JJ's Ramblings

Chapter: December

Crikey! What a brilliant Wasdale year it has been.

Since I last got some thoughts written down the time has whizzed and the weather throughout the walking season has been mostly superb. I’ve been far too busy in the outdoors (yay) and at work (hiss) to get round to writing but here I am scribbling again. That’s if one CAN scribble on a keyboard. Given a pencil and sufficient spare time, I probably could….

Sometimes it’s good to know when to stop.

The week before Easter brought changeable weather then it all started to improve and I was there in my usual spot in my tent looking up at the mountains. The improvement in the weather obviously affected other people too, and I even spotted Howard from the Wasdale Head Inn gardening! Maybe gardening was an exaggeration – he was tending the window boxes outside the front of the pub making the place look spring-like and welcoming for the first great influx of paying guests at the Easter break. Even the shrubs-in-tubs outside the cottages had started to flower.

I pottered up Mosedale to Black Sail Pass – one of my favourite routes. The views from before and behind improve all the time as one walks along. The plan was to go on from the pass up the scrambly end of Kirkfell and down the dreaded ‘Kirkfell Direct’ and thence back to the tent. The sun was shining and Bob and I rolled up our sleeves and enjoyed the rays warming our bodies and making the whole world seem to be a nicer place in which to play.

I started to feel a bit weak and the higher I got the worse I felt. I was determined to reach the top of the pass then due to my worsening health I planned to sit there in the sun while Bob did an out-and-back to the summit of the fell. Just before the top I stopped and admitted defeat. I was feeling hot and cold and shivery and my nose had started to run. It was difficult to give up so near the top but I knew what the pass looked like in my memories and it would be there for me next time. I left Bob to stride over Kirkfell alone and I started to potter back down Mosedale. Going downhill was physically easier and despite feeling pretty awful and continually stopping to sniff and blow my nose I brightened up considerably. I felt a bit of a failure in a way because I hadn’t even reached my modified target but I knew that I needed a rest and it was unfair to hold Bob up any more. I got back and had a sleep and was amazed to find that my first Wasdale suntan of the year was starting to form.

The first suntan of many this year! The weather has been brilliant – the best Wasdale summer I can remember. We have had countless times when we could sit outside the tent with a cup of tea and enjoy and warmth and gaze up at the wondrous views. The suntan kept being topped up again and again until the second weekend in September when we spent a weekend celebrating a friend’s birthday – camping at the Head as usual - and we all sat outside and closed our eyes and felt the soporific effect of solar radiation. Mmmmmm.  Only after that did the autumn weather begin for us. For a valley with a reputation of always being rainy this summer has proven that allegation to be false. One can only hope that the promised very cold winter will bring some lovely snow to play in on the mountain-tops.

One of my problems is that I have many favourite routes like the Corridor Route for example, and I tend to keep going back to re-do them and some parts of the Wasdale area remain untouched. For my birthday this year a friend who is a landscape photographer gave me a photograph of the Screes (the geological phenomenon not the pub!). We determined that we ought to walk right over the top of them, having never actually been up there properly, and we did it in November, looping around Burnmoor Tarn, Miterdale and then over the summits of Whin Rigg and Illgill Head – this would remove the chance of ankle-twisting on the Screes path along the water’s edge. The views from the top are outstanding; Netherwasdale is hardly ever out of sight and the Isle of Man was clearly visible and I could even make out Snaefell, the island’s mountain. We immediately vowed to return to walk the entire ridge.

A chance invitation to join Guy and his son to walk the ridge in a linear fashion came just two weeks later and so we returned somewhat sooner than we had anticipated. From sitting outside the tent bathed in sunshine just a few weeks earlier we suddenly found ourselves in a small snow shower. Unfortunately it didn’t settle where we were just below the magical 610m / 2000ft line, but the tarnlets were frozen solid in parts and the ground, normally squelchy, was very stiff and hard. We started at the forest near Irton Pike and walked all the way along the top until we ended up at Wasdale Head.

On the visit in November we attended the Memorial Service on top of Gable for Remembrance Sunday. Although the service is to honour war dead, it made me think of all the people who have perished in accidents on mountains.

"Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste: Look well to each step: and from the beginning think what may be the end." - Edward Whymper 1865.

Sometimes it’s good to know when to stop.

Chapter: March

I don’t like crowded places much.

That’s my excuse for only having visited the summit of Scafell Pike twice. I’ve been very close to it many times; I’ve looked at all the visitors, swarming like ants over the boulders and been glad I was several metres away. Maybe I’m turning into a grumpy old biddy. The two times I made it to the trig pillar were both in pretty awful weather – freezing cold with almost zero visibility - and it was a quiet place to be. It was one of those times that if I was silly enough to lick the stones of the pillar, my tongue would freeze and stick to it. I was able to contemplate life for a few minutes before submitting to the cold and dropping down from the top to get warm. I’ve never had a view from the top and I am envious of those of you who can see a vista of all Lakeland on your visits.

I also have a problem with boulder fields – it’s my short stature, you see. It takes a far greater effort for me to clamber over them, as each one is the height of my knees. Or thighs. A walking friend, Andy, describes the summit plateau as ‘the boulder capital of England’; mind you, he is six feet tall and was revelling in the experience of being able to stretch out and float over them all as I struggled behind grunting and cussing.

