Day 4 - Rosthwaite to Grasmere

Another beautiful day. Don’t we look fresh and happy at the start of the trail? That’s because we know it will be an easy day. We even started a little later than normal. Up to Lining Crag for a cup of mid-morning tea, then a jaunty trip down to the charming and quaint town of Grasmere, home of poet William Wordsworth. Peter Rabbit country.

The landlord said, you could even do the higher walk along the ridge because the descent is on grass. If you take the low route, it’s mostly rock.

Hell, yeah, we said. Grassy descent. Right on. We still have lots of time. The guidebook said 5-1/2 hours for the high route. Lots of time.




A view of one of the magnificent and ubiquitous stone walls. They snake and climb throughout the Lake District.












Fells viewed through a broken wall.









The “easy” climb turned out to be steep and rock-strewn.










Frank checking our guidebook for a definition of “easy.”










The view from the top of Lining Crag. We had come from the valley way below in the distance.







By far the most interesting part of the trip was the bog. None of us had ever tried to walk on a peaty bog before. (Yesterday's wimpy bog didn't count.) We didn’t know what the secret was to crossing the bog. We tried all sorts of things to find firm ground. Finally Tom decided that the answer was you just ran really fast across it before it could muddy your boots too badly. At his first step, he sank knee deep into the bog. All I could think about was a story I had heard of moor ponies being sucked into boggy quicksand. Goodbye, Tom.

Tom fell flat forward and with sheer determination yanked his feet out. The bottom two feet of him was Mudzilla. We all unkindly laughed. Later the laugh was on each of us in turn, because you really can’t beat the bog; the bog will always win.





Are we having fun yet?










The start of the “jaunty” descent. Jaunty must be a synonym for perilous.









Although the views were magnificent, the climb was hard, the descent was really rocky, and the way was definitely not easy.

The entry to Grasmere went through "The Poet's Walk," a short but lovely stretch through a garden. Grasmere was home to Wordsworth and Coleridge, and they rambled the area frequently. Mary informed us that Wordsworth and his sister would sometimes hike by moonlight. He may have wandered lonely as a cloud, but I hope he had a stout pair of hiking boots and a headlamp while he did that.

I have to back up here. Just before we got to The Poet's Walk, we came to a fork in the road and had to decide which way to go. There was the ritual adjusting of clothing, water sipping, and map consulting. Mary put her camera down and we all toddled off without it. At the bottom of the descent to The Poet's Walk, Mary discovered her loss. The descent had been rocky and steep (what else?) and we weren't looking forward to going back up. Jonathan immediately volunteered and quickly took off. That qualified to me as an act of superhuman strength and heroism.

A few minutes later Jonathan was back, not enough time to have gone all the way to the top and back, superhuman or not. Behind him were some hikers we had met before. Jonathan handed Mary her camera and explained that the other hikers had found it at the top and were bringing it down to turn in at the police station. They had seen Jonathan coming up and knew immediately what he was doing. Isn't that a happy ending?

As we curse the guidebook and the landlord in Rosthwaite, we also feel very lucky to have seen what we saw. The Lake District is incredible.

Day 3 - Ennerdale Bridge to Rosthwaite

This was to be one of our longest segments of the walk: fourteen miles to Rosthwaite. It would be longer if we made navigational mistakes. There was no room for error. So, of course, upon leaving the farm, we immediately turned right when we should have turned left.

Fellow walkers were right behind us. We pretended we had purposely turned right to see the “false stones,” pictured here behind Mary, so the other people wouldn't think we were stupid. These are fake ring stones put up by an archeologist who wanted to “discover” something significant.

Obviously using two maps, one guidebook, one compass, and a GPS hadn’t worked well enough.

It was another beautiful, sunny morning -- extraordinary luck this time of year. Through the branches of trees, we glimpsed Ennerdale Water, the lake that signaled the beginning of our walk.

