Isn’t Ambleside great?
There’s nowhere else I’d rather shop for my hiking equipment or go to a cinema-cum-Italian restaurant. We’ve often escaped there on rainy camping days to have lunch or a Thai curry, or just to watch the strange phenomenon that is pro-hikers wearing their pro-gear in the middle of a bustling little town.
One particularly bad camping trip resulted in me booking a last minute, ridiculously overpriced room in a slightly shoddy B&B in the town. I had spent the night before in a tent at the nearby Low Wray campsite: I had just got into a mildly comfortable position – lying on my side with all limbs zipped inside my sleeping bag, wearing two jumpers and a hoody, leggings, pyjama bottoms and two pairs of socks – when it became clear that nature was calling. Joy. For the next hour, as my hip sank slowly into the sleeping mat and then into the cold, hard ground, I lay huddled in this pathetic manner, debating whether to (a) get up and go to the daddy-long-leg infested bathrooms or (b) hold it in and risk damaging my bladder, or worse, pissing myself.
Of course, I made the horrible midnight trip to the bathrooms, donning my raincoat, head torch and hiking boots and carefully picking my way through the field of tents. On the way back I tripped over a guy line and fell onto my knees in the damp ground, soaking my pyjamas instantly. Thus I re-entered my sleeping bag, damp, cold and thoroughly pissed off. I didn’t sleep a wink. When we woke up, it was pouring with rain and I told Pete I’d had enough. I was going to book us a B&B or I was going home. Thankfully, he acquiesced because my incessant grumbling had kept him awake too and we spent the following night luxuriating in a tiny attic room, eating Chinese takeaway and watching The Great British Bake Off.
So I don’t normally associate Ambleside with the start of a hike. It’s usually a place of sanctuary on our camping trips – a reminder of what it’s like to be completely dry or how convenient it is to go to the toilet without having to put on shoes and a coat. But, the day after tackling Ullock Pike, filled with a new sense of adventure and apparently with no memory of the rougher parts of the day before, we decided to go South for our next Wainwright and parked up in Ambleside on a grey summer morning with a view to climbing Loughrigg Fell.
Loughrigg is a small fell at just 368m and the path begins and ends in Ambleside. The name comes from the Old English lough meaning ‘lake’ and rigg meaning ‘ridge,’ presumably because it sort-of separates two lakes – Grasmere and Windermere. At Ambleside we followed a lone hiker across the little bridge and out of town (I am always wary of lone hikers – unfortunately my rampant imagination conjures up all sorts of serial killer stories involving them stalking their victims up onto lonely fell sides and waiting for folks like me to become exhausted enough to overpower).
“Why does he keep stopping when we do?” I asked Pete after our third break for a breather.
“Why do you keep stopping?” was his reply. “Maybe he is as unfit as you are.”
“He can’t be unfit – he’s wearing all the proper gear” (my logic knows no bounds).
“Well we’d better get moving before he catches us up then.” Pete has now learnt that nothing moves me on quite so quickly as the prospect of being followed by a serial killer.
There’s not much to say about the hike up Loughrigg Fell from the Ambleside direction. Once you’ve evaded the serial killer (who turned down an alternative path into a wood) it becomes quite dull, though there are some fabulous views at every turn, including this one of the Fairfield Horseshoe under some grisly looking clouds:
There is one fun scrambling section, as you can see from this picture:
It can’t have been much of an uphill struggle this time because I’m actually carrying the bag rather than making Pete carry it.
I was a little concerned about the summit, having read that it is a sprawling mass of paths that could easily take you in the wrong direction – especially in fog. It was supposed to be relatively boggy and we’d had lots of rain overnight. Nothing terrifies me quite so much as the prospect of being sucked into a bog or quicksand. On our Scottish Highlands holiday in 2016 we hiked up a Graham on the edge of Loch Ness called Meall Fuar-mhonaidh (yeah, no idea about that one. I hate not being able to pronounce things properly and ended up referring to it [forgive me, Scotland] as something that sounded like mille-feuille-on-me-head). It was very wet and boggy, the type of stinky bog that turns the ground into a quivering, wobbly mass. I’ve watched countless YouTube videos along the lines of ‘How Not To Die In A Bog’ and the main advice is not to struggle. One of my favourite Simpsons moments is when Homer falls into a tar pit and explains his method for escaping:
We were pretty alone on Meall Fuar-monaidh and had a large section of bog to cross. I spent a few minutes assessing the ground (I REALLY need a hiking pole) before leaping comically to a rock on the other side. Pete laughed at my nervous flailing leap, spent zero time assessing anything and jumped straight into the bog, with one leg going in right up to the knee. A brief moment of panic crossed his face before he managed to pull his leg out (though not with his face), luckily his walking boot was still attached. Since then, he too has been wary of soft ground underfoot.
