KYQ4: A Dash up Great Calva

Sunday, 16 August 2026

A Dash up Great Calva

The Dash

Friday, 14 August 2926

Great Calva 690m 1hr 54mins
Little Calva 642m 2hrs 16mins

Ascent: 530 metres
Distance: 11.5 kilometres
Time: 3 hours 42 minutes

I was attending a wedding party for Neil and Jessica in the North Lakes and decided to leave earlyish and climb one of my remaining singleton Wainwright hills. After the heatwave of recent weeks, I had been awoken by a thunderstorm, and it was raining as I left. The M74 was relatively quiet. After Carlisle, I navigated the narrow lanes to Outhwaite using satnav, then, using OS maps online, to the start of the walk on the Cumbria Way at Peter House Farm. I squeezed into the last parking space. I was feeling a bit anxious having struggled up Ben Gullipen in the heat a couple of days earlier but nothing ventured. All the hills were enveloped in grey cloud after weeks of sunshine, fires and eclipses.

The track was just what I needed, a steady incline and the prospect of reaching the imaginatively named Whitewater Dash, a soda syphon of a waterfall on the Dash Beck, that unlike most water courses in England was still spouting H2O. At the top of the Dash, I was about to start the steep path onto Little Calva when a couple warned me against it. I followed them along the Cumbria Way for another mile and found what I thought was the start of a narrow path through the heathers to Great Calva. I could see them a couple of hundred metres ahead, but they had found the real path; I had been hoodwinked by a sheep's path that disappeared into a bog along the stream before eventually joining the path that was scored into the peat. And then, just twenty minutes of a slog to the summit, enlightened by a chat with a couple from Middlesbrough who were descending and on the way to Bakestall.

On my last visit to Great Calva, along with Bakestall in 2010, one of 10 Wainwrights with Gregor in a frantic day and a half involving 4 separate walks, I had moaned about the tedious slog up Great Calva despite having speed and fitness on my side. Arriving at the summit, the clouds had dispersed although they lingered on Skiddaw and Blencathra. The woman from Middlesbrough had made a disdainful reference to Mungrisdale Common, a piss-take of a hill listed by Wainwright. It is no more than a gentle uplift of less than 10 metres on a descent towards Great Calva, where Wainwright had probably stopped for lunch. My sentiments exactly.

I decided to descend via Little Calva, and it was an easy path across to its flat summit decorated by a small gathering of stones that certainly didn't constitute a cairn. Obviously Wainwright didn't have lunch here; otherwise it would carry his name. The descent was gentle at first, following some fence posts until the final 120 metres of descent, which were steep as they gauged out a channel through the heather. Arriving at the Cumbria Way, I made reasonably quick time down to Peter House Farm. It had taken less than 4 hours, including a couple of stops for chats and 15 minutes on Great Calva having some lunch and imbibing the joy of a summit as a viewpoint as well as a self-inflicted endorsement of achievement.

I had booked a hotel for the night in Cockermouth, one of the few places, even in this less visited part of the Lake District, that had a vacancy. I showered and changed and then drove to Hesketh Newmarket, where the wedding party goers were meeting for a meal at the Crown Inn, the fuelling place of Mount Everest junkies Chris Bonington and Doug Scott. It was the perfect summer evening; conversations flowed with old school friends, and acquaintances of Neil whom I had met at various birthday and other significant events since we first became friends at school 65 years ago. Driving 20 miles back to Cockermouth at 10:30pm was a bit of a trial, but sleep was easy.