Day 3: Rosthwaite to Grasmere

Weather: Stunning to start, clouding over later

Distance covered today: 14.5 km (9.0 mi)

Last night's B&B: Royal Oak Hotel

% Complete: Cumulative distance: 21.2%  64.3km Total Ascent/ Total Descent 635m/ 652m

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 3 (click!)

The walk out of Borrowdale is one for the connoisseur.  The exquisite contrast between lush green fields in the valley and the stark brown mountains on all sides is breath-taking.  Wainwright argues that “the Lake District is the loveliest part of England and Borrowdale is the fairest of its valleys”.  The buildings of Rosthwaite are more or less unchanged since he roamed these parts, and even then they had been around for a very long time. I have always argued that the architecture of rural England uniquely compliments the environment.  Strict planning laws reinforce the status quo, despite the economic opportunities that these preclude. Anyone walking along the beautiful Stonethwaite Beck on an ancient track flanked by dry-stone walls will fervently hope that these laws prevail.

Not, of course, that the Lake District is in any way a normal environment.  I learned recently in a fascinating book about a shepherd in the Lake District that only 43,000 people actually live here. They minister to the needs of 16,000,000 visitors every year, a ratio perhaps more usually associated with a major theme park.  These visitors spend £1 billion a year in the local economy.  The vast majority of them and especially those actually spending serious money, visit in the few short months when the deluge abates (or, at least I fervently hope, it abates).  Apart from tourism, almost all the remaining economic activity is agriculture, essentially sheep and cattle farming.  The travails of the livestock industry in the UK are very well known, especially in environments like the Lake District where the opportunities for innovation and intensive farming are almost non-existent. Yet the cattle and especially the sheep are entirely responsible for the way that the fells appear. As in almost all of the rest of England, nothing in the natural environment is as it was before man changed it, first through tree felling, then agriculture and finally the industrial revolution. So the least rewarded guardians of the very essence of what the visitors seek are facing long-term ruin. Someone better do something about it…..

Which brings me back to the Royal Oak in Rosthwaite.  I left you last post with a reluctant climb-down from the steely face-off between myself and the staff and residents of the Royal Oak. By the time I had written the post in the TV room, while watching the election exit polls with a couple of residents who admitted impishly that they were breaking the rules of etiquette for even showing interest in politics, I was beginning visibly to soften. At breakfast, I was amazed to observe myself exhibiting the very best of St Aidan’s manners (my Jesuit school), and the staff and guests seemed also to have warmed to me.  On the white table cloth, the butter was a work of art, the marmalade served in a silver bowl (none of those annoying plastic containers and oily foils), and the Earl Grey served with tea-leaves and a strainer. The English breakfast was perfect. Most of the tables were now talking to me, the only exception being the thirty-something, who in the morning light appeared to be more of a forty-something, ostentatiously ignoring me!  By the time I left the Royal Oak, going the wrong way of course, I had decided I would like to take Veronica there. What a transformation!

Digressing back to last night is a psychological expedient for avoiding the present.  I finally face the decision of the journey. In principle, I was intending tomorrow to climb the third highest peak in Britain, Helvellyn, and from there, by way of a precipitous scree decline, proceed to traverse Striding Edge. My good friend Bob informs me that his Grasmere B&B host, a mountain rescue man, had recovered a body of a man who had slipped off Striding Edge and rolled three kilometres to a stop! Helvellyn is 950m high, compared with Dent Hill, 352m!  Climbing almost three times that height when I am already very tired seems a big ask! Even if I made it, I suspect I would be very wobbly on the Edge. The final arbiter is the weather. I promised Veronica I wouldn’t even attempt it if the weather wasn’t perfect. A cold front is closing in bringing rain and wind and my host here tells me that I would be in danger and anyway see nothing in the cloud and mist. He also claims that the alternative route which also demands a prodigious climb (sigh!) is very nearly as attractive.

I’ll take the low road….   The wisdom of old age or pragmatic cowardice?

The Royal Oak Hotel

Sheep in Borrowdale

The path towards Greenup Edge pass

Sheets of water

Getting ever more energetic as the slope rises

Beautiful Borrowdale from on high

Water everywhere

Eagle Crag

Africa or England?

The work of glaciers

Snow on Scafell Pike

A tiny tarn on the top

Outer space!

