Blencathra via Doddick Fell, Mungrisdale Common, Bannerdale Crags, Bowscale Fell, Souther Fell
Wainwright describes no fewer than 12 ways to ascend Blencathra. When I chicken out of Sharp Edge due to high winds, I try his third best route—the exhilarating ridge of Doddick Fell. On reaching the summit, I ramble on over Mungrisdale Common, Bannerdale Crags, Bowscale Fell and Souther Fell, encountering foxhounds, Geordies and John Wayne. (Some of them are even real).
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”. The opening line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet may have chimed with Alfred Wainwright in 1961, as he spent evening after evening sketching for his fifth book, The Northern Fells. While her words hardly described his marital life at the time (the fells and his books were his retreat from the unease of a failing relationship), they perfectly capture how he felt about Blencathra.
Wainwright spoke of a “spiritual and physical satisfaction in climbing mountains – and a tranquil mind upon reaching their summits, as though I had escaped from the disappointments and unkindnesses of life and emerged above them into a new world, a better world.” For AW, the southern face of Blencathra was “the grandest object in Lakeland”. He devoted 36 pages to this mountain (more than any other) and described 12 different ascents— “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”.
The southern face comprises five distinct fells fused together by the summit ridge. At either end, Blease Fell and Scales Fell are broad grassy flanks, but the middle three, Gategill Fell, Hall’s Fell and Doddick Fell, taper to narrow airy ridges separated by broad plunging gills. As far as dramatic mountain scenery goes, it’s an embarrassment of riches. Hall’s Fell Top is Blencathra’s summit, and from here, another short ridge dips then rises to Atkinson Pike to create the Saddle, the mountain’s iconic skyline that gives rise to its alternative name, Saddleback.
Hall’s Fell Ridge was Wainwright’s favourite ascent (indeed, he thought this the finest way up any mountain in the district). Second came Sharp Edge, the narrow arête that runs east from Atkinson Pike above Scales Tarn. Doddick came in third. But third is good isn’t it? Third out of twelve—that’s something. AW went walking in his third-best suit. Better than second, at any rate. Shakespeare bequeathed his second-best bed to his wife, and I can’t imagine she was overly chuffed. Probably raised some awkward questions about who got the better one…
OK, it’s a ridiculous train of thought, I know, but I’m standing at the bottom of Mousthwaite Comb trying to convince myself I’m not a chicken. Ahead, a path runs up to the col between Scales Fell and Souther Fell and, from there, climbs above the river Glenderamackin to Scales Tarn and the start of Sharp Edge. This was my plan for today, but the ridge is a razor edge scramble with sheer drops on either side. It’s not for the faint-hearted, and I’d quite like to lose my Sharp Edge virginity on a day when the wind isn’t gusting quite so hard. With the words “discretion” and “valour” repeating in my head like a mantra, I take the other path—the one that climbs over the toe of Scales Fell and heads for Doddick Fell.
I’ve climbed Halls Fell Ridge before. It has drama aplenty—an exhilarating scramble with steep sides, if not quite as sheer as Sharp Edge, still capable of instilling an air of danger. While holding few genuine difficulties, it does require care. Doddick is a similar slim ridge, but with fewer rock turrets and precipices so it should be a little easier. However, my scrambling abilities are tested before I even start the ascent. Scaley Beck separates Scales Fell and Doddick Fell, and its crossing requires a descent into a steep ravine. The way down is easy enough, but on the other side, a narrow path climbs to a large rock step with a dearth of decent hand and foot holds. After some shenanigans that are most accurately described as scrabbling rather than scrambling, I manage to get one knee over the parapet, and with a little inelegant huffing and shuffling, I haul myself up.
A few minutes later, I’m stuffing outer layers into my rucksack. Out of the wind, the sunshine is warm. It’s a beautiful spring day, quintessential May—except it’s February, and this is alarming. (Still, it would be churlish not to enjoy it).
As I start my winding ascent up the steep foot of Doddick Fell, the green fields of St John’s in the Vale stretch out below, walled into irregular squares like a patchwork chequerboard. Wisps of low cloud soften the charcoal peaks of Clough Head and the Dodds as they rise across the valley, and to the west, the ridges of Coledale and Newlands are dark sails in a sea of fine mist. At 450 million years old, they’re all newcomers compared to Blencathra, which has stood a full fifty million years longer, forged not from cataclysmic volcanic eruptions but formed, over imponderable millennia, from layer upon layer of sedimentary deposits on the sea bed. I can’t tell whether it’s the weight of such eternities, or simply the wind direction, but the noise from the A66 below seems to have disappeared.
