BLENCATHRA

Jim Perrin praises the complexity, elegance and individuality of one of Lakeland’s finest fells

THE FIRST TIME I really saw Blencathra was on a winter’s day in the 1960s when I’d been climbing on Castle Rock of Triermain with the wife of a friend of mine, whose husband had gone up to Scafell intent on some serious winter climbing. We’d arranged to meet him in Keswick’s Lamplighter bar that evening, after an enjoyable session in the sun on some of the Castle Rock classics – Overhanging Bastion, Zig-Zag, South Crag Direct – jugpulling delights sheltered by High Rigg from the bitter wind blowing down from the north. I can remember few better winter days of rock-climbing than this.

When we’d coiled the ropes and clattered back down to the van, she – a local woman – decided that, instead of taking the dreary old A591, she’d give me a brief sightseeing tour. So we headed on from the foot of the crag up St. John’s in the Vale and as we were curving round towards Threlkeld, suddenly we were driving into a golden wall of light as the low sun streamed from the west to search out all the coves and ridges of the complex mountain mass straight ahead. That was the first time Blencathra ever registered on my consciousness, and it did so indelibly.

Yet somehow, despite a band of fervent and well-known admirers, there seem to be fewer than a fell of its singular and distinctive quality might be expected to attract.

It’s one of the finest Lakeland hills. John Wyatt, the Lake District’s first warden, wrote: “The mountain is not a top priority for fell walkers, but it deserves all the praise it gets from those who make the summits.” Wainwright called it “a mountaineer’s mountain … one of the grandest objects in Lakeland”. Its most notable feature is undoubtedly Sharp Edge, which curves round above the northern shore of Scales Tarn, and is on a par with, if not better than, Helvellyn’s more popular Striding Edge. To my mind it’s more elegant, serious and exposed than that rival for the title of best Lakeland ridge, and its Skiddaw slate is distinctly slippery and discomfiting when wet. It was on the walls of this ridge that the Abraham Brothers of Keswick linked themselves together, reputedly with a clothes-line, and recorded an 1890 ascent in their first-ever rock-climbing photograph. (“How not to climb,” they later captioned it.) It still gives a good, atmospheric impression of the setting and the narrowness of the ridge. Here’s Wainwright’s testimonial to Sharp Edge’s airy and enduring charms: “Sharp Edge is a rising crest of naked rock of sensational and spectacular appearance, a breaking wave carved in stone.

The sight of it at close quarters is sufficient to make a beholder about to tackle it forget all other worries, even a raging toothache.”

So – cancel your dentist’s appointment, take a quick jaunt up

Sharp Edge, and you’ll soon be right as rain (so long as it’s not raining)! My dear old friend Harry Griffin gave a habitually more rational and judicious assessment of what’s surely the best way up our mountain: “In summer it is a pleasantly airy passage, although, at a pinch, the hands could be kept in the pockets for most of the way. In winter, plastered with snow and ice and perhaps swept by strong wind, it can sometimes be distinctly awkward, especially the upper slopes leading to Foule Crag, and should be avoided, in severe conditions, by non-mountaineers.”

Literature adding its inducements! You’ll have concluded by now what line of ascent to Blencathra’s lofty gable ridge I’m recommending, but it’s by no means the only option. The easiest traverse on offer – and it is that, though quite a lengthy one that leaves you several miles from your starting point – is the one that begins from the Blencathra Field Studies Centre above the Glenderaterra Beck, the lead-mineravaged valley that divides the Skiddaw and Blencathra massifs. A lung-bursting 1500 feet (450 metre) climb up the nose of Blease Fell gains the summit ridge above Knowe Crags, and this fine esplanade winds its north-easterly way up and down over the summit, along to Mungrisdale Common, and a final climb to the summit of Bowscale Fell, above gloomy Bowscale Tarn. The sense you get from the summit of this fine outlier of the Northern Fells, into the structure of the whole group of fells in this quarter of the Lake District – Carrock, Caldbeck, Coomb Height, Great Calva at Back o’ Skiddaw, Helvellyn, High Street – is peerless.

They’ll whet your appetite for the differently peerless pies and pints of Robinson’s on offer at the Mill Inn in Mungrisdale, so long as you’re not distracted on the way by a ghostly vision of a Jacobite throng on manoeuvres with cavalry and carriages, such as was witnessed several times pre-Culloden on the slopes of Souther Fell, or engaged in conversation by the wraith of Coleridge, who was mightily impressed by Scales Tarn and wrote vividly and precisely of its “almost perpendicular precipice of naked shelving crags (each crag a precipice with a small shelf)... no noise but that of loose stones rolling away from the feet of the sheep, that move slowly along these perilous ledges.”

“On stern Blencartha’s

perilous height

The winds are tyrannous

and strong;

And flashing forth

unsteady light

From stern Blencartha’s

skiey height,

As loud the torrents throng.”