Living the dream of having a mountain out the back door!
OUT AND ABOUT WITH RALPH: Moving to Caithness put paid to lifelong ambition, but there are still ways to explore without the car
It’s always been a dream of mine to live where you can just go out the back door and climb a mountain.
No need to drive for hours and park. No long trips by public transport. Just put on boots and a rucsack and go!
While it’s a dream I have never realised, my parents did live for seven years in the Yorkshire Dales at Brigflatts near Sedbergh, and I would often visit and stay.
I would sleep in a 17th-century schoolroom from where you could hop over a stone wall, cross a field, go down a steep bank and ford the river where it flowed in channels down rapids.
Then, with just one tiny single-track road to cross you were onto the open fell and could walk for miles and miles above Gawthrop and Dentdale, on as far as Whernside and the Three Peaks.
In those days you were unlikely to meet anyone outside busy weekends.
Later my mum lived for nearly 40 years at Winton, near Kirkby Stephen in Cumbria. Without even touching tarmac you could take a little path up the side of the next cottage leading onto the ‘backstiles’, a rambler’s dream path which crossed about nine stone stiles in a circuit of the village.
Taking a careful route which linked various gates in stone-walled fellside fields you could make your way up to the open fell at Langrigg, a place with a grand view out over the Eden Valley.
Almost every morning I’d have an early jog up there, sometimes in driving rain or snow, sometimes as the winter dawn came up with owls hovering and swooping in updrafts over the escarpment, sometimes in spring sunshine with the hill ridge carpeted in thyme.
On rare occasions when the whole day was mine I could carry on over rough fell country of ridges where cairns and stone shelters mark old lead mines and a stunted rowan guards a tiny heart-shaped tarn.
Nine huge cairns on the skyline mark the summit of Nine Standards Rigg on the famous coast-to-coast path, just a few moorland miles from Ravenseat, home of Amanda Owen, the TV Yorkshire shepherdess.
I’d carry on south over peat hag and limestone pavement to cross the first narrow road then climb up over Mallerstang Edge before descending into Mallerstang, crossing the Settle-Carlisle railway and continuing up over the high tops of Swarth Fell and Wild Boar Fell then down the long miles to Kirkby Stephen and home, after a yomp of some 22 miles in the summer sun.
My wife lived for five years on a wooded mountainside in the English Lake District until I took her away to flat and treeless Caithness! But we often go back to the wooden bungalow on Whinlatter Pass.
Just cross the road and head straight up, through bracken and scattered rowans to pick up a popular path aiming directly for the striking 2600-foot peak of Grisedale Pike. I must have been up there a couple of hundred times, in all weathers and seasons. The climb falls into three roughly equal sections, the last being steep, rough and loose.
As with many Lakeland walks, half the delight is in all the different people you meet on a fine day. First a group of Scouse lassies, they didn’t look that fit and kept stopping for rests to eat cream biscuits.
Most people overtook me, fit young men, fell-runners both men and women, often with dogs leading or in tow. Three middle-aged Pakistani men had stopped halfway up the second section, when I caught them up they said that seeing me had encouraged them not to give up!
I told them that if I could do it with two mechanical heart valves and a hip replacement, anyone could. It was their first ever mountain, I met them again just short of the top as I was heading down. Lovely people.
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Meanwhile, the Scouse girls had reached the summit looking fresher than when they set out and were discussing which mountain to do next. Another lassie with a long mop of straw-coloured hair was riding her mountain-bike up the last few yards, having carried it up the steep loose stuff, as indeed had about a dozen other mountain-bikers in groups of two or three.
All around were huge views of mountain and lake under an unbroken blue sky. I could take my time over the descent, no worries about car park tickets or driving home on busy roads, then just make a cup of tea and sit in the sun.
There’s nothing like having a mountain just outside your back door!