“I have got to find the river...
Leave the road and memorise
This life that pass before my eyes
Nothing is going my way”
'Find the River', R.E.M.
IN THE SEPIA LIGHT of Warnscale
Head bothy, I ponder my options. Peering
through a little window, I watch as clouds
engulf us. To continue with the plan,
we’d have to follow the angry waters of
Warnscale Beck down a steep, narrow
path that we don’t know, and which is slick
with heavy rain, while suffering from the
temporary cataracts of poor visibility. It’s
not looking good.
And yet... what of sticking to your guns,
of true grit, of the irresistible force of the
neo-liberal individual? In your face, life –
you can’t stop me. So keep going, then – like
Scott of the Antarctic (okay, maybe not him)
- and my reward will be... sodden nights in
a tent en route to Easington, where the River
Cocker, having subsumed itself in the waters
of the Derwent, empties into the sea.
It isn’t just my own upstart ego I have
to manage, but my responsibilities as
‘expedition leader’ too. After all, this journey
was my idea, which my friend Martin and
his 14-year-old son, William, have bought
into. Sensing that William is unnerved but
doesn’t want to say anything, and wanting
to put his son’s safety first without putting
pressure on my decision, Martin hints that
they will be bailing out.
To this, add the opinions of the other two
people we’ve just met in the bothy: Emily,
broody under her gorgon tangle of hair, who
predicts certain doom if we don’t turn back;
and her partner, Angelo, who doesn’t want
to contradict her but is much more sanguine
in his assessment. I err towards Angelo’s
perspective, yet I find myself unable to trust
him on the basis that he looks like Grigori
Rasputin.
With all of this swirling in my head, I
keep on pondering, attempting to divine
the future in forks of rain sluicing down the
window. At this rate, if they ever make a
hillwalking version of Hamlet, I’m a shoe-in
for the top job.
DAY 1: DARK SKY, BLACK SAIL
At two in the afternoon, we finally put boot
on trail, and crunch along the gravel path
from Bowness Knott car park towards Black
Sail YHA. Across Ennerdale Water, the
fells are partly obscured by cloud, but this
seems to conspire with my plan of focusing
on water as the theme of this trip – on how
it has formed the landscape, and how it
moves through it. By way of preparation,
I’ve been perusing How to Read Water by
Tristan Gooley, and intend to see bodies
of water as “a summit in their own right”.
As we move alongside Char Dub, I spot a
glide – a smooth flow of water between a
riffle and a pool, and proudly announce my
observation to the group.
“Yes, it is,” replies Martin, matter-of-
factly. “I was just thinking that myself.”
It turns out that Martin is a bit of a fly
fisherman, and can already tell the difference
between a rise and a riffle. Equally handily,
William knows his trees. “See that tree there,”
says William, “that’s an ash. In late summer
they produce bunches of seed pods called
‘keys’.”
“Like those sycamore half-helicopter
things?” I ask.
“Yes, each one looks like half a snitch,” he
adds, winningly.
Just beyond Ennerdale YHA, where we
plan to track a beck through a firebreak up
to Red Pike, then follow the crags to Hay
Stacks, we hesitate. The cloud is definitely
descending, and the mountain weather
forecast is dicey at best. No matter. We decide
to take the glass-is-half-full approach and go
for it anyway.
Red Pike’s southern flanks turn out to
be rather steep, and we lean in to the slope
between cairns. At my feet, each blade of
grass is beaded by a gluey droplet of water,
and around my head flies buzz incessantly,
dangling their natty red legs behind them.
Time is of the essence, and the cairns aredisappearing in the cloud, so we opt to cut
the corner off and dead reckon our way
north-east to intercept the ridge. Yet the
fence posts that run along the crags simply
won’t show themselves, and we finally
realise that we’ve been heading due east
towards Raven Crag in a bowl of land.
Course corrected, we finally reach the
summit of High Stile in a pea souper. The
hoped-for views across the ‘watershed’ to
Buttermere are null and void. What follows
is a sodden stumble towards High Crag
along poo-splattered rocks that plunge
through the clouds towards the unseen
valley floor below. Disorientation sets in,
and I begin to think we’re walking the cliff-
tops of St Kilda. William texts his mum to
tell her we’re lost, which doesn’t help, and
we abandon all thoughts of visiting HayLAKE DISTRICT
60 The Great Outdoors August 2019