Diary: heading south for some detestable ridges and hilltop bingo

Hillwalking trips southward from Scotland to the Lake District always seem worthwhile – although it does help, admittedly, to be a long-term fan of the area with family connections that serve as a base camp. My own latest foray down Windfarm Alley (aka the M74) came last Thursday until Sunday and provided the usual moments of interest and different-from-Scotland situations.

The most obvious difference is in terms of busyness. Or that’s the theory, at least. Over the years, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard Scotland-based walkers say something along the lines of “Why bother going down there, when the hills are swarming with people and the Highlands are empty?” Well, leaving aside (a) the hint of misanthropy that accompanies such sentiments and (b) the question of whether the solitude-lover has ever been to the Cobbler or Glen Coe on Glasgow Fair weekend, there is surprising scope for finding quiet upland country in the complicated chunk of land to the west of the top bit of the M6. For sure, opt for Helvellyn-by-the-edges on a sunny summer Sunday and the linear masses on the Striding Edge skyline as seen from Red Tarn will make you laugh/gasp/fume according to temperament. It’s like a clip from Zulu. But there are other ways, and the traditional method of finding a bit of space is the obvious one: avoid the main paths. Almost everyone – at a guesstimate it feels upward of 80 per cent – sticks to the main ridges and approach-slope highways as though there was a law against straying. So sneaking up by some grassy gully or craggy corner can be very quiet – until the main summit is reached, after which there is surely no harm in a bit of people-watching for an hour or two, as the masses march along with their outdoor-magazine fashions and their de rigueur twin-pole sets. Or, alternatively, you can chance upon a day that is oddly quiet for no apparent reason – and last Friday was one such day. I teamed up with my usual Cumbrian sidekick, Gordon Ingall – one of those walkers who has done a huge amount of stuff without any fanfare and who just gets on with it week-on-week. He’s been round all the Munros, Corbetts and Grahams, has 100+ ascents of several of the fells on his Lakeland doorstep, and recently completed the 40-mile Keswick-to-Barrow fundraiser for the 38th time – more than anyone else – in an entirely respectable eight-and-a-quarter hours. (Even more respectable given that he lost much of last summer to a broken leg courtesy of a slip on the approach to Suilven.) Friday’s plan was that Gordon would show me round various Borrowdale fells which I’d somehow omitted to climb despite numerous visits going back almost 30 years. Start at Seatoller, follow the rough ridge from Bessyboot to Glaramara via Rosthwaite Cam and Dovenest Crags, then push on to Allen Crags (where I had been before), eat at the Esk Hause shelter – the kind of busy coming-and-going path-crossroads that you definitely don’t get in the Highlands – then angle out to Seathwaite Fell, drop to the Styhead path and finish with a slog back up and over Base Brown. All of which, as anyone familiar with the area will know, is mainline-busy in terms of walker-traffic, especially the Esk Hause / Sty Head section. Yet in almost eight hours out, in better-than-expected weather (it siled down just after the start, so we sat under a tree, but then didn’t really rain again until the horrible greasy-slabby descent of Sour Milk Gill at the end), we saw a grand total of 22 people. That’s not met – actually saw. The skylines were empty, likewise the line-of-sight paths. As we wriggled down the west side of Seathwaite Fell to hit the Styhead Gill bridge, Gordon remarked that he couldn’t ever recall seeing the main path – we were looking along a good mile of it – completely deserted mid-afternoon in reasonable weather. Two theories were aired as to the quietness. Gordon’s suggestion was that everyone had been scared off by my splendid new (well, new-secondhand) garment: a 1970s-era Soviet Union trackie top. It might be a bit dated in its politics, and isn’t exactly the latest in designer hillwear (I’m never likely to feature on the cover of TGO anyway), but it is warm and cosy – and hey, you can’t argue with 50p from a village hall jumble sale.

