Last night I have the best sleep I’ve had this week, with lights out by 10:00p, and I wake refreshed. The clouds look low, and over breakfast I decide to avoid the hilltops and take Beverley’s route south via Hartsop and Hayes Water to reach The Knott. She points me to the path that starts in the field across from her farm; getting there requires a dog-leg down the road and across the main street.I start out around 9:30 and try to hurry, but am not getting my woolen toe cushions just right. They’re either too thick and jamming my toes or too thin and not giving me enough support. After the third stop within 300 yards to adjust them, I realize I’m hurrying because I feel scared about the route today.
I’m not going at all on the bona fide C2C, but taking a valley route to Bampton Grange that parallels the ridge walk of the C2C, follows the C2C path between The Knott and Kidsty Pike, and then veers off to follow the Roman Road “High Street” before going gradually down Bampton Common. It altogether avoids the Haweswater Reservoir, which Beverley says is miles of stony walking like at Ennerdale. Much of today’s walk and landmarks aren’t even in Wainwright’s book.
Looking back on Patterdale, I decide on a different route to Hayes Water even from the one Beverley suggested. It sends me through a lovely wild grotto with lots of singing birds that I record on Perry. An amazing gnarled filbert tree looks very old but is still bearing fruit on a few branches. Brothers Water shows up right on cue as a languid landmark.Still following the details of my OS map, I get off track at Hartsop itself. The obvious footpath along a stone wall that I’m tracking peters out into a soggy cow path and dead-ends at another stone wall that has no stile. I can see my goal down the hill and its corresponding wiggly line on the map—the beck and gill beyond Hartsop—but I am way too high above it in reality.
OK. OS map rule #1: a 25000 scale really means that things are closer than they appear. I should be almost hugging the river, not this far above it. I resolve to attend to the map’s little stone-wall and fence lines more closely and turn to backtrack along the muddy cow path. A high-pitched cry comes from the sky—a golden eagle is soaring over the pasture I am in. She is heading me straight out like a beacon. I recall reading that golden eagles are returning to this area but stay in hidden places. I rejoice in her freedom and beauty, and in the chance to experience a sighting of this usually reclusive bird. I would never have enjoyed her flight had I not gotten off track.
Once again, the day is hot. A stop along Hayeswater Gill gives me a chance to rest from a steady uphill climb and soak my kerchief in the widest stream I’ve seen since starting the walk. Wide expanses of dry rock shows that this gill is still much narrower than it would be in wetter summers, though.
Getting to Hayeswater shortly afterward, I face what Elaine calls a “grunt” climb—easy for footing, but at a 35 to 40 percent grade that leaves me huffing and puffing and taking frequent breaks the whole way up. I finally reach the top to find seven cyclists resting and drinking water next to their laid-out bikes.“My god,” I say, panting. “Don’t tell me you carried those up here.”
“Yeah,” they chorus, laughing at my expression.
I shake my head. “That’s like carrying your horse up a hill to ride it!”
They are headed to the High Street to bike all the way down along the ridge. Before I leave, another three climbers come over the crest shouldering bicycles. Loony. That’s what they are. Bloomin’ loony.Beverley had told me that, after I pass The Knott, to watch carefully for the trail that turns sharply left so I don’t miss the turnoff to Kidsty Pike. “Follow the rock wall on your right. If you get to the big opening, you’ve gone too far. Look over your left shoulder, and you’ll see where you missed the turnoff. If you miss it, you’ll end up walking for hours south on the High Street and end up back where you started in Patterdale.”
Great. Don’t want to do that.
I decide to forego a visit to the knoll of The Knott itself and dutifully keep an eye on the rock wall, looking for the opening she describes. Only there are lots of openings. Fallen openings. Crumbling openings. Some deliberate-looking openings. And no corresponding path over my left shoulder. I begin to wish I’d mastered the trick of counting steps so I can gauge actual distance against a map when I spot another one of those bikers who has stopped to consult with a walker. They’re at the junction of a very wide gravel path that turns sharply left...rather hard to miss, actually.
“This the path to Kidsty Pike?”
“Uh, looks like it, yes,” they say, turning their own map around.
I let out a whoop and head up hill. Another tricky bit taken care of by available resources and support. Having canceled the idea of going to Kidsty Pike itself, I am just crossing a trackless field of heather and grass called Rampsgill Head when I catch long-distance sight of a couple wearing familiar-looking beige shorts, shirts, and outback hats.
The woman yells, “Audrey?”
I yell, “Elaine?”
