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?

Blencathra by Fell’s Fell Ridge

Saturday 10th April 2004

At this time of the year on my blog I run out of walks that I have done and in order to keep posting something every week I go back to a walk that I did many years ago that hasn’t previously been covered. However, this practice is not going to work for much longer as I’m soon going to run out of old walks to go on my blog, but that is not a problem yet as I have a fantastic holiday in the Lake District to describe from Easter 2004. Subsequent to this holiday I have returned to the Lake District at Easter more often than not as it is a great time of the year to be walking in the Lakes and a great place to walk at Easter. Previous to this visit I had been to the Lake District on just two occasions and so I was still at this time relatively inexperienced at fell-walking and this showed in the choices that I made and the walks that I did, however this holiday also shows progress compared with my two previous visits. Every time you go to the Lake District you learn a little more about yourself and that fabulous place.

At the start of the holiday I spent all morning on that first day travelling to the Lake District, arriving in Penrith at noon where I caught a bus to Threlkeld and headed straight across the fields at the back of the village to the foot of Hall’s Fell. I stopped only briefly to have my lunch before beginning to climb the steep heather-clad fell. The going wasn’t too bad with a clear path leading me most of the way until I reached the rocks at the top of the ridge and from then on I enjoyed a fabulous scramble while trying to decide the best route across the rocks. Route selection is always part of the challenge on steep scrambles, even if they are on narrow ridges such as this. Bear in mind that I was inexperienced in scrambling at this point, so I was not able to draw on my previous experience to enable me to select the best route. On a number of occasions I clambered up some seriously steep rocks only to find an easier path on the other side that I could have taken.

I have subsequently descended Hall’s Fell Ridge twice, in 2006 and 2011, both times after climbing the much trickier scramble of Sharp Edge on the other side of Blencathra, but I have not climbed Hall’s Fell Ridge again since this first time, which must be a shame as it is a great way of climbing to the top of a mountain. With luck, on that first ascent I was easily able to negotiate the steep rocky ridge and finally reached the summit of Blencathra, known as Hallsfell Top, which lies at the very top of the ridge. When I got to the summit I found that I was in luck again as the cloud that covered the fells to the south was absent not only from the top of Blencathra itself, but over all of the northern fells including Skiddaw which revealed to me magnificent views across the fells and beyond to the Solway Firth and into Scotland. Subsequent visits to the top of Blencathra have almost always been when snow has been on the ground (such as below) and the only exception was at Easter 2011, when I had low cloud.

The best views from the top of Blencathra are towards Derwent Water and Keswick and that was where I now headed proceeding west along the top of Blencathra, which is something I usually do when on the fell even when I’m not descending in that direction as the views west open out gloriously as you walk along the ridge. There is only a small drop to the next top, Gategill Fell, and you don’t lose much height before reaching Knowe Crags, at the end of the ridge, at the top of Blease Fell. This is a fabulous walk along the top of the world with great views ahead towards Derwent Water and the distinctive fells of the north west corner of the Lake District. At the top of Blease Fell a steep descent brought me down the grassy slopes with trails cut through the bracken lower down that led me all the way to the car park near the Blencathra Centre.

There is a great route to Keswick from the Blencathra Centre that wasn’t possible when Wainwright wrote his pictorial guide to the Northern Fells, but is now mentioned in Chris Jesty’s revised edition.  I knew about that route long before the revision came out and I took it now along a footpath behind the Blencathra Centre to the old farmhouse of Derwentfolds, continuing the descent to a footbridge over Glenderaterra Beck where a farmer’s access road brought me within striking distance of the old railway to Keswick. This railway was still active when Wainwright was writing his guides and finally closed in 1972. It is now open as a footpath from the outskirts of Threlkeld all the way to Keswick and is a great walk through the wooded valley of the River Greta with the railway crossing the river nine times on its four mile length. This was a wonderful way to end my first day in the Lake District and set me up for a great holiday to come.