🧙♂️ NORTHERN FELLS Progress Report ~ 4 of 24
🌅 Dodd & Carl Side Conquered! 🌄
I was going to do a new update post per mountain, but then I thought, good grief, no! Although I may have quite a few individual stories and photos from any given walk, if I do two mountains from the same book in one day, that’ll be one update post and we’re good.
That’s the case here – I climbed Dodd followed by Carl Side – although I set off with four or even six Wainwrights in my sights. How the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley, eh?
It took me blooming ages (or what seemed like it) to get to the top of Dodd from Keswick, walking across the fields from Spooney Green Lane to Applethwaite and Millbeck, then up through the sopping bracken around the end of Carl Side and up the hill itself.
On the way, I was reminded that smooth, wet, gently-sloping treetrunk disks pretending to help you get across a particularly boggy bit are in fact miniature ice rinks, and got my first dunking because of it.
I won’t give you every gory detail, various people have written excellent books about how to get up any given hill from any given direction, and I don’t intend to add to the collection.
I will tell you, though, that there was a sneaky shortcut alluded to in one of these books.
It suggested that instead of going a long way to the left along a gently upward-sloping motorway of a track, followed by the equivalent distance a bit higher up in the other direction, you could just nip straight up the rather steep slope along a path ‘which may be difficult to spot’.
I thought I’d found it, but what I didn’t realise was that they had recently felled a ton of trees on said slope. Now, I was not only struggling up a steep hillside, but trying to get a wet-boot-hold on downward sloping greasy tree trunks and branches which completely covered the ground. So, only halfway up Dodd, in a state approaching despair and panic, I was already regretting (or deeply questioning) this whole endeavour you are reading about here.
Long story short, I got up the whole thing and took my very first pictures with my new mascots, Eiffie and Paddie. You can see that my companions had great difficulty staying still in the strong wind up there.
At the top was a splendid stone commemorating various people as well as naming the hill, err… mountain, umm… I mean ‘fell‘.
Folks around these parts, namely a woman I frequently cross in the kitchen on my way to the coffee pot strangely resembling my mother (the woman, not the coffee pot), constantly ‘correct’ me when I don’t use the f-word when referring to those big pointy things I keep walking up.
She’d have been proud of me a couple of days ago though, if she’d heard me struggling up Grisedale Pike in a blizzard with stinging horizontal rain, nearly getting blown off the top and washed down into the next valley; I used the f-word plenty that day, I can tell you…
Windy wandering!
The Laggard of Lakeland 🌄
🧭 (Lakeland Chronicles No.26)
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⛰ Wainwright Log: 5 of 214 Fells Felled / 0 Books Bashed / Visit Log
