C2C Day 3, Stonethwaite (Mile 29.5)—Lofty Goals

I am traveling a road that thousands before me have taken, yet it is still new, for I am embarking on it for the first time myself.

Today is 15.5 miles, from Ennerdale Bridge to a little village called Stonethwaite. Dorothy’s daughter gives me a lift from the farm to town, so I don’t need to walk the same 1.5 miles from their farm again. I stop for cash at the town’s hotel, where, for the first time ever, I actually drain the ATM of its remaining funds—£70—while asking for a larger withdrawal.

I am also planning to buy some snacks before I leave Ennerdale, but the grocer recently closed down, and there are no other stores in the village. How can a village not have a grocer? But there it is—no grocer. I resign myself to trail bars, peanut butter crackers, and water for my lunch break. I’ve forgotten to request a sack lunch from Dorothy.

Today is much cooler than yesterday, for the heat wave has finally broken. A light rain falls as I shrug into my small daypack at 9:10a and head out of town toward the long lake that is Ennerdale Water.

Wainwright describes today’s walk as “easy, with no difficulties of route.” Almost three miles along Ennerdale Water, a four-mile forest walk to Black Sail youth hostel, and the rest of the way over hills to Honister Pass and Borrowdale, a valley that houses several hamlets that, says Wainwright, know how to cater to walkers who have “outsize appetites and tired bodies.”

I start out alone, but am soon overtaken by two C2C’ers near Angler’s Crag, a rocky outcropping on the lake. We pause for introductions. They are Michael and David, brothers, both retired, from Nottingham.

“Traveling alone?” asks Michael with a friendly grin.

“Yes.”

“Well done!” He gives me a round of applause.

Turns out that Michael has walked UK’s trails for 50 years, traveling over many parts of the C2C path, but never all in one shot. David, like me, hasn’t done much long-distance trekking. This is his first time on the C2C—part of his recent retirement celebration.

He’s not sounding particularly celebratory as we compare notes about yesterday’s walk through the second day of heat wave. They had taken the Dent route, and David had suffered from heat exhaustion over the top.

“I nearly died out there!” he says with a half accusatory look toward his older brother, who’s apparently the mastermind behind this idea of the C2C as a sendoff into the life of retirement.

Michael laughs, “Oh, you did all right. Not like that mother and her daughter. You hear about that?”

I shake my head. Michael’s voice and accent remind me of Wallace in Wallace and Grommet.

“They went over Dent yesterday and got turned around on those trails at the top. Heard they were still up there at 7 o’clock, and finally found their way back down the western side and ended up back in Cleator.”

“I’m glad I didn’t do the Dent then,” I say. “I took the easy way around, going along Flat Fell.”

“What!” says David. He turns to his brother. “You mean we didn’t have to go over the Dent? What else are you not telling me about? I could’ve died out there, you know.”

We all laugh, then we sort of walk together up to Angler’s Crag, where we take separate breaks, wave a farewell, and they move ahead at their faster pace.


The rain has let up, the air is muggy, and the morning haze has just about burned off. I peel off my rain jacket and roll it up to attach it to the bottom of my daypack. The trail along the water is easy to follow but rugged, with lots of stones, rock-strewn gravel, and a brief bit of scramble over Angler’s Crag. The second half is punctuated with lovely wooded areas like grottos, but rather than smooth footpaths, there are tree roots everywhere, each one a potential trip-up.

The only safe chance to take in the view is to stop and look around. Otherwise, it’s an unrelenting near-three miles of watching where every foot falls to avoid falling on my face. Very slow going. Still, I do pause often and am rewarded with breathtaking views across the lake, ahead to where I’m going, and back from where I’ve come.


The path along the water ends in a track that allows for a lovely final backward glance before it crosses a field of sheep. The transition from there to forest road happens over a wooden bridge that this morning is blocked by several fat sheep and lots of white and black lambs. They mostly scatter as I approach, but one little fellow panics and gets himself onto the bridge platform, too afraid to go past me and unable to get through the stile that keeps animals off the bridge. I back away reassuringly, and after a few more failed attempts at the stile, the lamb scrambles back to the grass yelling for its mother.

A noon lunch break at the Ennerdale YHA, at Gillerthwaite, gives me the chance to kick off my boots and rest on the grass under a shady tree. I am at mile 19 of the 190-mile trek, and a little over five miles from today’s starting point. The hostel is locked up at the moment—no chance of an indoor toilet. As usual, the hostel guests are gone during the day, and only two other people, staff by the looks of it, come through the gate while I sit here. Some bicyclers on the forest road behind me are noisy and yelling to each other as they part at the gate. They sound like a boisterous group of nine, but there are only four of them.

My toes are holding up magnificently with the lamb’s wool—thank you, Christi, for that dancer’s tip—and I’ve collected a little more from the fields and nettles over the past two days, so I have a good supply. They washed up wonderfully in the machine inside a nylon stocking stuff sack at Low Cock How farm.

