Saturday 18th & Sunday 19th January
Lake District
It was Claire's birthday last week, and being at my usual loss of things to buy her so soon after Christmas, I decided on a weekend away in the Lakes. We're staying in a B&B in Keswick called Cherry Trees which is only a few minutes walk from the bright lights of the town centre.
We arrived at about 6pm on Friday, and on being shown our room, were given a slightly panicked look by Margaret (the landlady) who asked us if a double room was OK. Once that moment of awkwardness was out of the way we quickly unpacked our stuff and headed off into town with Jen and Andrew (Claire's mum & her partner). We had a pub meal and a few drinks in The George Hotel which left us all feeling full to bursting, before heading back to the B&B to try and sleep off the food. None of us slept very well, although my sleep improved a lot after Claire wedged a sock in the door at 3am to stop it rattling. We had an excellent cooked breakfast whilst watching the rain bouncing off the windows, and decided that maybe we shouldn't head straight out to the fells.
We had a mooch round town, and Claire and I bought ourselves some new rucksacks that were reduced in one of Cotswold's competitors. Then we managed to coax Jen and Andrew up Castle Head, which is a nice little hill overlooking Derwent Water. It was quite a steep, and rather muddy, slippery climb up, but we did have some views from the top despite the weather, and I'm 90% sure I saw a red squirrel in the trees. If it wasn't a red squirrel then I'm really not sure what it could have been, but it moved so fast that I couldn't really see it well enough to be sure. Possibly a dwarf bear I suppose.
We had some lunch and then went for a walk along the Keswick railway trail, which is supposed to be teeming with packs of red squirrels according to our landlord Jim. We didn't spot any, but Claire and I did take a rather long detour after spotting a sign for Castlerigg stone circle. We managed to get a few moody atmospheric shots of the standing stones with various backdrops of mountains and threatening clouds, and then hurried back towards town before it got dark.
We spent the evening at the Alhambra cinema in Keswick, which is an old cinema with only one screen, and a desk attendant who looks like he's been around for nearly as long as the cinema has. We watched The Long Walk To Freedom, which is about the life and times of Nelson Mandela. It was a good film, and for £10.50 including a drink and a giant tub of popcorn, was much cheaper than our usual cinema experience.
Today Jen and Andrew had to head back home so we decided to try and tick another mountain off our list. We decided to go up Skiddaw, which is the mountain looming over Keswick. We thought it would be a good mountain to do in the winter as there aren't many dangerous ridges on it. Our route up was a bit of a dull slog to start with. We parked at a little car park at the end of a road that had more potholes than tarmac and followed an obvious rough track pretty much to the summit. The final third of the climb was more interesting (not to mention less steep), and there was much more snow left than we though there'd be. It got very cold all of a sudden when we walked into the cloud surrounding the summit, but I'd come better prepared than last weekend and had enough layers to keep the cold at bay (including this season's favourite - my down filled gilet).
We reached the trig point, took a couple of photos with white cloud background, then as if by magic, little windows started appearing in the cloud cover and we finally got a view down to the town and realised how high up we were.
We didn't linger at the summit too long, as the cloud droplets on our clothes were starting to freeze, and I didn't want to be turned into an ice statue. We headed down into the swirling clouds, had a quick sandwich stop, and then started a long, steep descent down to the road (including an unplanned slide down a very steep and slippery grassy bank for Claire). The walk concluded with a not particularly pleasant walk along a 2 mile stretch of uphill road back to where we'd parked.
Despite the snow, we didn't need our ice axes and crampons today. Which was fortunate, because we hadn't taken them with us, being confident that there wasn't enough snow up there. It would have been nice to have the axes for the summit photos, but their time will come I'm sure.
We've enjoyed pizza and wine for tea this evening and are now both struggling to keep our eyes open.
Tomorrow the forecast predicts little or no rain but low cloud and a close to 0% chance of cloud free summits. We've got a couple of ideas for walks but will make our mind up in the morning when we've assessed the weather and our legs.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Keswick
Posted with Blogsy
No comments:
Post a Comment