On the banks of Ullswater, looking back at where we had been staying.
We stared longingly as the steamer heading up Ullswater.
We were all excited and anxious about today’s walk, one of the longest of the trip: 17 miles. When we woke, we looked out of the window and saw rain, mist shrouding the tops of the mountains. Oh, oh.
Wainwright says in his books, our proprietress reminded us, that it’s okay not to hold to the way if conditions are dangerous. Hikers get lost regularly on the foggy paths in the fells (peaks). Our collective sense of direction (maps + GPS + democracy) has been infallible so far, but not even the collective can see cairns (piles of rocks keeping the hikers on the path) in the fog. So we decided to go the longer (18 miles, est.), roundabout way.
A bonus is we would not be obligated to attack the “steepest part of the C2C walk.” The steepest part? We thought nothing could be steeper than some of the parts we had already tackled. When you’re going pretty much straight up, how much steeper can you get?
We had been unnaturally lucky so far with the weather. Today that luck would change; lots of rain and gusty winds were expected. I had on long underwear, a thin wool shirt, a regular cotton shirt, a thin polar fleece pullover, hiking pants, a rainjacket, and rainpants. I enumerate them again because, unlike other days, I kept the layers on for most of the trek.
We chose our new route from a highlighted map previous hikers had forgotten at the B&B. I mean, wouldn’t you do the same thing?
Let me insert here that some of this route is very confusing. Our proprietress said one poor guest tried three times to get on the trail and wound up coming back around to Patterdale. Tom did not want to be a story that our landlady could tell, so he said we should stay somewhere else in Patterdale, in disguise, were we to re-route ourselves back.
The first part of the hike involved following most of the eastern shore of Ullswater, one of the famous Lake District lakes. Tom and I had been on Ullswater about eleven years ago when we brought my mother and the boys to England. Only then we had been on one of the steamers that ply up and down the lake. Even at that time I remember thinking, as we rounded a bend that exposed the second half of the lake, this lake is really long.
This is one of the most beautiful, scenic spots I’ve ever seen. Gently rising hills on one side, stark fells on another. Sheep pastorally grazing on the hillsides. Little stone cottages dotting the shore. Yellow gorse, green trees, orange-brown bracken, tiny violets. It would be wonderful to sit somewhere and just stare. But not when you’ve got 18 miles (est.) to go. Besides, we would have about eight miles along the lake to admire the scenery.
Yes and no. Yes, we got to admire the scenery. No, we didn’t do much of it, since our faces were turned down to get the, at times, stinging, pelting rain out of our faces. Before you feel too sorry for us, I should say that after about an hour or two of that, the rain turned to an acceptable drizzle. It drizzled the rest of the way of our ten-and-a-half hour walk. Now you can feel sorry for us.
Frank and sheep in a face-off.
Beautiful but treacherous stone steps. The ones in the fell the other day were even steeper!
The path turned east, away from the lake, and we found ourselves between stone walls and sheep pastures. The stone walls were to keep people out of other people’s property. The sheep just ran amok. We’d often come across them in our path, staring us down, daring us to come closer. Fortunately, that’s just the look they’re born with. They’re also born with a flight response. We couldn’t get near one of those sheep if we tried.
A last look at Ullswater.
Gorse + stream + green grass = pretty.
After trudging, the new word we’ve substituted for “walking,” along for another few miles, the scenery suddenly changed. We were in the stark and forbidding moors. We had gone from the closed-in valley settings of the last few days to the wide, flat expanse of the moors. There were no sheep on the moors, only mud. We got very good at dodging puddles, but the longer we were at it, the more we just started slogging through the puddles. It was too much effort to try to keep our boots dry, especially with the rain pouring down our rainpants and directly into our boots. Hah!
If Tom were keeping a journal, this is what it would say: Barbara told me I couldn’t pack my own suitcase. I’m only allowed to get things from the left half of my suitcase.
You have a lot of time to think in the moors.
In the middle of the moors, we came across a small road with two cars parked on it, and another car bearing down on us. In the middle of the remote and desolate moors, we had to stop and look both ways before crossing. That just struck me as hilarious.
That's a mighty stinging raindrop on the lens.
After trudging through the moors for a few miles, we came to a small town. Even at walking speed, we were through the town in minutes. That’s how small. Ah, seeing towns must mean civilization, B&B, Bushmills. We must be close. We fired up our maps, computational equipment, satellite link-ups, and figured out … we still had another six miles to go. At least.
Back to trudging.
Because we were not on the Wainwright course, almost all the walking we had done was off the guidebook map. But we were coming back into guidebook territory. There were C2C trail markings on the map. We could rejoin the C2C path instead of walking on the road. We could be hikers, not trudgers, again.
This is what gave us pause. When Frank took the low road (literally, a road) and the rest of us took the high road (anti-literally, the path), if you will remember, Frank arrived in Scotland (the B&B) way before us.
Should we give up the sure road for the unknown path which may add time and difficulty to our hike? Should we punish our already whining feet by taking a potentially rock-strewn, rollercoastering, poop-decorated meandering trail? Oh, why the heck not.
Enigmatically, on the map the trail seemed to be a straight southeast line from where we were to the town of Shap, our goal. How was that possible? Shouldn’t we have to twist and turn around obstacles?
After we twisted and turned through public footpath entrances, stiles, and gates to begin the trail, we found ourselves in a large sheepfold. The map directions were to proceed to a point on the opposite wall. Sure enough, we found a stile. On the other side? Another sheepfold. The map directions pointed to a point on the opposite wall. Sure enough, we found a stile (however, distinctly different in form from the last). On the other side? Another sheepfold.
And so on and so on for at least ten iterations. And that is why, my friends, it was a straight line on the map. We just walked diagonally from sheepfold to sheepfold.
Sheep poop a lot. And it was raining, so there was mud. Poop and mud. An observer would have thought us drunk, as we weaved side to side to negotiate the fields.
We stood on a slight hill and viewed Shap. Mary and I had different counters. Hers logged in at 20 miles, mine at 18. Our feet didn’t care how far, because to them it was simply too long. The hardest half mile of the entire trip was the half mile down the main road to our B&B.
A friend of the proprietor was going to have dinner in the B&B’s restaurant. (That sounds like a contradiction doesn’t it, that a B&B would have a restaurant. Wouldn’t that make it a B&R?) She stopped to talk with us while we waited in the living room by a blazing log fire to be called to dinner. She lives at the end of the village near the trail and often can see weary hikers coming into town. Some of them look barely able to walk another step, so she sometimes offers a ride to them. She could have been talking about us an hour ago.
She also solved our bag of stones mystery. When she was younger, one of her jobs was to build stone pathways on Scottish hiking trails. Bags of stones would be helicoptered in, and she and other workers would put them into place on the trail. Frank verified, mystery solved.
There are no pictures after the moors because I was too exhausted to dig out the camera, buried under layers of clothes, to take a picture of the sheepfolds. Look at one of the other sheep pictures. Seen one sheepfold, seen ‘em all.
Will I count sheep to get to sleep? Maybe. Maybe I’d even reach “1.”
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