Over the pass of Greenup Edge, looking down to the Grasmere Valley

Startling formations on the way down to Grasmere

Grasmere architecture

The Elevation Profile

Day 2: Ennerdale Bridge to Rosthwaite

Weather: Mostly sunny, cool following breeze, perfect Distance covered today: 24.6km (15.3mi) Last night's B&B: Stork Hotel % Complete: Cumulative distance: 16.5%: 49.8km Total Ascent/ Total Descent  719m/ 738m GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 2 (click!)

So much of what I said in my in my treatise on Wainwright yesterday turns out in the event to be wrong, that I have to reappraise! The route yesterday might have been tightly prescribed for geographical reasons. Today, on the other hand, lent much scope for individual invention. I might have suspected as much early on. At breakfast, fights broke out about the right route options to take. A particularly well-informed Antipodean opined that on the basis of his half dozen guides, his membership of some obscure Wainwright group on the web, and the general superiority of Antipodeans, a particular route would be optimal. I was asked what route I was taking. I mumbled I was following the new Wainwright guide. My cover was blown when it was established that this Wainwright, Martin, is in no way related to Alfred (as if relationship could confer legitimacy on route selection!). I finished my breakfast quickly and left.

The fundamental point though, is correct. Wainwright’s wishes not to have a path slavishly delineated along his choices are well respected. There are few waymarks along the way indicating the Coast-to-coast path, and those that do are clearly doing so for practical safety or private property reasons. Once one is solidly out in the country, the choices become legion. It is as Wainwright would have wished.  So much so, that the chances of getting lost are very real.

This produces a different sort of behaviour amongst the walkers.  There are far more individuals intently consulting their maps and guidebooks than on national routes, and more interaction between them. There is also a distinction between the young and fit, and the elderly majority. The youngsters naturally head for the high routes as Wainwright himself would have done, while the rest of us earnestly seek the softer options.

During one particularly long, but gentle ascent, I very gradually overtook an older couple, and was hugely pleased to be complemented on my “engine”.  As it happened, our paths crossed later at undoubtedly the most scenic Youth Hostel in Britain, Black Sail Hut, where I was having a bite to eat. Sometime later, I got myself horribly engorged in a bog, only to find Mike and Paula on a well-kept path just 20 yards up and to my right, calling me to join them. We started to walk together and they commented on the fact that almost all the walkers were foreigners, mostly from former British colonies, something I have often noted. It remains for them and me a complete mystery that the most beautiful parts of this country are visited mostly by foreigners.

Further up the hill, Mike and I got into a heated argument about which side of a frothing beck we should be climbing. He was using a traditional 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey map and a magnetic compass, and I was using a brand-new, pre-programmed Garmin satnav with the Ordnance Survey route planned by myself and uploaded digitally to the unit.  I couldn’t possibly be wrong, could I?  I was!  Veronica (and Chris) will be delighted!  To be fair, as we parted many miles further on, he did have the good grace to suggest that subsequently, my machine had saved us from a few poor choices which would have required painful correction.

Mike and Paula were tiring visibly by the time we reached Rosthwaite and I was in no good condition myself. On reaching my hotel, my mood wasn’t improved to find that my en-suite bathroom wasn’t, that there was no wifi connection in the bedrooms, that there are no radios or TVs in the rooms, and that dinner is a single, set menu, to be served promptly at 19:30!  When I complained about the lack of TV on election night, I was told, “our standard of guest objects to having television in its bedrooms”.  I ordered a lager, only to be told “We only serve beer”.

Bristling, I showed up for supper, only to find that I had failed fundamentally to understand the ethos. This is Fawlty Towers in Cumbria! The guests, all perfectly happy with the arrangements, were straight out of central casting! Their conversation was hilarious. I pulled out my laptop to start composing this post, and there was affronted silence throughout the dining room.  I refused the lentil soup, only to hear a conversation elsewhere about how, when we were young, not eating your dinner meant not having your pudding.  There was a fascinating discussion about Greece and Europe; only about five years out of date.  I was even propositioned by a thirty-something, clutching a highly intellectual tome, wanting to know what it was like to walk Coast-to-coast. (Dunno luv, just been at it for two days!).

Yet for all my cynicism, they were all really enjoying themselves. They do gentle walks from lunch to tea-time, not ludicrous, long-distance paths. The dinner was truly delicious, better than any I have had on half a dozen long walks. They loved each other’s company and the officious politeness of the female maitre’d.  I enjoyed the white table cloths and the heavy silver, and coffee served afterwards in small cups in the sitting room beside the log fire.

I am the Neanderthalic misfit, not them....

Forces once again. Such an appropriate Northern name for a waterfall

First proper view of Ennerdale Water approaching it from Ennerdale Bridge

Robin Hood's Seat. Our green clad hero certainly got around!

