Yvan Seth's Hole in the Internet

Happy Campers?

Preface

Our hiking adventure in England's Lake District has been and gone, and after a week in the normal world I wish I could go back already. Even if it is cold and soggy. I started writing up a day-by-day account of our trip, and eventually hit 5000 words. So rather than try to assemble one mega blog entry from that I'm going to break this down into nice bite-size daily chunks. This way the process of proofing, editing, and marking the entries up with photos is more surmountable and I may actually get them all done (I have problems finishing these things, I have a collection of more than 20 unfinished entries, mostly food and travel related, consisting of nearly 20k words of text.) Multiple entries are nicer to peoples' RSS readers anyway. Hopefully I'll pump them all out over the next couple of days.

First, for the impatient and graphically oriented our full album of trip photos can be found in the Gallery already. I've even managed to give all the photos meaningful text and GPS tags. Next thing is to plug them into a Google map! But I'm not expecting to have time for that. (Yes, Picasa Web albums would do it all for me… but 1GB is far too little space for all my photos and I already pay enough for hosting and don't want to fork out money just for photo storage. Flickr probably does it too, but I just don't like Flickr. I should explore mapping modules for Gallery I suppose.)

In lieu of merging photos with mapping data here's the full map of our journey, you can work the rest out yourself! It doesn't seem to work in Google Reader (in case you're wondering) but isn't so good in an iframe anyway (it doesn't even seem to work properly for me in Firefox half the time), click this link to get the better full window version: Lakes Hike Map

You may note that this looks somewhat similar to my preliminary lakes route map. It is, in fact, very different in both route and nature! We travelled counter-clockwise rather than clockwise, we spent a lot more time in lowlands than planned, and there are various significant route differences.

The brown line from the coast going inland is the R&ER miniature gague railway. The black line is our first leg, wandering up to Great How from Eskdale. This is the topic of the short Day 1 entry.

Day 1 – Getting There

River Irt

Our Lakes trip began with an uneventful train journey from Hitchin to Ravenglass, via London Euston. The final leg of the train journey winding along grassy coastal moorlands in a funny little single-car diesel, picturesque. Of Ravenglass we saw nothing outside of the train station, as the miniature gauge rail station is located just on the other side of the car park.

River Esk oncoming

We soon find ourselves in a little open-top carriage being pulled along by a little steam engine called the River Irt, chuffing its way towards Eskdale. This is the R&ER railway, affectionately known as "Ratty" (not sure why, and why their website depicts trains sinking through water is beyond me and a little disquieting!) From the end-of-line Dalegarth (for Boot) station a short walk takes us to the Woolpack Baa (yes, very funny), home of the Hardknott Brewery. Here we're supposed to pick up a delivery from a camping shop in Windermere, but it turns out that Saturday deliveries to Boot are impossible! Still, the beer is excellent, especially the refreshing yet tasty 2.5% mild.

Kat through a Peat Hut

We gave up waiting for our delivery (not yet knowing the impossibility of it) and let the bemused barman know we'd be back on Monday. Then we set out towards Scafell with the idea of camping somewhere behind Great How. Our walk took us up the foothills behind the Woolpack, past a peat hut, then on past Eel then Stony tarns. Stony tarn is the most attractive of the two, and yes, it is quite stony.

Kat by Stony Tarn

Following the path north from Stony Tarn takes us along the east side of Great How, just under the 450m contour. We discover that most of the terrain to the east of Great How, even around 450m, is wet and boggy. I put my pack down and have a quick scout around the area, and even most of the top is soggy! We backtracked a couple of hundred metres to a spot we'd seen that was quite acceptable (aside from being just below the 450m mark) and settled in for the night.

Home sweet home