A Taste of Heaven
How a walk in the Lake District National Park brought me back to my own ‘doorstep nature’
Weekend Away with the Lads
It’s Monday and, as of time of writing, I’m fresh back from a weekend trip with mates to the Lake District.
‘The Lakes’, as the area is affectionately known, is the jewel in England’s montane National Park crown.
Where the trees no longer grow
Technically (and characteristically) the terrain is mountainous, but my friends and I refer to them as ‘hills’.
The locals use the old English ‘fells’ and fell-running as opposed to mountain-running.
‘Mountain running’ would be too boastful for any Englishman to lay claim to. We leave grandeur like that to our US cousins (insert winky smiley face for my beautiful American friends ❤️).
Fell/Fjall: from Old Norse fell, fjall, meaning "mountain" and still in common usage today in Scandinavian countries to refer to, that land, beyond which, the trees no longer grow.
Small but Perfectly Formed
What the Lake District mountains and valleys lack in stature, they more than make up for in perfect proportions and exquisite scale.
It’s so idyllic and perfect it’s as though a child’s countryside play-set has come alive in front of you. You can watch tiny cars wind around the valleys floor…occasionally stopping to let sheep move off the road. You can see the farmer out on his quad bike with his loyal border collie hitching a ride.
Your eye moves freely from lake to summit. Even the clouds take on a humbleness (Unless it’s raining. And it’s always raining).
Proper Mountains
Having spent periods of my life living in ‘proper’ mountain territory (the Alps and the Canadian Rockies to be precise), I’m familiar with that sense of foreboding that comes with looking up at a stretch of earth which has no qualms about towering 12,000ft over you.
In Canada, you step out of Sainsburys with your grocery bags, and just before you open your car doors, you look up and the mountains slap you across the face.
Stunning in its truest sense.
On braver days you imagine yourself on the summits.
Dreaming the Mountain’s Dream
Daydreaming about the Canadian backcountry is to imagine a world of adventure.
Basically, you’re dreaming the dream of a young man with ropes and a beard bleached white with frost (this is a gender neutral dream despite appearances to the contrary).
I’m not saying you get bored by a dose of awe and wonder after your grocery shopping, but there’s definitely a sense of the full stop (a period) between you and the mountain.
The Lakes District, in contrast, the space between you and the mountains is more fluid. Your imagination is not body-checked by glaciers nor bergshrunds.
*A bergshrund is that line of demarcation (see photo above) that denotes the space between the old stagnant static ice holding on to the mountain, and the flowing ice slowly making its way down the valley.
At up to one hundred metres deep, it’s a line that could swallow your entire mountaineering party whole, without getting indigestion.
Don’t wake the dragon
The line, forms a scar across the mountain’s back. I imagine under a rare moon it received this injury from a run in with an equally undomesticated creature.
A visual reminder that, the mountain, far from being a dead lump of rock, is a sleeping, breathing dragon that wouldn’t take much to roar into life.
Berg, mountain (from Middle High German. Schrunde, from Old High German scrunta, from scrintan, to crack, tear, rip open
We don’t have bergshrunds in the Lakes and frankly, we wouldn’t know what to do with them if we did.
Those lofty heights where we can dare to dream.
No ice axes or crampons needed, your imagination is free to float up Scafell Pike, Skiddaw, or Cat bells.
In the Lake District, your soul can dance up the mountain paths just as freely as your feet.
It’s why, for every one person actually on the mountains, there’s ninety-nine in the coffee shops of the green and pleasant valley’s below. Happy in their warmth to slurp, look up and dream on.
Of course, if you’re desperate for adventure you can scamper along ridges, climb crags and dangle off of cliffs in the Lakes as you can in any other mountain area, but it’s adventure of a different order of magnitude.
The Lakes will offer you a civilised few hours of adventure.
In stark contrast, one could travel through the ranges of the Rockies alone and unwitnessed for days, if not weeks.
It’s Pissing Doon ☔️
The English weather too has a sort of melancholic, begrudging, welcoming quality to it.
Not the kind of weather to leave you snow-blind or to relieve you of a digit, or three, with frostbite.
It’s the kind of weather you can be out, and quite happily be miserable in, for hours.
So long as you’re ‘happy’ to forgo the comforts of walls, roofs and modern central heating, the English weather will welcome you with open arms.
A mind for suffering, fits English Lakeland weather like your favourite soggy woolly glove fits your hand.
England’s mountain weather in particular is the kind of weather that may tempt you to (mistakenly) believe you won’t need your emergency survival kit or indeed your jacket today.
You’d never chance leaving your kit behind in the high Alps, but in England we find ourselves frequently under prepared and consequently, more intimately entwined with our mountains.
The Lakes does what the more formidable mountain ranges cannot. It allows you a whole world in one compact vista and it welcomes you to spend time with it, naked of grand human ideas of conquest.
Compassion through Indifference
The fells don’t care who you are, you’re getting wet all the same.
In a world where who you are largely determines what you get, that alone is worth the entry fee.
Tracks of our Tears
Go there and spend some time tracing the streams and waterfalls down the mountain gullies into the lake.
https://youtube.com/shorts/5gXYyKvQs9I?feature=share
Go there and curse yourself for forgetting your head torch because you were only going to be a few hours and find yourself stumbling the last few slow miles in the dark (it’ll be raining too of course).
Trace your own physical journey up and down the mountain from sunrise in the car park, to late afternoon lunch in an English real ale pub.
Trace your own personal journey from father or mother, and brother or sister…from wage earner and mortgage payer to lamb in a field, and crashing waterfall…to Herron mirrored in a lake, to cloud hugging a mountain.
Watch the layers fall away as you regress beautifully from stressed out adult to playful child.
Lose yourself completely in a world created for you. In a world as much carried inside you as it is laid out before you.
From Soil to Summit (and back again)
As you can sense in the writing, I’m processing what these special vertical places mean to me.
I’m not sure I’ve completely made the journey but the writing helps find a home for the thinking.
The writing helps me make sense of my transition from young adventurer competing for the summit to vulnerable father-figure finding solace on the valley floor.
What I can say is, that I’m pleased I went with my friends back to the mountains this weekend.
I went, even though it would have been easier to say no thank you and just let them have their young man adventures (they have a taste for ultra-running).
Doorstep Nature
Maybe I didn’t find adventure in the foothills of the Lake District as I once did climbing the icy slopes and frozen waterfalls of the Rockies.
Maybe I found something closer to home. Maybe I found a nature that was waiting for me all this time on my own doorstep.
Maybe there was space to find more of ‘me’ cradled, as I was on the valley floor.
When was your last Adventure?
If you’re tending to your own wounds and traumas, it’s likely that you’ve withdrawn yourself from any sense of adventure.
I applaud you for your kindness to yourself whilst at the same time ask you to consider that adventure may be a well that you could top yourself up from.
I invite you, if the time feels right, to paint more brushstrokes on the adventure pages of your life.
Years ago, another lifetime, I had a blog called Love Letter to Adventure that was all about finding adventure around you and weaving it into your life. It's something I've been disconnected to for a while now, but maybe it is time to revive the micro-adventure.
Also, stunning descriptions of the Lake District. That was our last big holiday before Davy was born and it was an absolute dream. 🍃
This is my fave part -
“Compassion through Indifference
The fells don’t care who you are, you’re getting wet all the same.
In a world where who you are largely determines what you get, that alone is worth the entry fee.” 🏔️ 🎟️✨🧵🗝️💎🥰🪄