My enjoyment of peace and tranquillity leads to my seeking out of quieter fell-tops to visit; sometimes the less-travelled ones afford wonderful views of their taller cousins. One of my all-time favourites is little Lingmell. Now, I call it ‘little’ as a sort-of joke as the summit is 800m high – not to be sniffed at. If it was positioned anywhere else but next to the honey-pots of the Scafells and Great Gable, it would be visited far more often.

Why do I like it so much? The views, for one thing. From the top, to the west I can see Lakeland ’s finest valley and if I peer closely I will see my little tent in the Barn Door campsite. To the north is the gable end of (ahem) Great Gable, with its most precipitous side revealing itself to me; Great and Little Hell Gates; scree shoots and scrambles enough to feast on under the Westmorland Cairn - and the Needle and Sphinx are there, invisible from this angle but gagging to be climbed over and through. To the east is Lingmell Col – so pretty and almost Alpine in character, hiding the ‘fearful declivity’ (as Wainwright would almost certainly appell it) of Piers Ghyll. And I haven’t even started on the views of the Scafells….

I’m also a fan of attractive cairns and the one on Lingmell, although a little in disrepair is a beauty. It doesn’t have the beehive-like perfection of the one at Thornthwaite Beacon near High Street, but then Thornthwaite doesn’t have a view of Wasdale. Those of you who visit the Wasdale Web chat-room will know that I like Anglo-Saxon/Norse history and how it has influenced our local dialect words and place names. For anyone who doesn’t go in there, I’ll tell you that Lingmell means bare, heathery hill. There is obviously not much in the way of heather there now; it’s full of bracken – but our forefathers will have enjoyed a ramble through heather-clad slopes. I envy them for that.

Lingmell has two sides to it, both in deep contrast to each other. If you approach from Brackenclose on the south-west side and walk up the backbone of it, you’ll see a smooth slope that is green most of the year, and golden brown when the bracken dries in autumn. It’s an easy yet relentless little ascent to the rocky-crowned summit. On the other side, however, Lingmell is a brooding, fearsome mass of grey cliffs. From Sty Head Pass it looks quite impossible to climb. It reminds me of the Roman god Janus, the two-headed creature who was able to look both forwards and backwards at the end of one year and the start of the next.

If I have half a day to fill or just fancy a short potter out, then Lingmell never disappoints. It is high enough to need woolly hat, gloves and a flask of tea at the top in summer – in other words, a real little mountain.

We were in Buttermere in January at the same time as the hurricane hit. Thankfully we were staying in a camping barn and were safe but we had to take in some refugees (with the barn owner’s permission) who were rendered temporarily homeless due to their tents having been blown away in a 130mph blast of wind.

The rain came at us in angry spinning balls – like something out of a science fiction movie - it was extremely surreal and a little disconcerting. The bedroom had lots of space in to fit in the extra sleepers but no-one got much sleep due to strange noises from one source or another. The wind rattled the windows and doors and at several times the slates on the barn roof made an attempt for freedom but failed. Radio Cumbria reported that it was officially a hurricane - and the biggest blast was a terrible ball of wind at 3am that woke us all up as we waited for the barn roof to fly off (it didn't).

Everyone survived the night and woke to found that the power and phone lines were down in the valley. Radio Cumbria reported that a man found that a live cow had blown into his dining room through his patio doors. He'd cleaned up the glass and tied the cow up in the garden and was wondering what to do next as there wasn't a farm next door...

The BBC said that two black bullocks were trapped on Brampton Road . They were swept down the river Eden and one had an ear tag on with 400/465 on it. They were opposite the tennis courts - the caller said that somebody must own them and please could they come and get them as they were looking very distressed.

There were fallen trees everywhere, some on top of houses. Every single road was covered in debris – glass, stones, slates, branches. Roofs had blown off; not slates; entire roofs. Cows caught in the hurricane and thrown into houses through windows....a ladder stile in Buttermere was lifted off the stone wall it had previously straddled and deposited neatly on the opposite side of the road on the kerb as if a giant had changed its position on a whim.

It would be hard to explain to anyone who wasn't there exactly what the devastation looked like. Imagine the God of Cumbria demanding His tithes. He picked up one tenth of all the trees, all the buildings, all the stone walls, all the rivers, all the lakes, all the livestock, all the woodwork; He then changed His mind and threw them down again. The Winds of the North caught them up and mischievously put them all back in the wrong places.We returned to Buttermere two weeks ago. The difference was amazing – like nothing had ever happened. The ladder stile was no longer standing freely by the side of the road; all the fallen trees were gone and it looked as if the hurricane had never taken place.

I like Buttermere and it’s quite a simple matter to walk there from Wasdale over Black Sail Pass and Scarth Gap. You could have a quick night in the campsite there and then try a return route over Fleetwith Pike, Brandreth, Grey Knotts, Green and Great Gables. On second thoughts, it might be better to go over the tops on the first day. Places like Grey Knotts and Brandreth tend to be unhurried places with few visitors. On busy weekends they suit me just fine.

I don’t like crowded places much.