Dungeon Ghyll to Consiton: 7.5 miles, 1280 feet of ascent

Sometimes the walk gives you a gift, a day of simple pleasures and happy surprises, sunny enough to warm you but cool enough to keep you from overheating, with challenging sections to test your mettle but also long sections of just gentle up and down. Today was that sort of gift.

It started with one of the demanding bits. With a short walk and today’s accommodation noting a 4pm check-in time, we left the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel around 9:45am. After crossing the river through this little valley and passing through a campground, the most intense up of the day began. After winding up through a little bit of forest, it came out into the open hillside with a gradient that’s just about like climbing flights of stairs. Like, say, dozens of flights of stairs.

What this photo sort of conveys is that up the hill is s series of switchbacks. As Tracy noted in the middle of the ascent, usually switchbacks mean a series of more gentle slopes back and forth, but this bunch of switchbacks were all still like going up a staircase, just doing it winding across the hill. What kept me going, aside from the humiliation of collapsing in a sweaty heap while my sisters trek on ahead oblivious to my demise, was the fact of an endpoint to the up, in this case Blae Tarn, a little lake. Tim H. helpfully explained that a tarn is a bowl scooped out by glaciers where the rock was softer than the surrounding rock, leaving a place for water to fill in.

The photos remind me that although as I write I think of the day as sunny all the way, we did have gentle but blessedly rain-free clouds roll by every so often, just to vary things.

After passing by the tarn, we began a gradual descent into another valley. This began a series of little jolts of pleasure as the winding trail offered a new, different landscape at every turning. This emerged as the theme of the day. We’d come around a corner and have to stop and ooh and aah over a little waterfall, or the surprise that the next valley was richly forested in contrast the the one we started in, or a farmhouse yard where enough people were lumped up (another group of people who’d been in front of us, a family with dogs who had driven up from the other direction) that it felt like we were at a designated endpoint of something, or the ruins of a mill at the entrance to an old copper mine.

After yesterday’s long stretches of rain, with the last three miles skirting along a single valley without too many surprises, this was a treat, and we were in the easy rhythm of chatting or not, pausing when we felt the inclination to look at the landscape, switching off leader every so often. Tracy hikes with the speed of someone without a pack, I plod along like Eeyore, Tim stops for any distraction but then practically runs downhill over rocks that should surely trip him up, Karen has a steady middle speed and yet somehow finds time to take a thousand photographs. And as we switch walking order, it often means different conversations for the front two and back two walkers. I actually had roughly the same conversation with each of them at different times during the day about my plan to walk dogs in my retirement to stay fit and earn a bit of money.

In the second valley of the day, we passed through a farmyard with an ‘eggs for sale’ box. This one has a novel artistic surprise: there’s a cutout hole shaped like a chicken through which you access the eggs.

No, we didn’t buy any eggs. And on the subject of eggs, we’ve noted the egg imbalance at breakfast. Order poached or fried and you get an egg or two, but order scrambled and a great heaping mound of golden deliciousness lands in front of you. I’ve probably eaten a dozen eggs in the last three days.

All over the place in these valleys there are stone walls that leave you in awe at the sheer human determination to divide the land. Sometimes, you get something more elaborate.

Coming out of this valley for our second big climb of the day (this one much more gentle), we were passed by a group of women I’d say are in their 40s and 50s, one with a mostly bald head that suggested recovering from chemo. As we happened to be paused at a gate to look at the map, they also paused to chat for a minute, and in the usual ‘where are you headed, what’s next’ conversation, I learned from one of them that there is a running race of Lady Anne’s Way, which I will walk (emphatically not running) later in this trip. We could see they were faster than us, so we let them take the lead, and in under a minute they were far ahead. They’re probably in Cornwall by now…

I knew from the route elevation profile that this was the last big ascent, and so after we’d summited and were hiking along an undulating but straightforward section, I suggested a halt. It was perfect. We found a grassy bit, unspoiled by sheep shit, and sat down. Karen had cleverly packed some of the most delicious chocolate known to man, in a mouth-watering variety, packaged in a perfect one-bite size.

Tony’s Chocolate, call me and we’ll talk compensation for this endorsement.

The trail came down to that farm mentioned previously, where people where clustered, and we joined a minor road. This is where we stopped at the abandoned copper mine. The mine opening is not blocked, and Tim even got out his headlamp and went in, only to find that after a few feet the water gets too deep to walk in without wading boots. I love Tim’s open curiosity, which leads him to do things and ask questions and explore where I might just note the interesting thing and move on. It usually ends up enhancing the rambles he joins.

From here, the path followed the paved road down for a while until joining a bigger road, where there was, thank heavens. a separate footpath through the woods on the hilly side of the road. We made our way into Coniston. With time to kill, we sat in the churchyard where John Ruskin is buried. Oh, wow, I hear you all saying, John Ruskin’s grave! Or maybe you’re saying John Ruskin?

If you were an art history major or a literature major, you might, like me, be able to pull up from the memory banks that he wrote about art and lierature and architecture, that he was a great proponent of J.M. W. Turner’s painting, that his writing inspired the Pre-Raphaelites inasmuch as he urged artists to embrace nature in all its variety in their art.

In an odd coincidence, Tracy is reading a book that somehow involves the Pre-Raphaelites, and in that churchyard, she read a passage in which one of the characters wondered what John Ruskin would think of a particular painting. Spooky.

It was one last surprise at the end of a day of pleasant surprises. All in all, a great day.