The weather forecast was not so good with showers and hill
cloud the order of the day. Driving
along the shores of Ullswater there was plenty of clear sky to suggest the
forecast could to be wrong. Sadly on reaching Kirkstone pass we were met by thick
cloud and a heavy drizzle – the forecast was spot on.
Parking just up the road from the Queens Head Hotel on the
A592 we walked along the road for a 100m or so and then branched off on the
minor road to Troutbeck.
Once in Troutbeck we followed the Nanny Lane track which rose
steeply up towards an area marked as the Hundreds on the map. We were just below the cloud ceiling at this
point and it all felt rather claustrophobic as a grey drizzle turned to rain
and forced us to don waterproofs.
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| Nanny Lane as the rain swept in |
On reaching a bend where the track swung north we left the
lane and headed across the fellside towards Wansfell Pike.
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| Leaving Nanny Lane |
The views were limited to a few metres so we just plodded
our way towards Wansfell Pike. On the summit the cloud above did seem to be thinning a bit but after hanging
around for a while the drizzle returned.
 |
| Approaching Wansfell Pike summit |
It is worth mentioning here that while the Wansfell Pike top
is accepted (by many) as the top named in the Wainwright’s books. Others
however say it the Wainwright is the highest point of the fell just over a
kilometre away along the undulating ridge and is marked Baystones on the map. To add to the confusion the grid ref we had
for the Wainwright top was actually a spot height around a 130 metres north of
Baystones. The easy way to solve this
was to bag them all as we were heading that way anyway.
After some very soggy going we found the cairn on Baystones
.
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| Baystones Cairn |
After a quick break we headed off to the grid ref we had as Wainwright’s top
a little over 100m away. As we did so the cloud began to lift over on Wansfell Pike
Having bagged Wansfell, Baystones and the little lump to the
north we felt we had covered all bases so continued our way north towards our
next objective Troutdale Tongue.
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| Looking back to Wansfell Pike as the cloud broke up from the northern end of the ridge |
On
reaching the end of the walled fields we then dropped off the fell onto the
A592 Kirkstone road.
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| Heading for the Kirkstone Pass road |
This was crossed and after a bit of pathless exploration we
made away down to the stone slab footbridge over Troutbeck.
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| Troutbeck Tongue from just above the stone slab bridge |
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| Slab bridge - a nice pretty spot for a break |
A steep pull then led us onto The Tongue and our
second Wainwright.
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| Troutbeck Tongue with Windermere beyond |
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| The way back |
From here we followed the footpath down to Hagg bridge and
then followed Ing Lane back to Town Head and our start point.
This completes the
Far Eastern Fells section, leaving us with 56 to do
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