Ennerdale Water in the sunshine

A tree in silhouette, in case you couldn't decipher it!

Given all the water descending the mountains, the path was often just a stream

A little black lamb for Phyllis. There were thousands of white sheep with black lambs. Why? Black sheep in the family?

Sunshine pointillating the trees

They got crazy black cows as well, with long hair, and they eat grass. Cool....

And so to the mountains! I have to get over that!

Black Sail Youth Hostel; possibly the best sited youth hostel in the entire universe!

The closest replica of High Cup on the Pennine Way that I've seen anywhere

This is Paula and Mike. Our paths crossed a few times after which we walked together for miles. They were great company!

Mike kindly took a picture of me!

A fantastic view of Buttermere from on high!

After the ascent the descent. You can hardly see it, but the first objective was Seatoller at the bottom of the hill. Then a further trek to Rosthwaite.

Passing on the way this unusual sculpture celebrating one of the last working slate mines in Cumbria

Paula and Mike descending, helped by a sign

How can there be such lush green fields below such rugged mountains?

Gorgeous bridge over the River Derwent

The days elevation profile

Day 1: St Bees to Ennerdale Bridge

Weather: Heavy rain with westerly gale, clearing later

Distance covered today:25.2 km (15.7 mi)

Last night's B&B: Lulu's Bistro

% Complete: Cumulative distance: 11.9 %: 25.2 km Total Ascent/ Total Descent  967m/ 879m

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 1 (click!)

And so, to work!  Time to get serious!  As predicted, the weather was appalling this morning, but was forecast to improve around lunch time. I set out as late as I reasonably could with a view to the day’s challenge, but it was still raining cats and dogs with a howling wind and I got it in the teeth; literally!  One might reasonably expect that a walk from the Irish Sea to the North Sea would require an easterly trajectory.  But no!  In the worst traditions of the designers of the National Trails, Mr Wainwright chose to send his devotees westwards from St Bees, which for me meant right into the teeth of the gale!  He comments on this devilish intent in his guidebook and helpfully points out that even after one has walked 5km, one will still be west of St Bees! His advice?  Ah well, never mind! The view was worth it!

It would have been beautiful if I could have seen any of it. One is supposed to be able to see the Isle of Man from here, but that is a joke. I could hardly see the edge of the cliff!  I did consider avoiding the whole experience and just heading eastwards to join the path at a civilised junction, but that stupid spirit that cunningly invades the psyche of all long distance walkers, just says no! Why?

Later in the day, I experienced another of the traits that Mr Wainwright has in common with the designers of the National Trails. Like them, faced with an option to traverse an obstacle ahead, where the alternatives are either to take a sensible contour path around the obstacle, or to confront it head on and go over the top, they always go over the top! The example today was Dent Hill and I suffered!!  

Given all this parallel thinking, it is interesting that Wainwright was no fan of the National Trails. The fact that the Coast-to-coast is not a National Trail and is not represented as an official path, let alone a National Trail, on any Ordnance Survey map, is an indication of this philosophy.  Wainwright explains it in his Coast-to-coast guide. He says he wants “to encourage in others with the aid of maps the ambition to devise their own cross-country marathons and not be merely followers of other people’s routes: there is no end to the possibilities for originality and initiative.” Long-suffering readers of these blogs may recall that over the whole of my LEJOG adventure, I too shared something of this view. I commented frequently about the loss of freedom experienced at the start of an official route and the sense of adventure and liberation when on my own, devising my own progress between the national paths.

The irony of course is that when Wainwright first devised his route, the Pennine Way was the most popular walking route in the country and was being physically abused by the sheer number of walkers. He saw his Coast-to-coast as a free and romantic alternative through even more attractive countryside.  The reality today is that around ten times more people walk the Coast-to-coast than the Pennine Way, and guess what?   The vast majority, including myself, slavishly follow his suggested routing alternatives!!  Meanwhile, the Pennine Way has been substantially restored and in its pristine, unpopulated austerity, is now probably closer to the ideal he supported.….

None of this helped me up and down Dent Hill, but I did it anyway, and actually, I’m grateful I did. Today’s walk traversed three distinct regions; firstly the seascape around St Bees Head, so redolent of the Pembrokeshire and Cornish coastlines; then the drab and sadly depressed industrial hinterland of the coastal belt of towns. As in Cornwall and Wales, the demise of the industrial revolution is everywhere evident.  Its demand for coal, iron ore, tin and copper has been replaced by very little, leaving these poor villages as nothing other than dormitories for those lucky enough to get a job somewhere else. Finally, over the peak of Dent Hill, like the switching on of a light bulb, I had my first view of Lakeland, an unspoiled kaleidoscope of beautiful moors and valleys, streams and forests; a delicious foretaste of what is surely to come tomorrow.