Wow, what a delight to see familiar faces after a schlep like this morning’s. I’d given up hope of meeting any of my new chums today since I’d taken a different route from Patterdale. Heaven only knows where Michael and David are by now; they usually leave earlier than I do, anyway.
Elaine and John have already had a lunch break, and we discuss path options ahead. I relay what Beverley had said about Haweswater Reservoir, and none of us want to do the Kidsty scramble down. So we opt to follow my OS map and take the Roman Road down Bampton Common.
I pull out my sack lunch to eat en route, and we talk about our travels. “How was Striding Edge?” I am still happy I didn’t take that trail yesterday, and amazed that they had.
“Terrifying,” says Elaine. “Exposure on both sides, and some spots of real hard rock climbing. I’m glad I did it, and I don’t need to do it again.”
I heartily congratulate her success, for I know she has conquered a big fear. (Ask her about the time she crawled on hands and knees over boulders in Australia while her children skipped around her like gazelles, and you’ll understand the magnitude of yesterday’s accomplishment.)
John has done a lot of rock climbing in his time, some of it extreme, and agrees that Striding Edge is right up there in complexity and difficulty. He was particularly worried when he inadvertently dislodged a rock and sent it careening down the slope toward some hikers who had no business scrabbling up a particularly extreme side of the hill. “Look out below!” he cried. Fortunately, the stone bounced away from the climbers. John still looks relieved when he tells the story.
The Roman Road is less road now than a flat expanse of moors, and it’s blessedly gentle to walk on after so many days of stony ground and granite climbs. The path flows downhill, the hills are swells that expose peekaboo views of the lakes this district is named for, and instead of stones to jar every joint, padded peat cushions my steps.The path is easy to follow until we get to Bampton Common itself, at the end of the Haweswater Reservoir. Then it becomes a fun challenge to find our way among the undulating hills and multiple paths that appear and disappear in the grasses. A landmark called Four Stones Hill proves most elusive—it’s supposedly four standing stones on a hill near the reservoir, but they’re nowhere to be seen.
We laugh a lot here, and I realize it’s far more fun to be lost with others than to be lost alone. We have plenty of daylight and three brains to put to the problem. We press on with John’s compass, our two maps, and everyone’s best common sense, and the trail still leaves us hanging at the outskirts of the first farmhouse we’ve seen all day. There we find a mound with four boulders all in a line—quite possibly the Four Stones Hill moved much farther north.
Civilization in the form of Bampton shows in the distance at last. On the very last slope of the very last sheep field before we reach Bampton’s road, I am reading my map and I step straight into a rabbit hole. Boom, down I go, face-plant into the grass before I even know what’s happened. Thank god I didn’t twist my ankle or knee, but my already-sore toes got jammed forward in my boot. Yeeowch.OK. OS map rule #2: Don’t walk and read the map at the same time...
My hotel is at Bampton Grange, about 1/2 mile farther down the road from John and Elaine’s in Bampton, but that much closer to eventually reconnecting with the C2C trail around Shap. I take a welcome toilet stop at John & Elaine’s B&B (the proprietress panicks a bit when she sees three of us waiting on her doorstep, and had planned for only two). We reconnoiter with maps for tomorrow’s leg of the journey, and I am soon on my way to a shower, dry clothes, and an orange-passion fruit J2O at my hotel, the Crown & Mitre.At the onsite pub, a five-year-old blonde girl in a pink headscarf is holding out a white plastic grocery bag to each patron: “Pea?”
Her big blue eyes are wide as she offers me her goods. I peer inside. A pile of sugar snap peas. I take one with thanks, and off she goes.
I eat supper at the pub with Jenny and Len, C2C’ers who are also from Australia, selecting a dish of venison in red wine/cranberry sauce, chips, broccoli, peppered cabbage, and carrots. Elaine and John, who met their fellow Aussies at Stonethwaite, join us for dessert. I order sticky lemon pudding with vanilla ice cream, but it’s not as good as regular sticky toffee pudding.Turns out that John/Elaine and Jenny/Len live on opposite sides of Melbourne: John/Elaine on the coast, and Jenny/Len on the wine country side, 55 miles away. They’ve never met until this walk, even though they’re all avid walkers in Australia. They swap tales of the many hikes and walking tours they’ve done there, and I mentally move that country to the top of my list of places to visit someday.
By rough calculations and map checks, had I walked toward Shap instead of Bampton Grange, I would be at mile 61 of the official trail today. I’ve got four miles or so to walk to Shap tomorrow, which returns me to the trail at mile 61.5 and on the way to tomorrow’s nightly stop, Orton/Raisbeck.
Trail miles: 13; actual miles walked: 15
