Wainwright walks 96: Two crags, lots of beer, not enough water, and no bogs

• Hills: Sergeant’s Crag, Eagle Crag
• Classification: Wainwrights (171 and 172)
• When: Thursday 1 June
• Who: Me, the mountaineering minion, and Tiny Paddington
• Distance: Probably about 6 miles in total.
• Weather: Scorchio!
• Conditions underfoot: Good paths to start off with, then pathless ascent up the side of Eagle Crag. Hardly any bog which for Central Fells is a miracle.
• Post walk drink: Lots of beer!
• Post walk watering hole: Keswick Beer Festival sponsors party
• MAMBA factor: Saw a few people on the Coast to Coast route but had both hills to myself.
• Uses of the arse crampon: That depends if squeezing between a wall and a fence counts.
• Mishaps: Lurgy; a false start on a totally different hill; disappearing buses

After my walk on Catstycam on the 26^th May, which kicked off a week in Cumbria in a good way, things from the perspective of walking went a bit downhill. My hip was still a bit sore on the Saturday, so rather than risk it we decided to go and pay a visit to the extremely interesting Lowther Castle before driving to Carlisle for a couple of days, before then spending a couple of days at the Mortal Man Hotel, which we had visited back in 2020 on our first post lockdown trip away and thought was well worth revisiting. The forecast was – amazingly – for settled warm weather for the whole of our time in Cumbria – I’ve never seen the like – so given my dodgy hip I thought a couple of days pottering about rather than necessarily trying to do any walking would be a good idea and the walking could be picked up again on the way to or when staying in Troutbeck. Plus I was knackered after a tough few weeks at work and the horrendous journey North and quite frankly needed a bit of a rest.

Of course, the mishap fairy had other ideas. After staying in Carlisle on the Saturday and Sunday nights, it was clear on waking up on the Monday that I had gone down with a stinker of a cold. I felt, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty rotten and we took the call rather than trying to push for a hill to go and have a swim in Shap open air pool which is the highest lido in England. This was pleasant enough although seemed to be more designed for kids than ‘proper’ swimming but never mind – it did perk me up a bit and after that we drove to the Mortal Man where we had some drinks in the sunshine and an early night in the hope I would feel well enough in the morning to tackle a walk.

You can of course guess the rest. I did not feel any better and did not feel up to doing a walk. We decided to have a potter around in the car and try and find somewhere to do a wild swim instead. This could have been a good option had we been able to find anywhere at all to park! After trying Coniston Water, White Moss (for Grasmere and/ or Rydal Water) and Ambleside (for Windermere) we gave up and ended up having a picnic at the top of Kirkstone Pass, but the whole fiasco had me seriously worried about the parking situation and what walks would actually be feasible for the rest of the week – public transport starting to seem like the best possible option, or alternatively hills that nobody does that often and are not tourist hotspots. The following day we were off to Keswick and although I felt marginally less bunged up I was conscious that an attempt at a hill was likely to lead either to more failed attempts to park or to a failed attempt on a hill in the event we actually managed to park, so we ended up doing tourist stuff namely a boat trip on Windermere, which was pleasant enough, then driving to Keswick where we were staying for the next few days. I was pretty much determined to push for a walk the following day though unless I felt truly awful.

Wainwright walks 94: Allen Crags – one for my Dad

• Hills: Allen Crags
• Classification: Wainwright (169)
• When: Saturday 13 May
• Who: Me, the mountaineering minion, and Tiny Paddington
• Distance: Again probably around 8 miles
• Weather: Early fog all blew away – then scorchio.
• Conditions underfoot: Generally good paths, though the path in Ruddy Gill goes close to a nasty drop at one point.
• Post walk drink: Keswick Brewery Thirst Quencher
• Post walk watering hole: The Fox Tap, Keswick Brewery
• MAMBA factor: Low for most of it due to the hordes of people going up Scafell Pike. Good on Allen Crags
• Uses of the arse crampon: In use for security near to that nasty drop mentioned earlier. Otherwise AWOL.
• Mishaps: None to speak of – what the heck?
• One that got away: There were arguably several that got away. See post.

