the cloud, Mark appears. “See,” he says,
raising his upturned palms towards the sky.
“I told you so.”
“It’s a coincidence,” I shout back.
Plans compared, we decide to set off
together.
“It’ll take me 30 minutes to pack the tent,”
Mark states, marching off to make a start.
“Right lads,” I shout as he walks away,
“we’ve got 29 minutes to get the hell out of
h e r e .”
We set off for Kirk Fell, en route to
Great Gable – chosen because we should
be able to trace our riverine route from its
summit. The top end of Ennerdale turns
out to be a geographical marvel: the valley
is so humped by dumlins that it could be a
hatchery for Loch Ness monsters.
Mark leads the way into the cloud that
seems to be rolling down the hillside like
an avalanche, taking a path that follows Sail
Beck up to the ridge between Pillar and Kirk
Fell. Martin, puffing alongside me in his
Ivor the Engine style, gestures towards Mark
and asks: “Do you get the feeling we’re the
sheep and he’s the shepherd?”
Having heard, Mark stops on an outcrop,
spins around and announces: “I feel a
sermon coming on.”
Further up, the going steepens, then
turns into a scramble. William becomes
more introverted, and Martin – reading his
son’s mood – says “He isn’t liking this at all.”
At the crux of the scramble, a bad step right
at its terminus, William seems to suffer from
an attack of ‘reverse vertigo’. Rather than
his brain irrationally deciding that jumping
down is the quickest way to cure a fear of
heights, it decides that leaping up onto his
belly is the solution to this particular pickle.
He struggles there for some time, pinned by
his backpack, flipping wildly like a fish upon
a riverbank.
We trudge across the top of Kirk Fell,
then decide to let Mark go up Great Gable
alone. With visibility in the tens of metres,
climbing a mountain for a view it won’t
afford seems pointless.
We say our goodbyes and coast down
Moses’ Trod, then scope out the leeward
side of Great Round How for a potential
camping site. It’s too early to pitch, though,
so we head down to Little Round How just
as the curtain of pebble-grey cloud is half-
raised, affording a tantalising view down the
valley as far as Crummock Water.
With time on our hands, we decide to
hang out at Blackbeck Tarn, watching the
ripples as they refract around a series of
stones then create interference patterns. I
follow the beck down, past a huge boulder
so radially scored that it resembles an[above] The River Liza – nice, but not the Cocker [right] Rain, fabric and lightimmense scallop shell, pushing on as far as
I can until the angle of rocks turns near-
vertical. Hmm, Black Beck is definitely not
the way down.
With the wind whipping across the fells,
we set up camp. William, who has the job of
holding down my tent while I peg and attach
the outer sheet, gets distracted and starts
looking at his phone. Realising he’s let go,
I make a desperate lunge and just manage
to prevent my shelter becoming a box-
kite. Throughout the night, the tent bulges
alarmingly – the wind is so strong that it’smore of a solid than a gas, rolling against my
shelter like a rotund sheep.DAY 3: HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL
We awake trapped inside an immense
toilet bowl. Buckets of water are being
hurled at us from unexpected angles, our
gear is saturated, the paths are ponds, and
the map has turned into pulp.
Bowed but unbroken, we search the
quagmire for something that could be
considered the source of Warnscale Beck.
Two days in and we haven’t even foundLAKE DISTRICT
62 The Great OutdoorsJuly 2019