Castlerigg Fell: Up, Up, Up
23 May 2006
Location:
Castlerigg Fell, east of Derwent Water. I walked up to High Seat on Castlerigg Fell and then north to Bleaberry Fell, before I turned back to the car, down by Ashness Farm. This map shows the walk.
Weather:
Partly cloudy at first, then it rained and got very windy. I wasn't keen on getting the camera wet so I stopped taking photos once it had started raining in earnest. Consequently there aren't that many photos on this page and they're all from the way up onto the fell.
Instructions:
Click the thumbnails for a larger version. Some images also have a much larger version at 1152 by 768 pixels. You can download them one by one, by clicking on the wallpaper link next to the image. Alternatively you can download a zipped archive (14.0Mb) of all of them. The zipped archive includes instructions for making a screensaver of the images.
Ashness Brook next to the footpath was lovely with its dappled sunshine on mossy boulders.
Once I had gotten above the tree tops I took a photo looking north-eastward. That's the town of Portinscale you can see at the northern side of Derwent Water. Portinscale is west of Keswick. In fact the two towns are almost joined.
The same view but zoomed in a bit more. You can see the boats in the lake outside Portinscale. The lake behind Portinscale is Bassenthwaite Lake. Keswick is behind the hill to the right.
Looking up I realised that some of the boulders were not like the others. That's because they were sheep. This was one of many false summits on my way up to High Seat.
When I'd come to the top of this one, I was rewarded with a glimpse of Keswick in the distance. That's Latrigg behind Keswick.
Bad weather is moving in from the south. This is the reason why there are so few photos on this page. Once the heavy rain had caught up with me, I packed away the camera.
Looking north, in the direction I was going, the weather was still nice and sunny. I was thinking of turning around but given that I'd turned around the day before and that I had weather proof clothing, I decided against it. I'm glad I did. Even if I couldn't take pictures on the way down and I got pretty wet despite good clothing, it was still an exhilarating experience to be high up there and look at the other hill tops and the clouds coming in.
Finally, the trig point itself. After lots of false summits, it was good to know for sure that I was where I thought I was.
Looking north-eastwards, the cloud cover is getting denser. The hills look lovely in this shot, I think.
Far below me is Derwent Water with Portinscale and Bassenthwaite Lake. The Latrigg hills are on the right and Whinlatter on the left.
My very last photo of the day shows the same view with some crags in the foreground.