Apologies to my regular readers who may have been hoping for this post to start with a rant. However, for once there didn’t really seem to be anything to rant about! Having started my trip a day early due to the train strike, there was not going to be any issue of transport related mishaps (unless there was some sort of bus malfunction) and given that the single bus fare is currently being capped at £2, there is nothing really to rant about as regards cost. I could, I guess, continue to rant about the parking in the Lake District – as part of the reason for doing this hill by bus and therefore adding slightly over a mile to the walk at each end due to needing to walk from Seatoller to Seathwaite was to avoid the shocking parking issues at Seathwaite which have led to issues for emergency vehicles as well as giving local residents and farmers no end of grief trying to get their vehicles down a narrow lane past loads of badly parked cars. There seems to be a decent amount of parking in the field at Seathwaite Campsite, so maybe some of the issues are due to people being too tight to pay the farmer, or maybe it does fill up early, though it didn’t seem that full on the way past. Maybe the nadir of parking issues – though not experienced by me – was hearing on a Facebook page I follow that someone had failed to get parked at Buttermere at 6am. Completely ridiculous but having been to Buttermere myself on my most recent trip (on the bus) not actually that surprising – and does vindicate my current approach of picking off the hills by bus, though as noted before this is not going to do me any good when I have to start focusing on the far West.

Anyway, I guess I had better explain the title. The reason is actually pretty simple – the hill is called Allen Crags and my dad is called Alan. It was my parents that first got me into walking as a kid – we had 2 holidays each year to Wales and 2 to Yorkshire and although we mostly did coastal and waterfall walks (my mum doesn’t like doing hills) we did do the odd small hill, and Dad did the occasional bigger one by himself, for instance on school trips to Snowdonia (he was a headmaster). In fact my first ever hill was a Marilyn in Pembrokeshire at the age of five. Dad is now 81, but still active and walks about 6 miles a day albeit on the flat, and says he enjoys receiving my terrible summit selfies as I make a point of always sending them to him. So Father’s Day seemed to be a good day to write this blog as well!

Wainwright Walks 90: a High Hartsop Doddle

• Hills: High Hartsop Dodd, Little Hart Crag (a repeat)
• Classification: Wainwright (165)
• When: Friday 24 February
• Who: Me, the mountaineering minion, and Tiny Paddington
• Distance: About 10 miles in total
• Weather: Not great to start with but massively improved. Very windy though.
• Conditions underfoot: Generally fine
• Post walk drink: Robinsons Dizzy Blonde
• Post walk watering hole: The Golden Rule
• MAMBA factor: Surprisingly high.
• Uses of the arse crampon: One very minor one coming off Little Hart Crag.
• Mishaps: Unless wind counts, none to speak of.

This blog has been on something of a hiatus for a while – for all sorts of reasons. The first, and most obvious, is that I haven’t actually done any hill walking since September, until the walk which is the subject of this blog. There are various reasons for this – far too much work being an obvious one, and an abortive trip in November being another, but also health reasons as I have spent a significant amount of time shuttling between hospital appointments as a result of the blood clot I got shortly before my last trip -issues which will hopefully soon be resolved as a result of a planned operation.

Another reason for putting the blog on hiatus is that I’d lost my confidence a bit – well more than a bit. I’ve been under a lot of stress generally – mostly due to work and the health issues – but also the levels of stress I’ve felt about hill walking given I’m getting closer to finishing the Wainwrights seemed to have ramped up to such a degree that I was half seriously thinking about packing it in. Readers of my blog over the years might remember that a number of years ago I had a serious falling out with someone in a Scottish walking community I was involved with, which involved them suggesting (amongst other things) that I was a pathetic excuse for a hill walker. I know logically that I am not, but for whatever reason the comments made years ago massively came back to haunt me recently and after my latest trip in November, where a combination of weather and insomnia meant no new hills, I needed to take some time out and try and get my head sorted out a bit as well as try and work on my fitness, as lack of fitness isn’t helpful for confidence on the hills. I didn’t even do my usual summary of the year as there was hardly anything to write and the number of hills done was the worst ever, which again had me feeling pretty rubbish.