Ahead of me is a four-mile track of forest road to the Black Sail hostel, then a two-mile tricky bit that follows cairns instead of fence lines. Despite Wainwright’s assessment of the trail, I’ve been warned that the area is easy to get lost in. I’ll need to be attentive to my surroundings, not just to my feet.


The jutting mass of Pillar Rock, one of the many landmarks that Wainwright had lovingly drawn in his book, is visible beyond the hostel at the east. I read about it in the guide—his drawing matches the profile well.

Starting off again after lunch, I know I’ll make good time on this bit of road. True to Wainwright’s description, however, Ennerdale Forest is a trudge. And a misnomer. It’s really an enormous evergreen plantation, much like the ubiquitous Weyerhauser and Simpson woods in the Pacific Northwest. The same kind of trees—they look like firs here—planted as a crop for their wood. They are homogenous in species and size, crowded together, falling over onto each other like pencils in a jar.

Except in Wainwright’s days, more of the trees were actually there. Now most of them to the north are gone, the plantations having been harvested in a clearcut that leaves hillsides denuded of all but brown stumps and debris. To my left, the bald fells of High Stile, High Crag, and the Haystacks—a favorite ridge walk of Wainwright’s and one that he describes as being “for very strong and experienced fell walkers (only)”—hold the northern horizon away from view. To my right, trees tower and often block the view of the southern crags, and I am lucky to catch a glimpse of the River Liza that flows down the valley to feed Ennerdale Water.

The trail isn’t some lovely little nature walk curving through the remaining woods, either. It’s a straight-on, dusty, unrelieved, exposed gravel road that’s built strong enough to be used by logging trucks. “Just keep plodding along the forest road,” says Wainwright, and he’s right.


A little after 2:00p, the Black Sail hostel, one of the smallest in the YHA collection, is finally in sight. Woohoo! I am out of the clearcut and back into sheep-grazed, grassy hills.

I come around to the front of the hostel, and who’s there on the benches but David and Michael! They praise me for making it here. They’ve just finished lunch and are putting socks and boots back on. David counts multiple blisters.

Unfortunately, the hostel is closed due to unforeseen circumstances—full septic. No toilets. No water. Drat. David and Michael fill their bottles from the hostel’s filtration system up the hill, and they welcome me to join them when I ask if I can travel with them through Loft Beck, that tricky bit of today’s walk.

The trickiest bit turns out to be guessing which steep hill to climb: two of them face us once we follow a shorter side trail from the hostel to the end of the valley. Which one is Loft Beck—the one at the left with all the scrabbly rock and no apparent path, or the taller one to the right that has a faint path up part of it? We spend 15 minutes comparing maps, notes, Wainwright interpretations. David and I, neophytes that we are, dare to outvote Michael and suggest we take the scrabbly track at the left. It seems to fit their OS maps better, as well as descriptions of where to go in my Footprint map.

Willing to give it a go, Michael forges ahead up our chosen trail. David and I push on much more slowly, clearly lacking the mountain-goat blood that Michael has been endowed with.

Michael is practically a white dot against gray rock when he calls down from about halfway up, “There are steps!”

Hoorah, we’ve chosen correctly. I repeat the news to David, who’s not far below me. “We did it! You chose the right path!” I whip out my camera, and David whips off his hat for a photo of the happy moment.

The climb for us is arduous, and David and I buck each other up with jokes and encouragement in between rest stops to lower our heart rates. Michael has disappeared over the top of the hill and doesn’t answer my yells.

“He’ll never hear you,” says David. “He’s long gone. Just wait, when we finally catch up to him, he’ll be all rested, we’ll collapse, and he’ll say, ‘OK, let’s go!’”

The cairns at the top of the hill, which I expected to be difficult to spot, couldn’t have been easier to follow if they’d been neon signs. They are huge pyramids of stones and seem to be placed every two hundred feet. Michael is still nowhere to be seen.

We finally meet him resting among the cairns, having waited at least 20 minutes for us to catch up. His handkerchief is draped over a trekking pole like a white flag. Just as we approach, he grins and acts as if to stand. “Let’s go!”

“See?” says David. “I told you, didn’t I?” He drops down to the grass and groans, “Good thing we’re not expected to have sex once we get up here.” We all break out into laughter.

“Right,” I say, also folding to the ground in relief. “The only thing we would get up here is our bodies.”

We all laugh heartily. It feels good.

The trail leads next into Honister Pass, an old slate mining area, where Michael and David will stop for the day. I am to go on for another three miles to Stonethwaite. The trail to Honister is not only well marked but well trodden. The rocky, uneven ground is even more rough going than Ennerdale Water, though, and my feet and ankles hurt, and my legs are tired.