Assuming of course, after Dent Hill, that I can actually walk at all!

Sherry and Bill at breakfast this morning

I collected my pebble from the beach here, for transport to Robin Hood's Bay, by tradition

Heading out along St Bees Head

Fleswick Bay separates the North and South Heads

Exquisite formations

Gorse everywhere!

The end of the North Head

A sandstone quarry. What multi-millennial event laid down those white sands in amongst the brown?

The Heads from behind

A tribute to Coast-to-coast walkers. Thank you!

Depressed Moor Row

Wainwright everywhere!

2-up 2-down terraces in Cleator

Eerie Pine forests, reminiscent of Kielder

The Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in the distance

Looking back to the coast from the summit of Dent Hill

A startling change on the other side

Convoluted valleys on the way down

My first view of Ennerdale Waters; an objective for tomorrow

Profile of the day's walk. Apparently I started 134m below sea-level. It felt like it!

Day 0.9 On the train to St Bees

As the train speeds northwards, the sky seems to be changing faster than the accents. It is still the middle of the afternoon, but it’s getting darker and darker. The clouds are dense and threatening and I’ve just looked up the weather forecast to be greeted by the news that the Met Office has issued a flood warning for the Northeast!  After a bone dry April, this is excellent timing!  Still, after years of really good luck, I can’t really complain.

I hadn’t intended to write a post today, but I can’t resist. I was having difficulty connecting to the internet on the train and asked an official for some assistance. “The Internet is the Devil’s work!” he intoned in a voice loud enough to attract the attention of the entire coach. “If God had wanted there to be an Internet, he wouldn’t have invented mouths. You should all learn to talk to each other!  Go and talk to the train manager if you want help!”

A while later, he returned to collect rubbish, and he caught me fiddling with some electronic gadget. This displeased him yet again. “If you want stuff like the Internet, you should vote Labour. You should all vote Labour. The reason I’m collecting rubbish from Tory Southerners is because the Tories sold the railways and I lost my engineering job!”  To the huge amusement of fellow passengers he looked at me as if I was the embodiment of a Southern Tory voter, and in a withering tone exclaimed “I see you’re still helping the devil!”

Of course, being me, I did trot off to visit the Train Manager, mostly fascinated that such a person exists, but her strong recommendation was that I shouldn’t even try to use the train’s system, because they are trying to introduce a new one and it doesn’t work. “Buy a newspaper!” she advised to the amusement of the rubbish man who had suddenly made an appearance behind me!

All this did much to improve my mood, which had been as dark as the clouds, rushing to get ready to leave Veronica and home, trying to pack too much, and suffering from the worst cold known to man. Now, in an instant, I’m among the characters of my walks. How do they suddenly materialise?  Outside my window right now I have my first view of those marvellous moors, so reminiscent of the Pennines, all brown, beautiful and definitely foreboding.

I’ve also had a fascinating conversation with a young eighteen year-old named Jack. He is off on a fishing expedition, a pastime which he thoroughly enjoys. He lives a complicated life. He was orphaned at the age of four, but recently took the decision to try to find his birth mother. It was an emotionally wrenching experience, but he succeeded and he now spends time with both families. He was in fact travelling from one to the other, and I witnessed at the start of the trip the real affection of his adopted father. He plays rugby and football, but his real passion was base-jumping, until last year he broke his back in an eighteen foot fall. He is mostly recovered, though he can’t play sport and is clearly uncomfortable sitting.  I told him about Veronica and he suggested she should take up fishing!

To cap it all, I’ve just had a most entertaining dinner with two delightful Canadians (Phyllis and Rob, there is a pattern here!  Are all Canadians delightful?)  Sherry is understandably slightly apprehensive about the task ahead and I was able to reassure her, Phyllis, on the basis of your experience, and your consolatory advice to me, that with care and common sense, the walk is doable.

I’ll start to find out tomorrow!

A poor picture of the coast beside the track heading from Carlisle to St Bees

Lulus, my B&B. Right in the station building. I look down from my bedroom onto the platform. Wonderful!

High Street, St Bees

The Sleeping Garden in honour of Josephina de Vasconcellos, containing three of her works. She was a noted Lakeland sculptor 

The impressive portals of the St Bees Priory, in typically brown Lakeland sandstone