Anyway, 2023 eventually rolled round and I decided to pencil in some trips North and see what happened. I had an operation scheduled for early January which then promptly got cancelled due to the nurses strike and rescheduled for a time that meant my first booked trip at the end of March was not going to happen. I decided to take a deep breath and book a trip at the end of February and see what happened; I thought if I ended up leaving any attempts at hills till May there was a fairly strong chance I wouldn’t go back to it. In which case the person referred to above would have won – something I really didn’t want to happen. 

Wainwright walks 88: All hail Hindscarth!

• Hills: Hindscarth; Dale Head (a repeat)
• Classification: Wainwright (163)
• When: Thursday 2 June
• Who: Me, the mountaineering minion, and Tiny Paddington
• Distance: About 6 miles (at a guess)
• Weather: Generally ok apart from the random heavy hail shower at the summit!
• Conditions underfoot: Generally pretty good – no bog to speak of
• Post walk drink: Various real ales
• Post walk watering hole: The Fox Tap, Keswick followed by Keswick Beer Festival sponsors party
• MAMBA factor: Saw quite a few people but not really surprising given where I was.
• Uses of the arse crampon: One, on an unexpected bit of exposure
• One that got away: Robinson
• Mishaps: Unless you count the unexpected bit of exposure, or the hail storm, none as such.

For various reasons, this one has taken a while to crawl out of the subconscious. Work has – yet again – been manic, and although I thought of the title ages ago (it being rather obvious given the weather that I encountered on the summit) I was a bit lacking in inspiration for the post itself. Yes it was another annoying outlier dealt with (always a good thing) but that still leaves me with 3 of the North-Western fells to do – all of them with a reasonable amount of ascent and 2 that look like they might be tricky, given my general dislike of exposure and anything too scrambly, particularly on descent.

After our walk up Harter Fell on the previous Sunday, I think it was fair to say that the cumulative effect of 2 horrible drives plus a hill walk hit me quite hard so the Monday ended up being a day of pottering around museums. Tuesday there was torrential rain much of the day though we did manage to see another Hadrian’s Wall site (Corbridge Roman Town) in a brief break from the downpours. On Wednesday we left Carlisle for a few days in an AirB&B in Keswick with the weather forecast changing every 5 minutes or so (or at least it felt like it).

On arriving in Keswick, the weather was actually ok (if a bit pothery) but it was too late to start up a hill so in the end we walked down to Derwentwater where inevitably I decided to go for a swim. I think I’ve said it before but at the moment I am probably enjoying the outdoor swimming more than the hill walking. There is less pressure as there is not a list of lakes etc I am trying to work my way through (though there are various places I want to visit) and the impact on wild swimming of my post pandemic fitness issues is far less than the impact on hill walking – I haven’t done a hill with 700m plus of ascent for over two years. Whilst I know that the pressure regarding hill walking is largely self imposed, it still exists. It was a nice swim, but the rocks underfoot are both slippy and exactly the wrong size for your feet! Stuart elected to stay on shore and take action shots, thankfully not taking a picture at the point where I fell over and therefore started my swim in somewhat shallower water than intended!

2019: a year in review

Total hills climbed:
Wainwrights done: 24 – 133 done in total
Wainwrights left to do: 81
Other hills done: Only one new one (Black Hill in the Pentlands)
Number of ascents of Orrest Head before getting the train home: Just the one this year
Best hill names of the year: Has to be Great Cockup by a country mile.
Beer festivals attended in the Lake District: 3
Beer festivals attended elsewhere: 2
Favourite beer of the year: Probably still Lonesome Pine (Ulverston Brewery) closely followed by Loweswater Gold

This post has taken a bit of time to crawl out of my subconscious and actually make it onto my blog. Sometimes posts almost write themselves and sometimes they just don’t – maybe this is because 2019 was a good year for walking but not necessarily a great one; maybe because apart from a few exceptions I didn’t have all that much luck with the weather; but probably also because work has been really busy as well.

