On Rainy Scafell, Hot Bacon Butties and Warm Socks

Last weekend, the skies over Liverpool cleared. The temperature soared to nearly 80, and people came out of their houses
blinking, looking up at the sky and saying, "Ah...Eets a scorcha!"

My keen and long-honed travel instinct loaded us briskly into the little C-class and took us to the only place in the country it was raining, the Lake District, to climb Scafell Pike.

(Truly, weather presenters said, "And hurrah! The North West, where it's been coming down buckets since April, will see gloriously clear skies this weekend. All exept the Lake District, which will experience an uncharacteristically bit of unsettled weather.")



Scaffel Pike is called a 'pike' because it is tall and pointy, the tallest mountain in England (978m-ish). It rained steadily all weekend on the massif's craggy fells and scree. They slide right down into, interestingly, the deepest lake in England, Wast Water, which is 287 feet deep and very clear and probably very cold. We were alarmed to see people clinging to hot pink sausage shaped floats -just their heads - bobbing in the lake as we wound along the shore road, which I found disturbing and said, "Gosh I think those are people out there. Look." But B said, "I can't look honey, or we'll be out there with them." The little road winding beneath the giant fells, is just a little narrower than two cars, especially if one of them is full of self-absorbed and single-minded English people muscling down the middle, gorse-covered ledge and lake-bottom plummet on one side, ancient stone wall chipped and battered along its mossy length just at rear view mirror and passenger-face height on the other.

Note: the English drive baby buggies and shopping carts like this too, often sweeping side-to-side in a 'clearing' motion or along the Dairy and Creams section, clacketing along the glinting refrigerator bumper like a locomotive barrelling toward your tender and vulnerable acetabulum pretending deep interest in the On-Offer yogurts and double creams daring you to hold your ground.

The valley that holds the lake is called Wasdale, from the Viking 'Vantsdair', of course, meaning, 'Valley of Water' which is not very helpful, I wouldn't say, if you're giving directions to another Viking in a region with seven huge lakes radiating out of the center of an area streaming with gorges and gullies and rivulets and streams (called 'gills', actually, here is Brian expertly fording a 'gill'. A fine forder he.)



Wast Water is long, about 5 miles, but not very wide, and the slate scree slopes falling straight into the black lake give everything a fjord feel. It would hardly be surprising to see a wooden ship with a dragon head bow creaking past
as it sailed out of the cloud.

Well, we trudged up Scafell Pike - there were a lot of people in twos and threes, some of them running wearing next to nothing but shoes and a hat. It was about 60 degrees or so, but it was hot going. The views were tremendous over the lake and out to the Irish Sea and just to the north, the nuclear power station at St. Bee's Head, where the River Irt which flows from the lake is pumped to the cooling towers.

We were socked in by cloud about 3/4 of the way up just at the base of a narrow valley that I think might be called a 'col' full of scree up which we needed to scramble.

But, to mychagrin, I ran out of steam and we came bac k down.

Back in camp: Hot roasted sausage sandwiches in the rain when you've changed into your comfortable shoes and your socks are dry are delicious.

We are setting off this afternoon for Attempt 2, well provisioned with Bacon Butty ingredients (bacon and butty, I guess), dried blueberries, and a bottle of Reisling. Its name, wonderfully redolent of something you'd drink behind the 7-11, is Black Tower, and is in a bottle textured like a Germanic motte. Very velvet paintings and red upholstery in the basement. It's good though. Fruity. Like us all.

In Wales: The Off-The-Beaten-Track Beaten Track

Wales is criss-crossed by ancient Druid tracks, drover's roads, and Roman ways. They run from sacred spring to chapel, from village to market, from garrison to copper mine to coast, down river valleys and over Cambrian passes. Many are lost now, forgotten, swallowed up by heather and bog. Some are paved and still go where they've always gone only faster. The old tracks climb over this little country and its wind-scabbed feols like cracks across old weathered knuckles.

They say the oldest road in Wales is the Kerry Ridgeway. And when they say 'old' they mean it. Older than the Iron Age hillforts that run along it. Older than the Norman mottes guarding the trade routes along the valley Severn below. Older than the Celtiic tumps placed carefully beside it, it is thought, for the tremendous views of mighty Cadir Idris, the biggest blue lump on the western horizon impressive even at 40 miles.


The Ridgeway runs allong Kerry Hill from Cider House Farm near pretty little Kerry in Powys, Wales, 15 miles to nearly-posh Bishop's Castle in Shropshire, England.

After something of a slog up the rise to Two Tumps, the path can be called 'gently undulant' and it is through pasture and sheep on a farmer track along the sunken gully of the drovers' road. It's lumpy only with ancient tumps on which sheep are standing presumably for the view, because there is a fine Welsh Forestry Commision look-out tower - like a windier, sheepier Bridge on the S.S. Enterprise or a DJ mixing table - that you step up into and are ringed with full color, amazing maps (in both Welsh and English) of the vista before you. You look at the map, "Here are the wind turbines," you say, and then looking up, there they are on the horizon! and then you trace your finger along the Cambrian mountain vista and say things like "ok...let's see...that should be...gosh, is that Cadir Idis!? Thirty five miles. Gosh. There's Cadir Idris. Would ya look at that."


Impress Your Companions
Three rivers rise from just below the Ridgeway all within half a kilometer. You can venture up and over Feol Goch, Red Hill to find the sedgy dip the Teme springs from. The three rivers are the Teme, the whole length of which has been name a Site of Significant Scientific Interest by English Nature, the Itheon, that bubbles out of some woods across from the car park, beside Cider House Farm, and the Mule. All three of which run into the Severn. I fear your companions are waiting to be impressed. Hold on. I'll come back with something really good. Something having to do with...um....bees ma;ybe...