Across the foot of Hall’s Fell, half a dozen foxhounds are trotting this way. Members of the Blencathra pack, perhaps? Kennelled at Gate Gill, they are a famed company with a lineage stretching back to John Peel, the huntsman immortalised in the seventeenth century song, “D’ye ken John Peel in his coat so gay”. Their master awaits further up the slope here on Doddick. Perhaps I’m just used to seeing farmers dressed in fleeces and coveralls, but in his tweeds, waxed jacked and flat cap, he seems the embodiment of tradition. In spite of myself, I find I’m enjoying the scene. I supported (and still support) the fox hunting ban, and I don’t subscribe to the Countryside Alliance’s view that it is a law passed by Townies who don’t understand country ways. Growing up in the countryside, I encountered as much anti-hunt feeling as pro, even among some farmers whose interests it claimed to serve. Yet, it is possible to acknowledge and appreciate a close working relationship between man and dog, and between both and the landscape, even if you don’t condone the endgame.
Of course, since the ban, the endgame is supposed to have changed. They no longer kill foxes, they pursue fell runners now (which surely even Oscar Wilde would consider fair game). Trail hunting, where a runner lays a trail scented with aniseed or fox urine, was big in Cumbria long before the ban, and the Blencathra Hounds’ website states emphatically that their events keep strictly within the law—any attempt to do otherwise will result in the hounds being returned to their kennels. How rigidly this is enforced, I don’t know, but there’s no bloodshed today, they’re simply exercising the animals. One of the hounds has already reached Doddick, and minutes later, he brushes eagerly past my leg. As I reach the top of the slope, I pass his master, and being British, we comment on the weather, “Aye, wam oop ‘ere”, he grins.
According to Wikipedia, one version of the folk song paints Peel’s coat as grey, not gay. This seems likely, as it was probably made from Herdwick wool. It also reminds me I know the song best from Porridge, where Norman Stanley Fletcher sings an entirely different lyric:
“D’ye see yon screw with his look so vain?
With his brand new key on his brand new chain;
With a face like a ferret and a pea for a brain
And his hand on his whistle in the morning.”
As the initial slope levels off, Doddick’s ridge is revealed. If you ask a child to draw a mountain, they draw a triangle, and this is the shape of things ahead—a perfect chestnut pyramid rising to a pale grey peak. At the top, this fell joins the ridge that curves round from Scales Fell. The ground between is scooped into a deep and wide gill, its high sides draped in dry heather, like the chocolate fleece of a Herdwick yearling.
To my left, is another higher horseshoe. Across Doddick Gill, Hall’s Fell rises to an imperious tower where it becomes Blencathra’s summit, its slopes, a great wall of exposed stone flecked with sparse patches of yellow scrub, topped with rocky turrets and riven by a narrow fissure running all the way down to its foot. It’s a view Wainwright calls “awe-inspiring”. I’m reminded of a friend who used to run the Coniston Launch. I once asked him how he lured punters away from his chief rival, the historic steam yacht, Gondola. “Ah well,” he said, “I tell them the best view of the Gondola is from The Coniston Launch.” The same may be true of Hall’s Fell and Doddick.
A man with a north east accent is similarly wrapt. He tells me he normally climbs Blencathra by Hall’s Fell or Sharp Edge but decided to try Doddick today for a change. He’s not dissappointed. I confess to chickening out of Sharp Edge because of the wind (which sounds lame because here in the lee of the mountain, there isn’t any). He smiles and assures me it’s not as bad as people make out, then as we start up the slope, he admits he’s regretting the six pints he had yesterday afternoon while watching the rugby.
Our paths continue to cross as we climb the narrow ridgeline. When I reach Doddick Fell Top, I gaze back over the ascent. He’s two steps behind and looking beyond me.
“Sharp Edge”, he nods.
I turn, and there it is, towering like an impregnable wall over Scales Tarn. Its blue slate sides look well nigh vertical, and a tiny figure strides nervously along its battlements. Just then, we’re buffeted by a huge gust. My companion looks at me with a smile and nods, “Aye, bit windy today”. Then, as one, we glance back to check the solitary figure is still there and not floating in the tarn below.
The unseasonal weather has inspired people to pull on their boots, and Blencathra’s summit is crowded. A large group is posing for photo, so I make friends with their dog. We’re on tummy tickling terms by the time his grinning owner reclaims him. I stare down the spine of Hall’s Fell Ridge, falling abruptly away toward Thelkeld below. It promises thrills and adventure, but the day is young, and there are other summits I want to roam.
I set off over the Saddle toward Atkinson Pike. On its eastern flank, lies Foule Crag and Sharp Edge, but to the west, a blue slate scree slope (known imaginatively as Blue Screes) drops to a flat plateau of upland moor—Mungrisdale Common. If Wainwright thought the southern face of Blencathra, Lakeland’s grandest object, he found Mungrisdale Common its least impressive. Indeed, he’s positively rude about it, claiming it “has no more pretension to elegance than a pudding that has been sat on”, and that its “natural attractions are of a type that appeals only to sheep”. But I’ve been reading William Atkins’ book, The Moor, and it’s left me with a deeper appreciation of these boggy, desolate wastelands.
