The second day is flat out different to the first. When I wake there’s a sliver of sun in the sky and a cooling mist on the face. I’m revived by a full English breakfast – the first of eight I will have this trip – and bundle off into the wilderness. Going further into the Lake District things start to get distinctly wilder. The landscape is steep and wet. I come upon Honister slate mine, drenched in mizzle up in the hills before I’m trotting down into the beautiful valley of Borrowdale, where it suddenly changes again from ruggedness to tinkling charm. This is quintessential Lakes, with its slate-cottaged hamlets, wooded hills, quaint red telephone boxes and newly shorn sheep grazing in fields beside gamboling lambs.
Speaking of lamb, the Langstrath Country Inn in Stonethwaite has one of the most delectable slow roasted shoulders of lamb you’ll ever come upon – bliss it was in that dawn to be alive to eat one, as Wordsworth might have said. Wordsworth also wrote of the “unsurpassable beauty and variety” of the Lake District mountains and indeed contrasts are what this walk is all about. Both the terrain and weather are constantly changing. The Lake District in particular is filled with up and down cresting peaks and monumental valleys, spectacular tarns and rolling hills, wind, rain and sun all in one day. Walking to Grasmere, I feel like I’ve been put through a carwash. But it’s the next stage – 13 hours from Grasmere to the village of Shap – that promises to be particularly tough. The steep hills and the long, arduous route past Haweswater Reservoir are rocky and joint-wearing. The mist makes it hard to see. At some point I fall into a river. I lose my way on the mammoth 780m Kidsty Pike.
By the time I stagger into Shap, cursing like a bedraggled John Wayne, I’m empty. Margaret, the owner at the B&B, described as intimidating in the guidebook (utterly inaccurate, I will say) tells me that it was a long walk. I agree. But the Lakes are now behind me, she says. It’s all plainer sailing now on. She’s wrong.
