Grey Friar, Great Carrs, & Dow Crag from Seathwaite

It was to be my 100th Wainwright. Not quite halfway, but a minor milestone nevertheless. The day begins inauspiciously with a series of farcical calamities worthy of Basil Fawlty, but en route to the Seathwaite reservoir, the disarming beauty of the Duddon valley works its magic. After a splendid ridge walk, I celebrate in the rural charm of the Newfield Inn—the scene of a violent riot, 114 years ago, which ended in the fatal shooting of a navvy. Hard to believe these days, but I’m on my best behaviour just in case.

It’s not as if I was expecting fanfares, a red carpet and a Champagne breakfast on the terrace. That would be ridiculous—we haven’t got a terrace. But on a morning that marked a minor milestone in my fell walking career, I did, at least, want things to go smoothly.

It wasn’t to be. I awoke to find the cat had thrown up over the sofa cushions. He’d even managed to hit a car rug perched over the arm. The scatter pattern suggested he’d been projectile vomiting while spinning like a whirling dervish. Was he violently ill or possessed by a legion of demons? It didn’t look like it.

I’ve seen enough episodes of CSI to know how to work a crime scene, and here I found grass and a sizeable clump of matted fur (quite possibly not his own). Cat lovers will know that grass is an emetic which cats imbibe deliberately to shift fur balls. The ensuing upchuck is relatively controlled, so this extravagant distribution was clearly a matter of choice. The proud perpetrator was now standing by his bowl, demanding his breakfast.

After half an hour of intensive fabric cleaning, I stuffed Wainwright’s Pictorial Guide to the Southern Fells into my rucksack and set off for Seathwaite.

I’ve lived in Cumbria for twenty years and I’d never been into the heart of the Duddon valley. I’ve gazed down on it many times from the tops of the Coniston fells, ever struck by its lonely beauty. In autumn, the Seathwaite reservoir had shone like a sapphire on a baize of burnished gold. Today, the fields and trees are a swatch of fresh June green, licked into life by the early morning sun. I could easily lose myself in carefree reverie, but I need to concentrate because I’m not entirely sure where I’m going.

After Seathwaite, the map shows a fork in the road, with the right-hand prong giving way to the old quarry track that leads up to the Walna Scar Pass and on to Coniston. The reservoir track starts from the same point. Sure enough, the road forks where expected and there is even a sign saying “Coniston, unfit for cars”. But as the winding single-track road narrows to no more than my car width, I start to question why it is I think there is off-road parking at the end of it.

The road ends abruptly in a gate—with no parking space anywhere to be seen. A farmer on a quad bike is approaching from the other side. He clearly wants to come this way. I recall a distinct lack of passing places and the road is too narrow for a three-point turn. There’s nothing for it but to reverse back to the farm I passed quarter of a mile back.

Parking sensors are wonderful things, but they don’t know the difference between dry stone walls and cow parsley. Given the abundance of foliage overhanging the verges, my dashboard is lit up like a Christmas tree and my ears are ringing from the continuous high-pitched beep. I reach the farm, but I’m too close to the opposite wall to back in. I effect a painfully faffing five-point manoeuvre, while trying to avoid the eye of the farmer, who I sense is laughing heartily. Eventually, I manage to let him past. He gives a cheery wave and speeds off down the lane, no doubt dying to get home and tell his wife all about his encounter with Mr Bean.

I follow him back to the Seathwaite road. On the edge of the village, there are four parking spaces. One is still free. Perhaps my luck is changing.

It’s a rash hope. I open the hatchback to find the top isn’t properly on one of my water bottles and it’s emptied itself entirely into one of my boots—the one I’d put my socks in. I pour 500ml of water out of the boot and wring out the socks as best I can, then I squelch one and a half miles back up the road to the gate. I go through and just on the other side, I find the parking spaces.

Then, I step in a cowpat.

