KYQ4: Blencathra

Tuesday 27 February 2024

Blencathra

Blencathra from Doddick Fell

Monday, 26 February 2024

Ascent: 1024 metres

Distance: 13.5 kilometres

Time: 4 hours 45 minutes

Blencathra 868m. 1hr 48mins

Atkinson Pike 845 m. 2hrs 2mins

Mungrisdale Common 633m. 2hrs 25mins

Keith had organised another winter trip to the Lake District, staying at the excellent Keswick Youth Hostel. I drove down with John from Selkirk. We agreed to meet at Scales Farm below Blencathra at 10:30 am. The forecast was for a bright cold day with a 30mph northerly wind, it wasn’t wrong. There were several options for the ascent and we chose the path up Doddick Fell. Blencathra was in the clouds and the snow level was down to 700 metres. Crossing the Scales Beck involved some tricky scrambling on the slippy exposed slate before we began the steep grassy path that followed the apex of the ridge. At least we were sheltered from the strong northerly wind until we reached Doddick Fell where we took a few minutes before entering the jet stream to search for the Birkett top that Keith intended to collect and then wending our way up the zig-zags to Hallfell Top, otherwise known as the summit of Blancathra. There was no cairn just a windswept high point of this massive and impressive mountain.

We immediately set off for Mungrisdale Common, one of the quirks of the Wainwrights. You descend 200 metres and ascend maybe 10 metres to reach it, Presumable Wainwright had his lunch there one day and decided it was a mountain, just lower than everything around it.

As the number of classifications of British hill lists expands with Marilyns, Nuttalls, Birketts, Hewitts, Dodds and Tumps; all with rules about heights and drops to adjacent hills, you can't help but admire Wainwright's artistic license of defining hills His rules are completely random depending more on the Ribble Bus routes and Wainwright's bloody-mindedness than any pseudo-scientific blending of the imperial and metric systems.

To celebrate this we had a lunch break at the small collection of stones that are supposedly the top (or bottom) of Mungrisdale Common. Keith, in his obsessional manner, found the accurately measured top about a hundred metres away using an app on his phone. After 15 minutes of eating food and taking a drink while the freezing northerly wind sapped any warmth out of us, we began the long climb back from Mungridale Common to the snow slopes north of Blencathra. It involved a long traverse through soft snow to Blencathra and then a pleasant descent via Scales Fell to Scales Farm.

We had timed it perfectly and arrived at the Keswick Youth Hostel at 4pm. As always, the nomenclature fails to reflect the clientele at this time of the year. The only question was whether there were more seventy-year-olds than sixty-year-olds. Most of the guests had been hostelling since the days when no cars were allowed, there were 20 or so bunks in a room and the warden was a taskmaster who made you peel potatoes or clean the outside toilet as part of the payment. Nowadays, £15 a night for a warm room, a kitchen and beer on draft seems like the sort of place that Youth might fancy but for the fact it is full of yesteryouth.