Early Birds
The alarm buzzed at 5:30 am, which I like to think of as a polite suggestion rather than a command. However, one of our number was on a mission. No snoozing allowed. So by 6 am, Ami and I were on the road from Measham, first grabbing a quick coffee from the Esso garage — essential fuel for any would-be Wainwright hunter. The plan was to meander across some of the smaller Wainwrights to get us going – baby steps, you might say.
We cruised along the A50 through Stoke-on-Trent and then up the M6, stopping at Lancaster Services for some breakfast. Nothing like a Full English to remind you that the hills await, although “nothing like a Full English” was exactly what we had. We did get breakfast from Greggs though. Is 8am too early for a Greggs Chicken Bake? We ate outside to avoid any possibility of “Greggs Dandruff” in the car.
By mid-morning, we were driving into the Lake District via Windermere and Ambleside, the landscape slowly unfolding into fells, valleys, and the occasional “Are we there yet?” from me. Our first walk started from a car park at the Drunken Duck pub.
Black Fell: The Underfoot Underdog
After a ten-minute downhill stroll on the road, we began the climb up Black Fell — the second smallest Wainwright. At just 323 m, it’s modest, but as they say, “Good things come in small packages… and slightly more manageable ascents.”
Black Fell may not shout for attention, but its quiet elegance makes it a rewarding climb. The summit is a gentle grassy dome, yet the views are unexpectedly wide, stretching across the surrounding fells and down into the valleys and across Windermere. There’s a serene, contemplative feel here — a perfect spot to pause and drink in the early-morning light.
Black Fell has two tops. The real summit hides like a shy guest at a party. At the top, we discovered both a physical geocache and an EarthCache, because even tiny hills like to have secrets. The views were pleasingly broad — perfect for a quick admire-and-breathe session.
Silver How: Steep Ascent, Sweet Reward
Next stop: Grasmere. We parked in the village and set off towards Silver How. At 395 m, it’s slightly bigger than Black Fell, though the ravine ascent had us wondering if Wainwright was having a laugh. Our path up took us along the fairly gentle path alongside Grasmere and then cut right through a very steep ascent. It really was very steep. We definitely aren’t in Kansas any more.
Silver How lives up to its name with slopes that catch the sun, silvering the grassy ridges and adding a sparkle to the panorama. Its top is modest, marked by scattered stones, but the surrounding vistas are expansive: Grasmere below, the high fells of the Fairfiled Horseshoe and the Helvellyn range rising in the distance. It’s a summit that feels both accessible and rewarding, a gentle step up in the day’s adventure.
Lunch was a collection of snacks we’d picked up at Lancaster Services — the kind of meal that tastes better when eaten on a fell, probably due to the altitude, fresh air, or the body’s lack of familiarity with climbing.
Down We Go
The descent via Easedale was far nicer than the climb up. Well, apart from when Ami performed an impromptu sit-down on the trail. A few hundred metres further on, we realized her phone had taken a tumble too. Dialling it brought an unexpected hero. A slightly surprised gentleman from Hamilton was walking by. He was literally the only other person on the mountain at this point. He agreed to walk back down and he returned the phone to Ami thankfully undamaged. Crisis averted, although Ami did make a point of zipping her trouser pockets for the rest of the week.
Oh, there was the end point of a puzzle cache down here too. Not that its presence affected my choice of route down. Others on the summit advised the Easedale side was an easy walk down. The puzzle in question was the rather “old skool” The Old Rectory/Allan Bank – The Wordsworth Way, dating from March 2006. I wasn’t even a geocacher back then.
High Rigg, Schmigh Rigg
By mid-afternoon, we tried the road to High Rigg, but my car went a bit haywire on the narrow, overgrown track. I didn’t fancy it, to be honest. At the end of the week it became clear I was being a wimp, and had already done the worst bit, but on this day it looked horrible. So halfway up I executed a dodgy turn and went back again. Later in the week then.
Castle Crag – Bigger than it looks
Instead, we headed to Rosthwaite and after a couple of laps, found a parking spot in the National Trust car park. That’s a perfect launchpad for Castle Crag.
Castle Crag may be tiny at 290 m, but its steep incline and zig-zags through old quarry workings make it feel like a heavyweight. Maybe the fact we’d already climbed 600m of altitude in the day contributed to that too. Wainwright included it, despite the modest size, because it “is so magnificently independent, so ruggedly individual, so aggressively unashamed of its lack of inches, that less than justice would be done by relegating it to a paragraph in the High Spy chapter.” In my own words though, it’s quite steep and very sticky-outey, so it’s well worth a chapter. The prominence is only 75m but to reach it from Rosthwaite we climbed 200m, according to my GPS.
Anyway, the summit view over Borrowdale is absolutely worth the effort. There’s an impressively weird collection of standing stones above the quarry zig-zags. We got lost there for a while before realising the correct way of ascending to the very top, with its War Memorial. Up the top was also King of the Castle – another EarthCache. This one seemed a bit ambiguous in the questioning, but it related mainly to the rocks in the quarried section, so there was plenty of time and opportunity to stare at them and make notes.
Evening in Keswick
We drove into Keswick and checked into our rented flat in the town centre. By the time we’d retrieved the keys, it was gone 7 pm. Clearly the accomodation office was shut at this point, so we had to dig out the bit of paper with the code for the padlock on their keysafe. Similarly a code was needed to drop the barrier in front of my assigned parking space.
A quick shower and snooze later, we ventured out for dinner. We didn’t venture far. The George next door had stopped serving food, so we went to the Royal Oak instead. I went for a steak and ale pie, Ami had a chickpea curry — both excellent and well-earned.
We decided on a fairly late start the following day. It had been a long day and the weather the following day looked good all day, so no rush.
Wainwrights Completed on This Day