While our moors are as hazardous as our mountains, we conceive of their dangers differently. Literature reinforces this: lofty crags are noble; to scale their heights, heroic; to die trying, worthy. Moors are bleak, lonely places, populated by outcasts; to drown in the bog is the ignominious fate of the wretched.
Atkins’ book teems with tales of men and women who have battled to turn moors into fertile farmland. Yet time and again, the attempt is futile and leads to ruin, even madness. For centuries, our peat bogs were seen as useless waste ground. Today, with the reality of global warming, we’re waking up to their value. We learn in school that plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen, but when plants die they release all that stored carbon back into the atmosphere. The sphagnum moss that covers our wetlands is an exception. When it dies it forms the peat that lies beneath, and peat traps all the carbon it collected during its lifetime. Or at least it does if it stays wet. Drain our moors and we release the carbon. Protecting our wetlands is now a task of significant environmental importance.
As a carbon sponge, Mungrisdale Common’s diminutive size means it hardly registers in significance compared with the vast peat bogs of Exmoor, Dartmoor, The Peak District or North Yorkshire, yet as I step off the blue scree and on to the squelchy ground, I look at the green and red sphagnum with a new-found appreciation.
Finding the summit is more problematic. Wainwright declares that “any one of a thousand tufts of tough bent and cotton-grass might lay claim to crowning the highest point”, which means, I suppose, that walkers bagging the Wainwrights need only set foot on the Common to claim it. I decide it deserves more respect, and set off along the broadest of the visible paths heading for what I hope is a patch of imperceptibly higher ground.
Cloud has now swallowed the top Blencathra, but here on the Common, I’m still in sunshine, and the landscape assumes an air of the Wild West. Admittedly, cacti and Comanches are in short supply but there’s something about craggy mountains rising from a broad sweep of straw-hued flatland that evokes John Wayne. I’ve been to Denver a couple of times and always marvel at the plains running flat as a pancake all the way to Kansas, while in the opposite direction the vast wall of the Rocky Mountains rises out of nowhere. Skiddaw is no Pikes Peak, but it’s a giant in Lakeland terms, and it looks “mighty fine” (as they might say over there). The Common compliments Great Calva and Lonscale Fell to similar effect, and I conclude that AW must have been in a unusually unimaginative mood to resist to such charms.
I find a cairn which I count as the summit and turn heel for the Glenderamackin Col. At the col, the paths to Bowscale Fell, Blencathra and Bannerdale Crags intersect with a fourth that follows the course of the fledgling river down into the valley.
Bannerdale Crags looks unexciting from here, a nondescript grassy hillock basking in the shadow of Blencathra’s saddle. That changes entirely when you reach the summit. Here the views are utterly uplifting. To the east, Souther Fell rises over the infant River Glenderamackin, a last noble outpost of the Northern Fells. Beyond is the broad flat sweep of the fertile Eden valley, hemmed by the distant indistinct wall of the Pennines. Immediately to the north, the Tongue rises to the neighbouring peak of Bowscale Fell, and from here the pièce de résistance, the crags themselves, sweep round to meet it, a crescent wall of charcoal cliffs plummeting to apricot slopes beneath. It makes for an inspiring walk, and everyone I pass along its sweep has the same beatific smile.
On the summit of Bowscale Fell, I meet a man who’s sweating and puffing from the ascent. He’s come all the way up from the valley, past Bowscale Tarn, which, according to Wordsworth, is home to a pair of “undying fish”.
“That doesn’t get any easier”, he exclaims.
“Oh, I know”, I reply. “They get higher with age.”
“They certainly do!”, he grins, and staggers off for the sanctuary of the summit shelter.
I wander back down to the Glenderamackin col with the dark Saddle dominating the skyline and follow the stream down into the valley between Bannerdale Crags and Scales Fell. Above me on my right, Sharp Edge looms, looking no less daunting from this angle. Daunting but inspiring, and I find myself whispering, “next time”.
I leave the path where it rounds the bottom of White Horse Bent, cross the steam by the footbridge, and climb to the col where Scales Fell and Souther Fell meet. From here, the path leads down Mousthwaite Comb and back to Scales, where I left my car.
But Souther Fell is right there, the last bastion of the Northern Fells, and with the weather so amenable, aching legs would seem a small price to pay for making it a big day in the north.
In 1745, twenty six men and women swore they’d seen a ghost army marching over Souther Fell. For more on that, my ascent of Hall’s Fell Ridge and the legendary Celtic king who is said to lie beneath Blencathra, click here…
I did eventually get to walk over Sharp Edge. If you’d like to read that account, here’s the link:
http://www.lakelandwalkingtales.co.uk/blencathra-via-sharp-edge/