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.
No comments:
Post a Comment