Saturday 10th September 2016
While travelling to Scotland for my holiday last September I had stopped off at a section of the Lake District that had only just been incorporated into the National Park, and while coming back I likewise stopped off in a new section of another National Park: the Yorkshire Dales. The Howgill Fells were savagely cut in half when the National Park was created with the northern fells being missed out. On first August this year the National Park was enlarged by twenty-four percent and now included the whole of the Howgill Fells in the Yorkshire Dales. I came off the motorway at Tebay and after a tiny distance stopped off in the little farming community of Longdale. Although the weather was very good with the sun shining under blue skies, it was quite clear that there had been just as much rain there as I had endured in Scotland and soon encountered paths that were thick with mud. I was following Wainwright’s direction as given in walk fifteen of his guide to Walks on the Howgill Fells, which directed me across the beck and up through a lovely wooded area into a field full of sheep.
Once I reached a track on the other side of the field I had a long, dreary walk slowly gaining height towards the heart of the Howgill Fells ahead of me. After almost two weeks of poor weather in Scotland the sun had finally come out and I had driven down under clear skies but as the day progressed it become cloudier with hazy sunshine, although this was still a welcome change after the poor weather that I had endured in Scotland. The path was initially very good, but after coming across a deep pool of water that blocked the way, the track dwindled away and I dropped onto a tiny path that climbs through the valley of Uldale. This path was very muddy being little more than a sheep trod that made this an arduous trudge as I made my way up the valley. The path never improved all the way up the valley until eventually I reached the top of the pass at Blakethwaite Bottom where the dramatic Carlin Gill snakes down from the other side of the pass. The top of the pass is marked by the Blakethwaite Stone, which doesn’t look significant, but on a map it is vitally important.
The old county boundary for Yorkshire used to follow the Carlingill Beck up to the Blakethwaite Stone and at that point turns uphill to reach the eastern ridge. The boundary of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, until recently, followed this old boundary line since it was thought that the Yorkshire Dales should be wholly within Yorkshire. However in 1974 the counties in England were radically changed and the county boundary moved so that the whole of the Howgill Fells now lies in Cumbria. For many years this old county line marked the boundary between the protected and the relatively unprotected, but now the whole of the Howgill Fells are within the protection of the National Park and I turned to climb the steep, grassy ridge following this now obsolete boundary. At the top of the ridge, on Docker Knott, I was so exhausted from the effort of the climb that I stopped and had my lunch. The walk didn’t get any easier after eating as I descended steeply into Churn Gill only to climb all the way up the even steeper bank on the other side.
Steep sided valleys and grassy ridges are the hallmark of the Howgill Fells and this walk was treating me to a clear demonstration of these steep grassy ridges. When I eventually, exhaustedly, reached the top of Simon’s Seat I could finally relax as the walk was now downhill all the way. I was on the highest peak in the newly incorporated section of the Howgill Fells and the heart of these fabulous hills could be seen clearly rising up to The Calf, the highest point in the range. That was behind me as I headed back north along the ridge that drops gradually and narrows slightly before rising to the Ordnance Survey pillar atop Middleton. The view ahead of me as I slowly descended was quite striking and I stopped several times to take in the far reaching vista and enjoy the sunshine that I had seen so little of in Scotland. At the bottom of the valley is a beautiful old footbridge made of stone that crosses a stream with an oddly familiar name: Langdale Beck.
I was now in the valley of Langdale, which is not to be confused with the Langdale in the heart of the Lake District. At the start of this holiday I walked through a Borrowdale that is not the well-known valley in the Lake District and at the end of this holiday I walked through Langdale, but not the one the tourists flock to. This Langdale is a pretty little valley with a lovely beck running through it and a smattering of trees to add to the charm. However the ground underfoot was exceptionally muddy in places which caused me quite a few difficulties, and added to all the other muddy paths that I encountered on this walk it rather soured my impression of the whole thing. The mud was worse than anything that I had seen in Scotland and really put me off the walk, which would have benefited enormously from being carried out in drier weather. The walk ended by passing through farmer’s fields back to the misappropriately named hamlet of Longdale.
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