Day 2 - Cleator to Ennerdale Bridge

This is our first big climb of the trip. The tiny arrow you see in the distance to the left marks St. Bee’s. The other tiny arrow just to the right of center is Cleator, our last stop. Dent Hill is about 1,000 feet up from Cleator. It’s excellent that our next stop is just over Dent Hill. We can celebrate our first significant climb by collapsing on the doorstep of Low Cock How Farm.




The photo below is taken at the very top of Dent Hill. Do you see that chartreuse patch at the right? That’s up the hill from St. Bee’s. The view from Dent Hill is fabulous and it shows the meandering path we’ve taken from St. Bee’s to get to where we are. We are so lucky, lucky, lucky that the weather has been clear and warm, but not too warm, and we can see so far all around Dent Hill. We think we can even see where we are staying for the night. To get there, we have to negotiate the steepest descent of the entire trip. You go first, Frank, so the rest of us will have something soft to land on.



But first, we have some stiles to jump. The variety is amusing. Single step and double step stiles are old hat to us now. So this is what we ran across today.




The double-step, cross stile.













The enormous stile with narrow slats set at an impossibly small distance from each other.










The stiles and gates have turned out to be benignly treacherous. Mary had just finished telling me about how she wrapped duct tape around a pill bottle in case she needed some, when she climbed a stile and tore her backpack on a wayward prong of barbed wire. Aha, immediate use for the duct tape!

Some of the gates have proven to have too small a space for a person with a backpack to pass through. Contortions, lifting of backpacks like barbells, climbing backwards up the fence posts and hilarity ensue. I always hope no one is taking a picture of me navigating one of those gates.

Random complaint #1: We slowly came down the steepest descent of the walk step by painful step, only to have the people after us canter down the slope with ease. And I’m not even going to mention the man coming up the slope with his six dogs, no water bottle or backpack. Are you going up to the top, I asked. Yes, he said, we came down from the road (he pointed off into the distance) and are going up and around and back to the car. Where’s your water bottle, I asked. Oh, he said, I don’t need one for a short walk like this. But I’m not even going to mention him.

Here’s a picture taken just before we plunged down the side. (Perhaps plunge is the wrong word, but it was really steep.) The other picture is of the last part of the descent.

Nannycatch Beck, a beautiful, meandering stream, was at the bottom. We followed it for a ways, crossing it back and forth, sometimes walking in its overflow (see second picture below). We stopped in the shadow of a steep (if a hill isn’t rolling, it’s steep; no in-between state exists) hillside to have our lunch. Birds were singing, there were very few ants and no hordes of tramping hikers, the hotel had packed a great ploughman’s lunch, life was good. Overhead (remember, the cliffside was steep) a sheep tried to find its lost lamb. It baa-ed all through lunch. More about this soon.

It was an easy stroll to our next B&B, a working farm just off the pathway. Along the way we noted a dead sheep in the beck. Not that we were inclined to do so, but we were happy that the cool, clean water hadn’t drawn us into dangling our toes in the stream earlier downstream!

Here is the entrance to Low Cock How Farm. (BTW, the proprietors don’t know why it’s called Low Cock How. Insert your own joke here.) I looked at this picture later that evening, and I’m sure that’s a flying saucer in the corner there. I circled it so you can see it.











Dorothy runs the B&B. The picture on the right is of her husband (name unknown) talking to Frank. He’s the ranching part of the couple. It was obvious that he was making a great effort to be understood when he talked with us. We understood about 70 percent of what he said. A friend of his stopped by to tell him about a lost sheep (the mother of the lamb we heard earlier during lunch) that belonged to the farm. I only know that’s what the friend said because the husband translated for us. None of us understood a single word! So off the husband went on his motorcycle, with one of his sheepdogs perched on the back.

Dinner was very English: meat and veggies. One meat, eleven veggies. Frank enumerated the veggies in his journal.

I was trying to turn on the light in the shower room. There was a string there. I pulled it. Nothing happened. I pulled it again. And again. Nothing happened. I finally decided it was not for the light and whatever it was for didn’t work. I found the light switch outside the shower room. Mary later told me it was the cord you pull in case of an emergency. No one came to investigate. I guess many Americans had been guests on the farm and pulled that cord, and the farmfolk wisely knew to ignore it.

A pleasant four-hour walk, a pleasant farm, a pleasant sitting room and tea. If this is what each day will be like, bring it on!