AN UPHILL PADDLE
It’s hot, you’re sticky, and the clear flowing water of that cascading stream is oh so tempting. There’s never been a better time to go ghyll scrambling...
Spoiler alert: you’re going to get wet.
Exactly how wet will depend on the experience you’re after. If you want to go the whole hog – wading through rapids, plunging into pools and salmonleaping up waterfalls – you’ll need to enlist the help of a specialist. Plenty of adventure companies run ghyll scrambles where you’ll be provided with wetsuits, buoyancy aids, helmets, and the local expertise to know what is and isn’t safe; leaping into unfamiliar water is a sure-fire way to end up damaged, dead, or possibly both. But if you’re happy for the getting wet to be incidental rather than intrinsic, there’s a less immersive alternative. By making the scrambling the focus, rather than the ghyll, and aiming to clamber around, over, and up the drier walls and rocks, it’s something you can do with just the basic hillwalking gear you’ve already got. You will, though, still get wet.
A ghyll or gill (both from the Old Norse word gil, with the spelling ‘ghyll’ introduced by Wordsworth in the 18th century) is a ravine or narrow valley. They are usually formed by, and often still contain, a mountain stream or beck. As such the word has become synonymous with the watercourses themselves, rather than the cleft they flow through. If you’re looking for examples
– of both the features and the variant spelling – Great Langdale is an excellent place to start. In no particular order, it is home to Rossett Gill, Little Gill, Stake Gill, Grunting Gill, Grave Gill, Redacre Gill, Scale Gill, Robin Gill, Mags
Gill, and its two most famous ghylls, Dungeon Ghyll (which lends its name to the Old and New pubs) and Stickle Ghyll, which is one of the best ghyll scrambling locations in the Lake District
– and where photographer Tom Bailey and I happened to find ourselves on a baking hot afternoon.
“So, do we get in here?” We’d rounded the back of the Stickle Barn, followed the constructed path a matter of metres uphill and met with Stickle Ghyll (which from herein refers to the river itself) in a wooded corner of a small clearing.
Now it came to leaving dry land, I was reluctant. “Seems as good a place as any,”
Tom replied, demonstrating none of my hesitancy and stepping purposefully onto the water-fringed rocks. At this point,
The final problem. No, not the Grand Reichenbach Fall, but Stickle Ghyll’s ultimate obstacle.
Stickle Ghyll was a relatively gentle flow of water over and around its bed of boulders; the gradient wasn’t particularly steep, so gravity’s grip was weak. That said, the recent dry weather had also lessened the stream’s volume, and after a prolonged wet spell even this babbling brook would no doubt transform into a raging torrent. I followed Tom onto the island rocks. “OK. We’re in. Let’s go up.” The initial section wasn’t anything you could call scrambling. It was more like extreme hopscotch. There were enough exposed boulders and pebble-strewn shallows to be able to make speedy progress upstream with very little risk of getting wet. SPLOSH. A shower of spray rained down. I looked up from watching where my feet were going. SPLOSH. A more thorough wetting this time, accompanied by a snigger. Tom was kicking the water, quite deliberately, at me. “You’re going to get wet at some point,” he offered with a grin. There’s something about playing around in water that brings out the inner-child in people, and Tom’s is less inner than most. The first real test came in the form of a twinfunnelled waterfall tumbling either side of a small curved rock wall. Small, though, is a relative measurement, and the step we needed to ascend was still high enough to warrant care and attention. Wet rocks can be treacherous.
Wet rocks covered with lichen or moss… you might as well just hurl yourself on your face and be done with it. Although the flows of water were narrower than their fullest spread (the remains of a tree torn from the bank washed downstream into this bottleneck demonstrated just what Stickle Ghyll in full force was capable of), spray-coated the surrounding smooth stones with a film of moisture. Hand holds were plentiful as we clambered between the falls, but each and every footstep was tested two, three, sometimes four times before trusting weight to it. In the end, the climb was simple, but the experience proved useful.
A rocky gully, lined with glistening stone worn smooth by the passage of water and time, decorated with bejewelled mosses or dappled by the leaves of the gnarled trees clinging to undercut banks, is one of nature’s most serene splendours. There’s nothing gaudy or extravagant about it as a scene, it’s just wonderfully calming. The additional sensory stimuli of being right in amongst it all only improves the experience. The rough bark of overhanging trunks under gripping fingers, the fine mist from the churning water freshening our cheeks, the growl of the cascade rattling our ears, the woody scent of rich-green plants in our nostrils, the heat
“THE CASCADE WAS BRAIDED BY RIDGES OF BARE, DRY ROCK”
of the sun, the cool of the water, the thrill of the climb. We rock-hopped onwards, leaving Stickle Ghyll only once momentarily to bypass a small hydro-electric installation below a footbridge. Upstream of the tree-banked pots and curls, the river opened up, its course wider but complicated by large boulders and awkward obstacles. “Is that the scrambling done?” Tom asked. “No,” I replied, not entirely sure that was true. But I’d seen pics of tall, towering falls. Surely we’d not missed them? We heard it first. The dense, heavy, unmistakable sound of water not just moving quickly over rock, but falling with force from height. And then we saw it. “I’m going to put my helmet on, I think,” I muttered. The waterfall tumbled just shy of vertical down a slick, dark face. There was an obvious line of weakness in this rock-wall, but the torrent of water was occupying that, leaving a far nervier climb up alongside it the only option. Again, every footstep was tested with intense scrutiny, and even the handholds, as plentiful as they were, were given solid tugs to ensure their reliability. It was focused scrambling.
I arrived at the top and slumped down on a dry rock to await Tom. A minute later, he emerged over the lip. “Look at the state of you!” I guffawed.
He was soaked. “Umm?” He replied, pointing back at me. I looked down. My clothes were dripping with water. I hadn’t even noticed.
If that had been the finale of Stickle Ghyll’s scramble, we’d have gone home happy. Damp and slightly chaffed, but happy. But as we clambered onwards, more in hope than expectation that anything else of interest might lurk upstream, clothes already beginning to dry and sweat starting to collect on our brows in the heat of the afternoon sun, we began to feel that perhaps it wasn’t quite all over… “Look. At. That!” I’d crested the top of a rise a short distance ahead of Tom, and the sight that greeted me was joysperational. An inclined maze of rock and water stood across the river. The cascade was braided by ridges of bare, dry rock. Here and there small pools were cupped within the fissures, and a faint rainbow spanned the spray. This was surely ghyll scrambling perfection. I went one way, Tom went another, and we weren’t even remotely attempting to keep our inner children at bay now. We scrambled, we splashed, we whooped, we got very, very wet. As we neared the top,
Tom slumped backwards into one of the elevated pots of water, letting the torrent pour over his head and shoulders. He emerged from the hard-hitting curtain of water laughing gleefully and absolutely soaked.
The scrambling gradually petered out and became less challenging as
Stickle Ghyll rose to meet Stickle
Tarn. With the sun well into its downward trajectory, and
Tom and I both without a dry thread on our bodies, we left the river and took the path that winds alongside the ghyll back down towards
Langdale, pointing out the highlights of the scramble up as we passed. Tom’s fortysomething.
I’m… well, about that. But that afternoon had been one of the most simply joyous experiences we’d both had since we’d stopped writing in crayon. And all we’d done is clamber about on some rocks and splashed in some water. Choose the right day, the right place and don’t do anything daft, and let ghyll scrambling bring out your innocently joyful inner child. Just remember a change of clothes.