was to bag it, however Wainwright failed to recommend the Skiddaw Tourist Route as a way up Little Man and perhaps a mere walk along the ridge to ‘bag it’ does Little Man a disservice. A proper climb of Little Man would be from Millbeck or Applethwaite and is needed to fully appreciate the true stature of this mountain.

I came back down the ridge on the other side of Little Man and rejoined the tourist track to continue up the stony path to the summit of Skiddaw. With warm weather on this Easter Sunday there were many people milling around the top, including a man with a huge aerial on his back making or receiving radio transmissions. I quickly walked north away from the crowds at the summit to the north top, which I found to be curiously devoid of people. In clear weather I’m sure the views northwards are terrific, unfortunately on this occasion I was surrounded by clouds, however as I returned to the summit the eastern slopes opened to reveal stunning vistas of the surrounding country. On my subsequent visits to the top of Skiddaw I have always suffered with poor weather (often snow, which makes finding a suitable picture to accompany this blog difficult), and so I have rarely had a view. On this occasion I had good weather, but patchy cloud meaning that any views were fleeting at best.

Eventually I began to descend loose slopes south-west towards Carl Side with the scenery finally opening up to provide me with glorious sunlit views of the adjacent valleys and across Bassenthwaite Lake. My descent on the loose stones seemed pathless on a featureless unrelentingly steep slope and definitely not to my liking. I would have hated to have tried to walk up it so despite the crowds on the tourist route I thought that was preferable to this hard slog. Having subsequently climbed this steep slope I now know there are paths that take a gentler route up, but there are no good routes up the steep, stony slopes of Skiddaw. A short climb brought me to the top of Carl Side where I was able to view the delicious scenes of Derwent Water to the south; the weather, which had been improving by the minute, were now finally producing the picture postcard scenes that you get in the Lake District.

From Carl Side I headed north along Longside Edge over Ullock Pike and down the Edge, the ridge that I had tried to use as my ascent route the year before. This time I had a fabulous walk in excellent weather with extensive views to the north and with views to the west and south that would keep improving all the way down, while the summit of Skiddaw resolutely held onto its clouds. Once I was off the Edge I turned around and headed back to Keswick through Dodd Wood walking a short distance away from the road for much of the way before heading up to the villages of Millbeck and Applethwaite where there is an amazing vantage point and a diagram that shows a plan of the view before you over Keswick and across Derwent Water with the fells of Borrowdale lining the horizon. By now it was a clear hot day with every hill out of the clouds and a stunning view. Why go abroad when you can have views like this?