The bog factor on Loughrigg wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated. We made it to the trig point in one piece and the summit stayed relatively clear for us, enough to take in some excellent views.
Here I am looking towards Black Fell past Loughrigg Tarn. It took a good ten minutes to set up this apparently natural shot and it ended in me getting my ankle slightly caught between some rocks.
And my obligatory ‘hand on the trig point’ shot has a view of Ambleside in the background:
Looking in the opposite direction you can see Grasmere and the road through the valley that takes you up to Keswick:
We started back down the Grasmere side of the fell with the most magnificent view in front of us:
The descent was made easier by some more of those fabulous rough steps that are tirelessly maintained by the good folks of the Lakes. I’ve almost managed to make Pete, in his t-shirt and shorts, look like a pro in this atmospheric shot:
Eventually you reach Loughrigg Terrace, a long, flat path that takes you around the edge of the fell:
This path takes you around the Northern side of the fell and, like magic, you stumble across this:
By ‘like magic’ I mean you follow the hoards of tourists who have come up from the car park at the bottom to see Rydal caves. This was what I’d been hoping to see.
I have a love-hate relationship with caves. Growing up on the South Coast and reading a lot of Enid Blyton I had a romantic vision of a cave as a place high up on a cliff that held the great treasures and dark secrets of smuggling. However, my first actual experience of being underground was not quite the Famous Five adventure I’d hoped for but instead involved a school outing to the Black Country Museum in the West Midlands. As part of our visit we went into the old mines on a canal boat: we had to lie down and walk the boat through the claustrophobia-inducing tunnels that opened up into a big cavern full of freaky mannequins and dodgy soundbites. I have been on various trips into mines around the country and one thing that the guide will always do is turn the lights out for a minute to give you an idea of how dark it is. As a claustrophobic kid who didn’t like shutting my bedroom door at night because I enjoyed the comfort of the landing light, experiencing proper dark was pretty traumatic. It is so dark deep in a mine that you feel like it’s possible that you may no longer physically exist. You can’t see your own body and there is nothing but blackness and the hushed silence of thirty other schoolchildren all having the same existential crisis.
My enjoyment of caves was restored on a trip to Beer Quarry in Devon in 2015. The tour was very interesting: one fact that has stuck with me was that the water dripping onto our heads had likely fallen as rain on the surface when Charles I was on the throne. It took hundreds of years to filter through the rocks above. Whether that is true or not I don’t know but it brought some of the magic back for me, as did the idea that some of the tunnels joined to the smugglers’ caves in the cliffs and were used by the infamous Jack Rattnebury himself.
Back in the Lake District, Rydal Cave is not the type of cave you can journey into very far. It’s more of a cavern filled with knee-deep water, within which there are somehow hundreds of fish darting about. This picture was taken as far back as one can get:
It’s a lovely place to stumble across though, especially if you aren’t expecting it. Pete very much enjoyed it and seems to be receiving some kind of holy inspiration in this picture:
(or maybe he was just catching seventeenth-century drips…)
Once you have passed Rydal cave the walk back to Ambleside is long but flat and takes you right back to the car park where you started your journey. It was only about 2pm when we returned to town and I was feeling surprisingly motivated, so we decided to grab a quick lunch and drive back up to Keswick to do Latrigg before the sun went down.
Loughrigg Fell is definitely a good hike for the modest adventurer. It has a little bit of everything; scrambling, lakes, views, bogs and caves and there were lots of kids having a great time along the route. On a scale of 1 to Jenkin Hill, I’d give it a nice easy 3: even this uphill struggler still had some oomph left for another Wainwright!
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