Monday 3rd March 2014
You could hardly imagine a better day for walking –blue sky, white clouds, breezy. It is wet under foot after days of rain, but not unsurpassable; the paths between Silver How and Blea Rigg are easy to follow, but I know where I’m going anyway: I was up here in low cloud two days ago and thrilled myself with my successful navigation, so now it’s just a question of actually seeing where I’m going before I get there. From Silver How the view south to south-west is full of lakes: Grasmere, Rydal Water, Elterwater, Windermere, each more silver than Silver How has ever been. The Coniston fells are huge and snowy, and the Helvellyn range shines white. The route from Silver How to Blea Rigg runs up and down over soft turf and marshy patches, past small tarns, and below crags. There are dozens of miniature summits summoning the walker to leave the path and taste their offerings. Two days ago, in the mist, this area was other worldly: hills appeared and disappeared, changed shape, changed height; I heard voices belonging to people who I never saw. I was encased on my own private mountain, and the same is true today, but with better visibility. Between Silver How and Blea Rigg I do not meet a soul; only upon Blea Rigg does a raven sit on what little is left of the summit cairn and croak at me.
Blea Rigg is rough and rocky, barely separate from the rest of the surrounding upland. The views on this day are vast in all directions: a vertiginous swoop down to Easedale Tarn, Morecambe Bay winking, the Pennines in their solid strip across the country. And above me, the higher tops of the Langdale Pikes, sleeping lions of the Lake District; behind, unseen, but higher still, High Raise, hiding its offering of snow and bog and glorious sights.
I continue up to Sergeant Man with Pavey Ark on my left, in shadow and threatening. I can see Jack’s Rake in its unlikely but definite diagonal line across the rock face. A short scramble to the top of Sergeant Man, patches of snow in nooks in the rock. I drink tea, check my compass and carry on over the open upland to High Raise. The summit cairn is hidden from Sergeant Man but it’s just a question of walking North-West, a compass point I especially like for reasons I may yet expand upon. It feels like moorland up here, vast and featureless and if it wasn’t for the exquisite panorama few people would come up here because there’s nowhere to hide and nothing to explore. But from the summit cairn one of the best views in the Lake District unfolds itself – I can see everything. It is excellent in every direction and as I look, one of the jets that so often scream through the valleys flies exultant around half the panorama: Catbells, Maiden Moor, Dale Head; across Honister Pass, over the sharp dropping away of Honister Crag, the back of Fleetwith Pike, Mellbreak, High Stile, Brandreth, Pillar, Green Gable, Great Gable, Great End, Scafell Pike, Scafell, Esk Pike, Bow Fell, Crinkle Crags, Pike o’ Blisco; then it becomes no more than a white fleck in the sky, flickering out over Cold Pike, Swirl How, Coniston Old Man, Wetherlam. It takes no more than a minute.
But there is more to see than this – Skiddaw and Blencathra in their splendid isolation. A flash of Derwentwater. The Irish Sea. The Solway Coast. Ingleborough. The Helvellyn Range and St Sunday Crag and Fairfield and all its subsidiaries. The lovely Langstrath Beck in the vast trench it has carved for itself over eons. And here are hundreds of memories crowding in of other walks, of swimming naked in Black Moss Pot in the Langstrath valley, of camping in yurts at Seatoller, of my very tall friend realising as we stood atop Scafell Pike that he was ‘the highest thing in England’; of walking the Coast to Coast and playing Monopoly at Helvellyn Youth Hostel and falling asleep to the sound of the stream outside the window. Last time I was on High Raise, a year and a half ago, the air was utterly clean and pure and it was the first time I’d been up there and I recall the delight in checking Wainwright’s diagram of the view and reeling off the names. I linger a long time.
The descent to Easedale Tarn is long and delightful because it involves scrambling and there are few things that I enjoy more than scrambling. You have to walk with your eyes in your feet. The shadows are lengthening in the liquid light, streams converge before reaching the tarn, which is deep true blue. I sit at Easedale Tarn a long time too, having it all to myself, something to cling to at such a popular spot on such a beautiful day. I am always looking ahead, always planning the next walk, idealising future summer days spent swimming in the tarns and reading in the sun. In an ideal world I would never go indoors again.
(photos to follow)
the diminutive walker 