Gordon was convinced that the CCCP lettering and accompanying hammer-and-sickle badge was having an effect (and right enough, the only spell approaching normal busyness, around Esk Hause, when we met 17 of the 22 people, coincided with the cagoule covering up any suggestion of communist leanings). A more credible theory, however, came that evening, courtesy of my better half. The spate of late April / early May public holidays, she argued, allied to a general lack of spending money, had skewed the first part of the tourist season, such that people had crammed in early and now the place was half-deserted. This would be hard to prove short of seeing week-by-week trading figures, but even the roads were quiet, so maybe there is something in it. Incidentally, the Bessyboot to Glaramara ridge is a particularly rough bit of country that took – as Gordon predicted – more than twice as long on the ground as the map distance of just two kilometres suggested. Later, I dug out my 1973 copy of Baddeley’s guide to the Lake District – a useful, nicely written and almost forgotten book. In it, the editor R J W Hammond has this to say of the ridge in question: “The north-east spur, Rosthwaite or Chapel Fell, is entirely detestable.” And so to Saturday, when we reconvened further east to wander over little Arnison Crag (very nice), Birks (very blowy) and St Sunday Crag (less blowy and pleasant as ever) to reach the real target, the complicated, crag-indented, confusing-in-mist dome of Fairfield. We got there in good time because, for the second time in a fortnight, I wanted to watch a hill race from its high point. It was the Fairfield Horseshoe race, which goes clockwise round one of the classic Lakeland circuits in a startlingly fast time. Gordon is no slouch and has climbed Fairfield around 115 times, but reckons it takes him five hours or more to complete the horseshoe. The race record is 75 minutes, and this year the entire field of 298 (barring two retirees) finished in under two hours 56 minutes. As on Dumyat ten days’ earlier, the field was remarkably bunched: 272 had reached the turn within 30 minutes of the leader.

We were mainly there to cheer on Eddie Dealtry, who wears the green Kendal vest (or, when running in Scotland, the purple vest of Ochil Hill Runners). He predicted it would take him 75 minutes just to reach the main summit, but he was there in 68 and went on to finish in a minute over two hours. The summit leader – and eventual winner – was Morgan Donnelly of the Borrowdale club, who will surely have run along that “entirely detestable” ridge a few times. He reached Fairfield, via Heron Pike and Great Rigg – around 6km distance with 800 metres of ascent – in 45 minutes. Seeing someone with such speed and nimbleness over rough ground is always impressive – and there was also an entertaining sideshow courtesy of the two summit marshals, one of whom called out the approaching runner’s race number while the other marked it down on a clipboard. This started smoothly enough, but the number-caller gradually wandered further and further from the clipboard man, who was seated at one of the various felltop cairns. The leaders were allowed to turn for the descent over Hart Crag without coming any nearer than five metres to the Fairfield cairn once their numbers had been noted – whereas in Scotland, the tradition seems to be that runners circumnavigate the cairn. But, as time went on, and as the middle part of the field came through, Eddie included, the number-caller drifted 20 or more metres from the cairn. This had two effects. One was that the course for these runners was a little shorter than for the leaders (and also than for the backmarkers, as the marshal eventually returned to the cairn). Also, it became steadily harder for his companion to hear the numbers as they were called, especially with the wind – a north-westerly – blowing in an unhelpful direction.

After a while, and with the prospect of the number-caller soon being halfway to Rydal, the clipboard man shouted (in the manner of Cameron to Clegg in the rose garden – well, sort of), “Come back! Make them come closer.” He then added to us, sotto voce, “...apart from the Ambleside runners” – thus revealing which club he ran for and drank with. Very entertaining, especially when a walker with a wicked sense of humour shuffled towards the cairn and called out “66”. Confusion momentarily broke out, before the number-caller went into tetchy-stern mode. “Are you in the race?", he asked. "Well, shut up then.” One of the genuine runners – arriving amid a large bunch such that the number-calling resembled a frantic bingo session – threw in a joke of his own by shouting “House!” It was all good stuff, and cheered us as we wandered off towards Hart Crag with the last few stragglers coming by. All that wilderness and empty-quarter stuff is fine up to a point, but there's a lot to be said for having your hills busy.

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