First we had to walk through the town of Ennerdale Bridge. Although it’s a main stopping point for walkers, it is a very small place. A group of school kids were crowded at one end of their playground, with clipboards and plastic bags in hand. They hollered to us and Frank went over. They wanted to survey us and to have us mail them a postcard two stops from now. The baggie held a postage stamp and their address. We went to the famous (maybe) Shepherd’s Arms to buy postcards and F&M talked another tourist group into taking the survey and coughing up a card. Our long walk hadn’t really begun and we had already spent about a half an hour futzing around.


At last, at the shore of Ennerdale Water.











What do I know of Ennerdale Water? It’s big. It’s deceptively big because you can’t see the whole of the lake from one end. It twists around the bend. Every time I thought it was the bend to end all bends, I could see another bend ahead. The road wasn’t too rocky, except for over Robin Hood’s chair where we had to pretend to be mountain goats, and it soon changed to mystical forest land. Why, you could even imagine fairies living in those woods.






And what the heck are these bumpy things anyway? No one offered to investigate.











These beautiful violets grow in the most unlikely places, both warm and cold, along the trail.














The land changed dramatically from the placid lakeside to a roaring river. The path got rockier and sketchier at times. Upon crossing a bridge to the other side of the river, we found a road … which soon degenerated into a rocky path. See that last picture? Guess where the rocky path is heading. The answer is not “down.”

Sometimes the rocky path disappeared or there was a fork in the road, and we would have to vote on which way to go. Our luck held and every choice we made was the correct one. Stories abound of travelers who chose erroneously. We think we’ve discovered some of the shredded guidebooks they must have cast aside to lighten their load as they struggled to find their way home.











If you are one of the few and mighty who make it to the top, this vista of the valley you’ve just come through, with Ennerdale Water in sight, is your reward.












After traversing a bleak, cold, boggy, and windy stretch at the top, we were happy to spot an abandoned slate mine, the sign that our descent into the “thwaits” (a collection of small towns with "thwait" at the end), of which Rosthwaite is one, was about to begin.











The descent is nothing to write home about, so of course I’m going to write about it. A lot of it is on a bleak switchback road going from the slate mine to a visitor’s center below. Tom fortunately found the track again and most of us abandoned the roadway -- except for Frank. We all thought the track would intersect the roadway soon, so no problem.

The track went higher and more to the left, leaving the roadway far below and away. We finally dropped down into one of the thwaits and tried to place a call at a phone booth to let our B&B know we were going to be late, but there was someone using the phone. (The B&Bs are instructed to call for help if a Mickeldore -- our scheduling company -- guest is not there by 8:00 p.m.)

The person on the phone must have had a lot to say because ten minutes later we were still waiting. Rather than wait any longer, we decided to plunge on, one eye on the highway, which we had finally joined, to see if we could spot Frank. The track, of course, almost immediately turned away from the highway again. At times, we weren’t even sure it was a track. At one point we were shuffling across a narrow ledge, using an iron chain drilled into the rock as a handhold.

Jonathan was supposed to join us in Rosthwaite, but we hadn’t the vaguest idea when he was scheduled to arrive. Using the maps, we honed in on the B&B, hoping to hear that Jonathan had arrived and what had happened to Frank.

About a block from the B&B, there walking toward us was Jonathan. We walked to the B&B together, and there outside the B&B was Frank, freshly showered and begging the proprietress to delay dinner until we arrived. (Her answer, by the way, was "Dinner is at 7, sorry." That was okay, because it was 6:45.) Mary, Tom, and I claimed the philosophical high road, because we had stuck to Wainwright’s course to arrive at our destination.

The B&B was high-end; Tom and I had a hair dryer, three beds, room to spread our suitcases and backpacks around, and lots of plugs -- but no internet.

Our day’s trip had gone from 100 feet to 1100 feet (and up and down a few more times, but without the dramatic change in elevation). We had walked on tarmac, gravel, dirt, rocks, more rocks, many more rocks, rock steps, endless rock steps, endless steep rock steps, and bog. We were in pain. Advil is god.

We made plans with Jonathan to start off on one of the easier segments of the trip the next day, so the guidebook and the landlord of the B&B informed us. The landlord said that we would be in Grasmere in time for lunch. Yay! An easy day!