The last downhill trail—an old tram road that was used to haul slate down from the mine to the processing plant—is grueling in itself: more of that uneven slate and stone jutting all over the place, plus lots of loose rocks. “Ankle breakers,” Michael calls them.

We pull into Honister Slate Mine/Museum/Shop at 4:50p, and I take a half hour break on a slate wall and take a moment to appreciate the snaking trail we just came down. We exchange contact info and kisses and goodbyes. We’re likely to catch each other on the trail to Grasmere tomorrow. Their itinerary ends Aug 2, mine Aug 5; our schedules split off around Keld, I think. Michael tells me I’m supposed to go to the Wainwright Chip Shop in Kirkby Stephen to sign a C2C travel book. It’s close to the halfway point of the trail.

I leave for Stonethwaite, with the intention to have a leisurely supper stop at either Seatoller or Rosthwaite on the way in. I hope to get the Stonethwaite by 9p, which is still daylight at this latitude and time of year.

I reach Seatoller within an hour of walking down another rugged trail, and duck into a restaurant to buy a yogurt and banana to tide me over until dinner, as well as three OS maps to get me over the Lake District and through to Shap, a few days away.

After seeing the additional information that Michael’s OS map provided today, I’m feeling the need to supplement the Footprint maps. The greater topographical detail and wider geographical context allay my fears of getting lost or being unable to take an alternative path if I need one. Too bad OS no longer makes a C2C system map, though—it takes lots of individual maps to piece the whole path together.

I decide to forego the official C2C trail from Seatoller to Rosthwaite so I can stay on the paved road. My feet appreciate the level, smooth ground, and there’s a decent shoulder or sidewalk most of the way.

My arrival at Rosthwaite around 7:00p means I’m just in time for supper at the local pub. I order dinner at the bar with the recommendation/help of a patron who’s the brother of the chef and used to work here, and find a table at the back of the main room. I pull my daypack off and begin telescoping my trekking poles for storage on the booth seat.

From a table nearby, a man says with a smile in his voice, “We should all be wearing a sign saying ‘Coast to Coast Walk’ on the back of our packs.”

He’s bearded, friendly, and the male part of a couple in their late ‘50s or so.

I manage to pull out enough energy for a chat. “You too?”

“Yes. We just came from Ennerdale hostel. Very crowded last night. They had to take in several people from Black Sail because of emergency septic problems at Black Sail. Are you American?”

“Yes. Seattle area. You?” I can’t place his accent, although it sounds familiar.

“Australia. Where are you staying tonight?”

“Stonethwaite Farm, half mile or so down the road. Heading to Grasmere tomorrow.”

“So are we!” says his wife. “Where are you staying?”

“The hostel, I think.”

“Oh, we’re going there! Which one?”

I dig out my notes. “Uh, YHA-Grasmere.”

“Isn’t that great? We’re staying at the same one. Perhaps we’ll see you there, then.”

Another couple from across the room starts talking with the Aussies about the C2C walk. They seem like locals who know a little about the trail, and are familiar with meeting walkers. My dinner arrives and I’m far too tired to keep up with the cross-room conversation, so I disappear into the pleasure of lamb shank with jacket potato and salad and sticky toffee pudding with ice cream. I’m very hungry, and very eager to get to the B&B and collapse for the night.

After a few false turns and wanderings, I finally find Stonethwaite and Stonethwaite Farm. Tracey, the proprietress, has left me a note on the door to find her at a pub down the street. She and some girlfriends are having dinner out. She breaks away from her meal to settle me into the farmhouse.

It’s another cozy renovation with white plaster walls, unsquare corners, and walls wider at the base, plus the added challenge of slanting floors in the hall, my room, and the bathroom. It is reminiscent of the Haunted Shack at Knotts Berry Farm—I lean slightly uphill to walk into the room, sit down on the toilet by falling slightly backward, and take a bit of extra effort to get up out of bed to the left because of the floor’s uphill tilt in that direction. It is, however, altogether warm and comfortable.

Oh, to shower, to sit, to rub oil on my feet, to lay myself down on a bed and ruminate after today’s rough trek! Luxury following luxury. Foot inspection shows signs of stress at my right foot big toe, fourth toe, little toe—tenderness and white skin. The left foot has only the two smallest toes hurting as yesterday, but no fresh blisters. The wool is doing wonders for my comfort; I found more fresh wool to use today, this time in gray and black, too.

Everyone creates their own C2C walk, and I am, too. That’s the fun of meeting people on the way: finding out how they’ve decided to do it, comparing itineraries. And having the chance to share groans over the tougher parts of the trail, or highlights of what we’ve experienced.

My highlights today were definitely meeting Michael and David, and accomplishing Loft Beck. And making it all the way to Stonethwaite after more than fifteen rough-going miles, before dark.

Trail miles: 15.5; actual miles walked: 16