Numbers wise I added 24 new Wainwrights to my total, finishing the year on 133 which leaves me 81 to go if I do decide to try and do the lot – actually my second best year for Wainwright bagging. If I do decide to do the lot though it will need some planning – I’m starting to run out of hills that can easily be done by public transport, and my Wainwright map is really skewed now with some areas where I have done most of the hills and some that I’ve hardly touched. I’ve only got 4 of the Northern Fells left to go for instance, and the same number of the North-Western fells, but loads left to do in the West, South and Far East – inevitably the areas which are a bugger to get to without a car. I have at least managed to identify a car hire place in Penrith that is open at the weekend, which does open up more possibilities, albeit with additional driving involved (not to mention extra cash outlay, oh well). I’ve also got a lot of annoying outliers left from when I was too wiped/ hung over to tack on an extra hill or was running tight for time – things like High Hartsop Dodd which realistically I’ll have to do as one-shots.

Wainwright walks 65: Another eastern fell – by the Seat of my pants

Hills: Seat Sandal
Classification: Wainwright (131)
When: Saturday 7 September
Who: Me and the mountaineering minion
Distance: 6 miles approximately
Time: About 4 hours including breaks
Weather: Lovely!
Post walk drink: Various real ales
Pre walk drink: Various real ales
Post (and pre) walk watering hole: The Grasmere Guzzler beer festival at Tweedies
Uses of the arse crampon: 1 – the first use to assist in ascent!
Mishaps: See ‘pre walk drink’…

After my walk up Dollywaggon Pike and Nethermost Pike on the Thursday, I think it’s fair to say the forecast for the Friday was a bit mixed with heavy showers and sunshine forecast (as it turned out sometimes at the same time). I was also struggling a bit with m back and knees which clearly hadn’t recovered from the walk and I was in quite a bit of discomfort and regardless of the weather I was not really in any state to do any sort of serious walk. A day off and a pottering about day was clearly required and so it transpired; we had a loose arrangement to meet up with our friend Kets at the Grasmere Guzzler beer festival that evening too once he had finished his walk.

2018: a year in review

Total hills climbed: 30
Wainwrights done: 27 (plus one repeat)
Other hills done: 3
Number of ascents of Orrest Head before getting the train home: 3
Best hill names of the year: Brown Willy (Cornwall) Barf (Lake District) Pikeawassa (Lake District)
Beer festivals attended in the Lake District: 2
Beer festivals attended elsewhere: 1
Favourite beer of the year: Lonesome Pine (Ulverston Brewery)

All in all 2018 was a bit of a game of two halves, as a football commentator might say; a year of highs and lows, with some excellent hill walking and other fun stuff done but also some health issues to deal with which curtailed my hill walking significantly in the last half of the year, though I did manage some good walks towards the end of the year, rounding the year off with an ascent of Barf in glorious winter sunshine on Christmas Eve. Numbers wise I added 27 new Wainwrights to my total, plus one repeat, which is my best annual total ever for Wainwrights – not my best hill totals ever though, that was in 2009 when I managed 28 Munros plus a few other hills as well.

Wainwright walks 50: Boiled on Blencathra!

Hills: Blencathra, Mungrisdale Common
Classification: Wainwrights – no.102 and 103
When: Tuesday 26 June
Weather: Scorchio!
Time: Just over 5 hours, including a couple of fairly lengthy breaks
Conditions underfoot: Good paths on Blencathra – dry bog thereafter…
Who: me and the mountaineering minion
Post walk drink: Keswick Brewery Thirst Quencher, later Prosecco
Post walk watering hole: Horse and Farrier, Threlkeld then the Ambleside Tavern later
Mishaps: Transport. Although this is becoming such a frequent occurrence I am not sure it counts as a mishap any more, just the normal state of play….

