Ambleside to Dungeon Ghyll: 9.5 miles, 1394 feet of ascent

This turned out to be a good second day experience, longer and a bit harder than day one, with overcast skies and more rain than I might have preferred, but still rambling through this gorgeous landscape.

It started with the usual slog to get out of town, but this one took longer than Windermere. To get from Ambleside to Grasmere, our first leg of the day, involved at least half a mile walking on sidewalks alongside a pretty busy road. That’s nobody’s favorite. Once we got off the road and onto a country track through an estate (maybe several estates? a bunch of public land that used to be an estate? who knows…) and climbed gently along the east side of a valley that would lead us the three+ miles to Grasmere.

The skies were overcast, but at least for a while it was dry, and the walking was pleasant. We hit some bits of path with more challenging footing on rocks, but it was smooth going. Across the valley we could see what appeared to be an old mine (slate? copper? no idea), looking like a bog cave opening with piles of dumped rock that are known as tailings below it. We had hit such a rhythm that neither of the staff photographers (Karen and me) got a picture, do you’ll have to imagine.

We passed by several campsites, including one right by a very old very grand historic estate with formal gardens. The wayfinding is at times a bit tricky, and several times we had real debates about where we were and whether ‘take the path ahead’ meant the upward-winding gravel road, the footpath into the brush straight ahead, or the paved road easing down the hillside.

These moments can be frustrating, because one person is reading paragraphs of trail directions trying to find where we are among those sentences, and everyone else is listening to that person read what they think matches, so everyone has time to develop strong but not-evidence-based opinions. As my sister likes to say, “Always certain, sometimes right.”

At one of these debate stops, we stood and puzzled while a big group came from behind us and forged ahead on the footpath while I cheated and consulted GPS and decided the paved but car-free road was getting us to the same place, and they’d rejoin in about fifty yards. So we did that, and sure enough, after about a minute we re-encountered those other hikers, also clearly headed into Grasmere.

We passed by the famous Dove Cottage, where Dorothy and William Wordsworth stayed. It’s a tourist site now, and you can pay to enter or stop for coffee. Barely breaking our stride, we all voted to skip it, because we still had six or more miles to hike and the weather was looking unpromising. As the most over-educated person (at least as regards literature), I was called upon to recite some Wordsworth. I will confess I can’t get much past “Five years have passed,” (the opening line of “Tintern Abbey,” which wasn’t written during the Wordsworths’ time in the Lake District, since Tintern Abbey is in Wales) and can only name a few of his poems without really digging into the memory bank. Oh well.

Grasmere is a busy tourist town, which like Ambleside has a range of outdoor gear shops for the tens of thousands of walkers who come to the Lake District. It also has a Beatrix Potter store and a lot of places you can buy souvenirs. We stopped for a toilet break (it’s so tourist-overrun that you have to pay 60p to use the public restrooms), and got out of there at a good clip. Monday was a bank holiday, and this whole week schools are out in England, so there are a lot of families doing trips. So imagine a tourist town on a day when the sky is gray and it’s often drizzling or really properly raining, and everyone is hellbent on walking anyway because they didn’t drive their seven-year-old and nine-year-old all this darn way just to sit in a tea shop all day. Harumph.

From Grasmere, I knew we had a big ascent to hump over one of those lovely-to-photograph hills, and this one was getting to be a bit of a slog, because the rain was becoming steadier and showing no signs of stopping. But onward ho!

We descended into the very small town of Elterwater, by which point we were all soaking wet. Tracy was the first to voice the general wish, which was to stop for something to drink to warm us up and give us a chance to dry out a bit. And so to the pub in Elterwater, where, in an amazing stroke of luck, we found Tim Slevin happily settled reading and sipping a pint of something. He’d taken a bus here, was planning lunch at the Wainwrights Inn a half-mile walk away, and would after that either bus or walk to our final destination, the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel (as opposed to the New Dungeon Ghyll Hotel, which is actually a half mile earlier on our trail for the day). We got dry and Tim S got interrupted from his reading. Then we set off again for the last three or so miles. The rain was still not giving up, and we were all getting a bit tired, but the end was if not in sight at least somewhere on the horizon.

This last leg is through a winding valley with a river, which we crossed and crossed again and crossed again and so on.

The trail finally cut away from the river, only to climb up the south side of the valley to a surprising height that made me grumpy but grateful that I did a lot of work with a personal trainer this winter to get ready. The ups still get me breathing audibly, but at least I didn’t collapse and die on the trail, unless this blog is being written by a ghost. (Note to self: blog written from POV of a ghost… this could be a bestseller.)

Finally we made it to our lodging, tired and wet and happy to be out of the rain. We all headed to our rooms to shower and rest up. And of course, about an hour later, the rain stopped and the skies cleared for the first time, giving us sunny views of the hills.

Tomorrow we begin by climbing one of those hills on a trail that uses switchbacks to ease the climb. But it’s only a 7.5 mile day, and after today, I am feeling ready to tackle whatever comes.

I’ll end with a few photos of Herdwick sheep, which have become our obsession. Adorable.