Friday on Watendlath Fell

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After breakfast at the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in Keswick, once the town’s courthouse and now a Wetherspoons pub, I walk to the bus terminus for the 78 to Borrowdale, departing at 09:50. It’s full of silver heads like me, our senior citizen passes allowing free travel after 09:30. Twenty minutes later, at the crossroads between Rosthwaite and Seatoller, I’m the only person to alight.

Pausing to snap the bus shelter …

… I head up the Stonethwaite valley. For the significance of this shelter I have to go back to the summer of 1969, my third trip to the lakes and first solo. I was sixteen and knew nothing. Not even that in the summer holidays my chances of sauntering into a lakeland youth hostel and securing a bed for the night were zero. After trying Keswick and Buttermere, then trekking up Honister Pass to be turned away at the hostel on the summit, I’d walked dejected and weary under a starlit sky down the other side to Seatoller, where I took the Borrowdale Road towards Keswick. Half an hour out of Seatoller, at a farm behind this shelter, I slipped into a barn piled floor to eaves with hay bales. There I spent a better night than I’d any right to.

Next evening, a Sunday, I sat in the shelter to pass the time till night fell and I could repeat my stay in the hay. An elderly man in dark suit and fedora, on his way home from church, struck up a conversation. Omitting the barn part, I told my story. He had me stay seated as he crossed the lane for a word with a more rustically attired chap applying shears to a hawthorn hedge. When the two returned, second man – the farmer – bade me go to the farmhouse to tell his wife I was to stay in the caravan along the lane.

He didn’t ask where I’d spent the previous night,

Embarrassed but desperate, I did as instructed. A smiling Mrs Farmer told me that if Mr Farmer said I was to have the caravan, then caravan I would have! It was available all week, pending a visit from kin in New Zealand. Man, had I landed on my feet! After six good nights I hooked up with three Pudsey lads who let me share their tent at Seatoller. Back at the farmhouse on my last day, before joining my new pals, I tried to pay but Mrs Farmer was having none of it. A few days earlier she’d deflected my offer of help on the campsite she ran, telling me to just enjoy my holiday. People can be flat out amazing.

So on an icy Friday, fifty-five years on, I’m snapping the bus shelter where a teenager’s fortunes had taken so decisive a turn for the better. Back then a corner of its wooden bench had a cubby hole, eighteen inches square and the same deep, with a hinged lid which, when closed, formed part of the seat. Here the bus driver would leave the daily newspapers for collection but for me it had served as a windshield for my primus while making porridge after my night in the hay of August 1969.

I can’t guarantee there won’t be more tales from yesteryear, given the walk I’m taking today.

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I follow the lane into the valley, Stonethwaite Beck to my left.

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The snow sparkles. Try as I might, I can’t do it justice. These are the best I can do.

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At the Langstrath Inn in the hamlet of Stonethwaite I leave the lane, take the track to the bridge over the beck and follow a path curving east to Willygrass Gill, then sharply north. The going is gentle to begin with but I know I’ll soon be on the short steep ascent to Lingy End, on boulder and scree through deciduous tree.

 

The snow deepens as I turn leftwards and north into the woods, where the going is tougher.

 

As deciduous gives way to snow carpeted moorland, the ascent continues but in gentler mode. I know this route of old and, though now a septuagenarian, I’m finding the going no harder than when I first hared up it as a sixteen year old lad. An unsung quality of the seasoned fell walker is patience. For a climb like this I get legs and brain into first gear, take breaks – but not too many – and adopt a pace I can sustain, confident I’ll get to the top in my own good time …

Willygrass Gill, on its way from Dock Tarn to Stonethwaite Beck ¹

… even if I am but a shadow of the man I once was.

 

This is a route less travelled than Cat Bells. Not a soul do I encounter, this side of Watendlath. But I know these contours. Mark my words, I’m about to reach Dock Tarn – frozen over, I’ll be bound.

See the rocks below, left of that tiny island of bonsai? That blue remembered summer I’d caught perch here, on a rod – a reward from dad for passing my 11 plus in 1964 – with so many ferruled sections it packed away in my rucsack. Of the dozen or so landed, I chose three for killing and gutting at water’s edge. Back at the caravan I fried them in Mrs Farmer’s butter. A myriad tiny bones made for picky eating but the flesh, snow white and rich in fell-tarn flavour, ² pleased my unschooled palate.

 

Leaving Dock Tarn I head due north for Watendlath, a mile distant. It seems further. The snow’s a foot and a half deep and I’m glad of the poles, depicted yesterday on Cat Bells.

Up here I’m using them less to stop myself slipping on ice as to give a little upward thrust and, where I suspect a marshy underlay, to prod that carpet of pristine white before trusting it with my booted feet. My wet  booted feet. Having forgotten gaiters, snow has found its copious way in, twixt boot tongue and woolly socked foot.

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To the west is Helvellyn. Mid distance and centre right we get a peep of Thirlmere, and the A591 from Keswick down through Grasmere and Ambleside to Kendal and the Yorkshire Dales. Crow fly from Dock Tarn to Striding Edge is six or seven kilometres but, with nothing to assist the eye, it could as easily be thirty.

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My first sighting of Watendlath Tarn, setting for the Rogue Herries series by eighteenth century novelist, Hugh Walpole. His brother was Britain’s first prime minister, a Robert Walpole as bent as they come and twice as resourceful. The attendant nepotism is said to have given rise to the phrase, Bob’s your uncle.

 

As it was yesterday, the descent from the fell is beset with perils for the unwary as thick snow gives way to icy track and footpath …

… but, as I had yesterday from Cat Bells and Hause Gate, I make it down in one piece.

 

 

From Watendlath I take the lane, icy and quiet, all the way down to Derwent Water. I’m passed by three or four cars, meet one other walker …

… and am stared at by fellow sentients.

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Looking back on Watendlath Fell and the route I’ve taken.

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Thwaitehouse Beck, on its way to a Watendlath Beck itself headed for Derwent Water.

 

Now the long but for the most part gentle descent is as easy on the legs as on the eye.

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The lane joins Borrowdale Road at Barrow House. The YHA had the hostel here, where dad took us on our first trip to the lakes in July 1963, three months after mum died. With a twenty minute wait for the No. 78 up to Keswick, I potter on the lake shore the way I had back then, enthralled as ever, sixty-one and a half years on.

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The trio on the jetty, young Chinese, admire my camera kit and ask me to snap them on theirs. Well turned out and unfailingly courteous, they and their fellows will be missed – and not just for the money they bring – when the bottom falls out of the international student market.

 

That evening I visit Keswick in-laws for home cooking and good company. Hours later, declining all offers of a “proper” bed, I make my way by moonlit path on frozen meadow and flood plain to the quietly understated comforts of my van. Having passed two nights here I’ll drive south to Ambleside, where I know a rubber tramp friendly spot or two.

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1. Bourne, beck, burn, brook, brooklet, clough, creek, gill, rill, rivulet, stream – let no one say the English language and its dialects lack words for rivers to be.
2. In WW2, with German U-Boat wolf packs taking a devastating toll on merchant shipping in the north Atlantic, alternative food sources had to be found. Perch trawled from Lake Windermere and canned at Bowness did their bit for the war effort.