Not Walking in the Lake District - a heretic's tale

I was brought to believe that Walking in the Lake District was the thing to do, it was almost a tenet of faith in and around Carlisle.

Most of the people in our small social circle Walked. The capital letter is deliberate - this was not just a casual stroll to the local post-office, this was a fully kitted out walk involving rucksacks, heavy boots (or stout shoes at least) , waterproofs, animal-wool (to prevent blistered heels) Kendal Mint Cake - to keep the children’s spirits up - sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and a thermos flask of something or other, and either a Baddeley guidebook or a Bartholomew’s Half Inch Map of the area.

• As young women, my mother and her friends (clad in the tweed skirts that were thought appropriate then) had regularly taken the Fellwalkers’ Bus which operated from Carlisle each Saturday (one week to Seatoller, the next week to Keswick) which would drop off the walkers and pick them up again at say, 6pm.

• A few years on and my parents would go off in the car. Once or twice they climbed Great Gable to attended the Armistice Service at the Memorial to members of the Fell & Rock Climbing Club killed in the Great War. It was quite an experience to be on the summit as small groups of walkers emerged from the November mist just before 11 o’clock for the solemn and touching commemoration.
  ( more here: http://www.frcc.co.uk/rock/history/gablememorial/gablememorial1.htm.

Climbing Catbells c.1950

• My sister and I were taken on smaller challenges, to climb Catbells, to walk along the road to Watendlath - where Vivian, a local eccentric, opened a gate near the car park for a small remuneration. (Vivian had a tame jay which hopped around his feet.) - and to clamber on the Bowder Stone

www.visitcumbria.com/kes/bowder.htm

• Years later when I was living in London, a walking holiday in the Lakes was the most wonderful escape ever! Arriving at Longthwaite Youth Hostel in Borrowdale, with the neat lines of discarded boots in the porch (‘No boots inside the hostel’ a golden rule) was bliss - London was so impossibly remote; I no longer believed it existed.
  
  

But that was then. Now I am back in the North, living on the edge of a quiet little town and it is so easy to get to Windermere, Ambleside and to Keswick, that somehow one doesn’t have the strong drive to go. It is all here on my door-step;I can go any time.

And lovely though the surrounding landscape is, I must confess a heresy: nowadays I prefer town walks and townscapes : the magnificent sweep of Grey Street, Newcastle, dipping down to the Quayside with its breathtaking bridgescape, the endless joys of Georgian Bath, the college courts of Cambridge and winter sunsets over King's Parade, the Minster and the houses and gardens of the Close,seen from the City Walls at York, the views over Kendal from Low Fellside.

I no longer want remoteness. Now I flee to the town.