First, an apology.
I haven’t posted in a while. I am a writer by trade and the last thing I’ve felt like doing when I finish an 8-hour stretch of staring blankly at a Word document that just won’t come together is spend the evening doing the same for a WordPress blog post. Truth be told, I’m a telly addict (remember that show?) and have been mostly relaxing my frazzled writer’s brain by eating Waitrose Belgian Chocolate Chip and Hazelnut cookies and dribbling in front of Netflix during the cold winter evenings (Gilmore Girls, Friends and Arrested Development to be precise). This has meant a few pounds of the fat variety were accrued over the winter period but, now that the weather is getting kinder and the evenings lighter, we are back in the hiking game.
It’s currently the start of May 2018 and we haven’t been to the Lakes since October Half Term 2017. During this trip back in the autumn we intended to climb a few of the smaller fells to add to our collection. The weather had other ideas. On our first day we went to Tarn Hows with a view to summiting Black Fell – a nice easy hill in comparison to some of them, or so we thought.
I was told Tarn Hows was lovely. I’m sure it is. I wouldn’t know. When we got there all we saw was this:
Foggy, right?
Yep.
Not ideal weather for climbing up high. Needless to say, we attempted to find Black Fell but had to abort. Though not before we watched an off-road motorbiker faceplant into some rocky terrain whilst trying to ride along an ankle-shatteringly rocky path (he was fine).
…
Back to the Wainwrights we’ve actually managed to find. Or at least, I hope we’ve found – for where exactly is the summit of Latrigg?
No, seriously. Where is it? Because when we went there back in late summer last year we couldn’t figure it out. There is no trig point and not even a cairn to signal that you have reached the top. OK, so it’s really just a small hill in comparison to its bigger neighbour Skiddaw and maybe doesn’t warrant a proper trig point but come on, give me something to take a photo of.
Like Black Fell on a clear day (I imagine) Latrigg is one of those very easy minor fells – a fell for absolute beginners. Especially if you start at the car park half way up as we did (Pete likes to start there because you can buy coffee and snacks from a little van). It took us longer to drive there from Ambleside than it did to get to the top. I’m not even going to describe the route – if you can’t find your way to the top via the wide open path then I’m not sure even Specsavers could help you.
What Latrigg lacks in height it makes up for in views of the larger, more imposing fells around it.
Isn’t that a good one? This is looking back north towards the mighty Skiddaw (to the right is the horrific Path-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named up Jenkin Hill). Almost looks unreal doesn’t it? The smoothness of the hills from a distance gives little insight into their craggy tops and difficult ascents.
And this one (below) looking South takes in Derwent Water, Catbells and all the Central Fells:
It doesn’t take much climbing to get to these views and, consequently, its a busy little fell. But we had it pretty much to ourselves on this beautiful August evening.
Considering we had spent the best part of the day climbing Loughrigg Fell in the Southern Lakes, I was feeling surprisingly energetic and ran ahead to take this picture of Pete in front of an awesome view of Keswick below.
Keswick (pronounced Kezz-ick) is a lovely town in the Northern Lakes that we have yet to explore properly. Although it was once home to the great poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of my favourite facts about Keswick is that it has a museum dedicated to pencils – the Derwent Pencil Museum.
Dubbed ‘a must for pencil lovers’ (we know you’re out there somewhere), the museum boasts the world’s largest coloured pencil.
“What colour is it though?” I hear you shout. “And how big is it?”
Well, I’ll tell you. It’s yellow and it’s 26ft long…
I can see you booking your tickets already.
As someone who can spend hours looking at stationery in an art shop, I am actually genuinely impressed by this and may well visit the museum on a rainy day in the future. The reason there is a museum of pencils in Keswick is due to nearby graphite mines providing the raw materials for the well-known (amongst stationary shop aficionados) Derwent brand and, if you really stop to think about it, the humble pencil is actually an amazing and under-appreciated feat of design worthy of its own museum. If it weren’t for some enterprising sixteenth-century folks in Borrowdale, who realised that the graphite they had discovered could be used for making marks, we’d potentially still be using toxic lead. The wooden casing was added afterwards to stop fingers from getting covered in graphite – the best designs are the simplest ones.
The museum itself gets great reviews on TripAdvisor
It is testament to the simplicity of climbing Latrigg that I can spend so much of my time padding out this blog post with facts about pencils.
If you want to know where to start with Lake District fell walking, start here. We managed to summit Latrigg (hopefully) in no time at all and I stood on something that looked like the top to record our achievement:
And that’s about it. We spent some time sizing up Dodd, which we would be attempting the following day. But that’s another blog post…
Comments