As I tramp up the reservoir track, I feel every bit like Basil Fawlty scouting around for a branch with which to give the day a damn good thrashing… But subconsciously, I start to change gear. There’s a song going around in my head. It’s The Waterboys’ Don’t Bang the Drum—it was playing on the radio on the way here:

“Here we are in a fabulous place
What are you gonna dream here?
We are standing in this fabulous place
What are you gonna play here?
I know you love the high life, you love to leap around
You love to beat your chest and make your sound
But not here man – this is sacred ground
With a Power flowing through
And if know you you’ll bang the drum
Like monkeys do”

The song warns of being so pumped up with our own self-importance, or perhaps with peeved indignance at the banana skins life leaves littered in our path, that we can stand in the most astounding of places and fail to realise.

I stop to apply sun cream, and I wake up to where I am. The epiphany strikes like an earthquake. A minute ago, the Duddon valley was a place of cowpats, frustratingly hidden car parks and wet feet. Now it’s a place of astonishing power and disarming beauty.

Across the valley, a conspiracy of sun and shadow renders the Scafells as an Art Deco railway poster—broad, flat, angular and stylised.

To the east, the sheer green slopes of Brim Fell, Dow Crag and Walna Scar form a colossal rampart to rend the valleys of the Duddon and Coniston. And straight ahead, rising over rippling foot hills, is the grassy dome of Grey Friar—the only Coniston fell I’ve yet to set foot on. Except, it isn’t really a Coniston fell at all. As Wainwright points put, Grey Friar belongs entirely to the Duddon.

Ticking off all the Wainwrights hadn’t been a goal. I was more interested in getting to know my favourites well—experiencing all their ascents and ridge walks. However, some gentle hectoring from my neighbours, Paul and Jeanette, convinced me that tackling the full 214 is a great incentive to explore new ground. They’re right, and since committing to the challenge, my knowledge of the peaks has grown exponentially.

I’ve climbed all the other mountains in this range at least twice and some (like The Old Man) as many as eight times. But Grey Friar, I’ve been saving. It will be my 100th Wainwright.

The OS map shows no path, but Wainwright sketches two that wend in parallel up the south western ridge. The first, a grass rake, is clearly visible from the track, but the intervening ground is marshy. AW suggests continuing to the reservoir and starting from just beyond the outtake channel. His second path is more direct and starts from the same place.

After a mile or so, I crest the hill and the long buttressed curve of the dam wall appears at the foot of dark shadowy slopes. As I reach the walkway that traverses the top, the sun slips behind a cloud, so now over the parapet, the dark waters stretch out—a long black placid pool, cool and inscrutable.

The reservoir’s tranquillity belies the violence in its construction. The ancient tarn was dammed in 1904, to extend its capacity as a water supply. The summer was a scorcher; the work was hard, and tempers were frayed. In such a small and remote community as Seathwaite, tensions were strained between locals and the labourers drafted in to sweat and toil. It would only take a spark to ignite the tinder.

In the event, alcohol proved the accelerant. According to Dick Sullivan’s book, Navvyman (Coracle Press, 1983), Owen Cavanagh had been drinking heavily since 9am. By noon, the landlord of the Newfield Hotel (now the Newfield Inn) judged he’d had enough. As Cavanagh’s rowdiness threatened to get out of hand, the landlord demanded he and his mates leave the premises. The men refused. They smashed up the pub and stole bottles of whisky, then they spilled into the street where they pelted the church and the vicarage with rocks. The publican, a barman and an engineer confronted the rioters with firearms. Shots were fired wounding three—fatally in Cavanagh’s case. The gunmen were arrested but later acquitted on the grounds their actions were legally justified in protecting property.

A primeval peace pervades now. The ghosts of rampaging navvies don’t haunt the fruits of their labours. I follow the walkway along the top of the dam and cross the footbridge over the main and auxiliary tarn outlets.

Between the crags of Great and Little Blake Rigg, Grey Friar’s slopes are more forgiving—grassy terraces peppered with rocky outcrops. Where Wainwright shows the start of his direct route, the tiniest of cairns hints at a faint path. I augment the cairn with a couple more stones—now you’ll have to blink a fraction longer to miss it.

