Keldas, Ullswater

KELDAS IS THE whole of the Lake District in miniature. Mountain. Water. Woodland. Grassy paths and rocky bits; legends and history.

You’ll find it above the neighbouring villages of Glenridding and Patterdale, at the southern tip of Ullswater. And that’s a big part of its charm: it offers one of the best possible views of broad, bendy Ullswater, framed by poetically placed pines.

But beneath its noble summit, it has its own little sheen of water: Lanty’s Tarn. Named after 18thcentury landowner Lancelot ‘Lanty’ Dobson, this small pond is every bit as lovely as the more famous pools at Tarn Hows, thanks to the ring of beeches, birches and oaks that cluster around it. At one end are the remains of an ice house: during the 19th century, when the tarn became part of the Patterdale Hall estate, the owners would let the tarn freeze and store chunks of ice in the semi-buried building, ready for summer.

Again, Keldas is technically part of a larger fell, in this case the broad flank of Birkhouse Moor, but thanks to the hause, the tarn and its separate summit, Keldas feels like its own entity. And as it’s all of 1020ft tall, it’s an easy evening’s escapade if you’re staying in Glenridding or Patterdale.

Of these five summits, Keldas is the one you might just have heard of, as good old Wainwright had a soft spot for it. Keldas gets a glowing review in an appendix to his chapter on Birkhouse Moor in The Eastern Fells, and an even warmer one in his coffee-table tome, Fellwalking with Wainwright: “Although of modest altitude, Keldas is one of the finest viewpoints in Lakeland, a place where artists and photographers suffer paroxysms of joy.”

We had to look up ‘paroxysms’. It means ‘a sudden outburst of emotion’, and as usual for AW, it’s a perfectly deployed sentiment. Keldas is adorable.

WALK HERE: From Glenridding, take lane west from Sharman’s stores, then take first path L to Keldas. Descend to Patterdale and return via road.