After my last walk, and the subsequent beer extravaganza that ensued at Keswick Beer Festival, I had no walking planned for some time – in fact nothing actually in the diary for several months that involved being anywhere near a hilly part of the country. I had already hit my target for the year in terms of hills by making it to the ton on Steel Knotts – what was next? With no obvious hill walking goal next it was surely time to potter around the house/ garden and do some of the tasks that had been sorely neglected.

This lasted a couple of weeks. We did actually manage to get the garden sorted out although tidying the house and/ or any of the other tasks that could really do with being sorted didn’t happen. We did attend another beer festival, this one being near our house, and work got completely mental for a couple of weeks before what looked like a reasonably quiet week presented itself. This quiet week coincided with a week that Stuart was going to be away on business for most of it so inevitably, a plan was hatched… I had missed out on doing Blencathra when staying in Keswick due to reasons of knackeredness and later the weather starting to turn. Aha! I would book a couple of days off and – assuming decent weather – try and get it done as I have wanted to for ages.

Wainwright Walks 49: Blue sky but no bluebells in Rannerdale

Hills: Rannerdale Knotts
Classification: Wainwright – no.101
When: Wednesday 30 May
Weather: Blue sky and clouds. Humid and very hot at times
Time: Just under 2 hours, including a break
Conditions underfoot: Dry grassy paths, some rock underfoot at times
Who: me and the mountaineering minion
Post walk drink: Merlot
Post walk watering hole: The Oddfellows Arms. A beer festival the following day too (if that counts)
Mishaps: None to speak of – ??

After getting my ton up on Steel Knotts on Bank Holiday Monday, the Tuesday was – at least sort of – a rest day. We were shifting our accommodation from the Glenridding Hotel to a self catering apartment in Keswick, where we were sponsoring a barrel of beer at Keswick Beer Festival. Having got the ton, the pressure was off regarding walking for the rest of the holiday although I hoped to do at least one more walk before the serious beer drinking ensued; Keswick Beer Festival is a pretty big event and there would be something like 150 real ales available to try, both local ones and those from further afield. It was therefore unlikely any serious walking would be done once that kicked off – although beer seems to affect me a lot less than red wine does.

The Tuesday was actually a really nice day as it turned out – but having done a big walk then a shorter one on back to back days, I was pretty knackered and my back was playing up again. Had there been any obvious small hills in the area we might have thought about doing something but realistically I was not up to much. We chilled out in the pool in Glenridding in the morning then drove down Borrowdale where we had a drink (well a coke in my case) in the Langstrath Inn which I had not been to before and looks worthy of a visit by bus at some point. We checked in to our apartment at 4pm and did some shopping before having a few beers in a couple of local hostelries then cooking a meal and opening some wine back at the apartment. The view from the apartment was terrific – the flip side to the view was 6 flights of stairs up the side of the apartment building which was a bit of a pain in the arse given the need to lug stuff up them. Oh well!

Wainwright Walks 48: Steel-ing myself for the ton!

Hills: Steel Knotts (Pikeawassa)
Classification: Wainwright – no.100!
When: Monday 28 May
Weather: Strong sunshine, not much of a breeze. Roasting hot at times.
Time: 2 hours 15 minutes, including breaks
Conditions underfoot: Generally good. One very minor boggy bit.
Who: me and the mountaineering minion
Post walk drink: Hawkshead Gold then various pale ales
Post walk watering hole: Ullswater Steamers bar, then various Pooley Bridge hostelries
Mishaps: Does sunburn count?

After the big push to get four hills done the day before, I wasn’t totally sure if I would be walking the following day. The weather forecast was good – indeed meant to be so for at least the next couple of days – but it was fair to say that after the big walk I was a bit wrecked. Not in terms of alcohol but my back and feet were both killing me after the walk and I didn’t really have much of an idea what I would be up to doing. One of the things about walking with a spinal problem is that you need to listen to your body and plan accordingly; some days I can do a big hill walk and be up for more of the same the day afterwards, some days I am up for a shorter walk but not an epic and other days I know that any sort of hill walk is just not going to work. I thought the likelihood was that I wouldn’t be up to much, but had an early night anyway after a long bath which is generally not a bad way to get rid of post hill walking aches and pains.