In places, you have to rely on instinct and common sense to determine the line of the path. In others, it’s more pronounced, but nowhere is there any difficulty. A moderate pull up grassy slopes attains the ridge, and I make for the summit. Two cairns, a little way apart, stake equally convincing claims. Wainwright judges the north-eastern contender to be the true summit but concedes the south-western has the better views. He’s right, I pull myself up a rocky step and hunker down beside it to gaze across at Harter Fell and the Scafells.

A blue haze, like a sea mist, transforms the peaks into a mythical realm, where black spires, full of menace and foreboding, rise above dappled flanks, pretty and beguiling, and dark hollows harbour mysteries, old as the hills themselves.

One hundred Wainwrights under my belt is still seven short of halfway. Even so, it’s a ton, a nicely rounded sum, and it feels like an accomplishment. Grey Friars was a fine choice. It’s an underrated mountain, but away from the numbers, these are the kind that can reward the most. It’ll be a different story across on Scafell Pike. At this time of year, walkers will be arriving by the coach load. The Let’s Walk the Lakes Facebook group are tackling that today. Three weeks ago, I climbed Skiddaw with them. It was my first outing with the group, and a nicer bunch of like-minded people you couldn’t hope to meet. I wave in their direction and look forward to our next hike together. Then I set off for Great Carrs.

Just shy of the summit is a memorial cairn to the wreck of a Halifax bomber that crashed here in 1944. I’ve written about that at length in Ghost of Canadian Airmen, so I won’t repeat myself here, but the cairn with its cross and its plaque, together with the little wooden crosses people plant among the stones to commemorate their own departed loved ones, never fail to move me.

I don’t know how this looked in Wainwright’s day. It’s been rebuilt, so perhaps its appearance is more poignant now, but I find AW’s casual dismissal of it as a pile of aeroplane wreckage a tad perplexing. I’ve always suspected his curmudgeonly character was a slightly tongue-in-cheek persona: the bonhomie and humour in his writing suggests someone a little better disposed to people than is commonly supposed. But this throwaway line in the Grey Friar chapter does seem to reveal a more damaged individual, either lacking empathy, or perhaps, so used to burying his feelings he found them awkward to deal with when they surfaced.

I cross the shoulder of Swirl How and head over Brim Fell. The sky darkens, and it spots with rain. The hills are now a solemn grey, the Seathwaite reservoir a sombre sheen. But the dark clouds above Dow Crag are clearing and the ones overhead are insubstantial. They lack the ammunition for a proper downpour. Halfway to Dow Crag’s summit, the sun breaks through in triumph. By the time I reach the top, it’s glorious.

I read a number of walking blogs, and I enjoy Tessa Park’s, not only because it’s called Mountains and Malbec (which scores double points in my book), but because she champions the use of the ARSE CRAMPON. The concept is not entirely new, Wainwright remarks on the usefulness of the posterior, particularly in descent, but Tessa coined the phrase and she deserves a shout-out as I make liberal use of this piece of equipment in scrambling off the summit rocks.

Dow Crag’s buttresses and gullies are some of most dramatic features to be found anywhere in Lakeland. Its top is peppered with plunging vistas of heart-stopping beauty. Intrepid climbers perch on precarious outcrops high above the blue glimmer of Goat Water.

On the way down over Buck Pike and Brown Pike, Coniston Water is a hazy aquamarine wash to the east, while to the west, a band of barley forms a golden heart in the Lincoln green of the Duddon Valley. On reaching the Walna Scar Road, I turn right and descend past the old quarry into the pastoral perfection of Dunnerdale. Harter Fell looms ahead and Tarn Beck burbles over rocks as I meander lazily back to Seathwaite.

The Newfield Inn is the epitome of a charming rural pub. I sit in its pretty beer garden, enjoying the warm sunshine and a cool hoppy pint of Mosaic from the nearby Foxfield brewery. It’s impossible to imagine this was the scene of a violent riot and fatal shootings one hundred and fourteen years ago.

I’m quite sure the landlord doesn’t keep a loaded firearm behind the bar anymore, but just in case, I return the glass, thank him kindly and take extra care not to break anything on the way out.