Wast Water, up Great Gable to Seathwaite

June 26, 2012

a birthday treat!

"To the true rough stuff cyclist, there's no such thing as a dead end!"

Tim Hughes, editor of the CTC's magazine in the 1980s

It stays dry during the night and we sleep well, not hearing any traffic or whatever and it's gone 8:00 by the time we get back to the road and start riding up a slow incline that gradually gets steeper.

A couple of miles on, we come to the village of Eskdale and the little shop there is open, so we treat ourselves to yogurt and bananas for breakfast and wash and clean our teeth in the public toilets nearby.

My birthday treat is a proper breakfast in Santon Bridge, at a nice café – The Woodland Tearooms – tucked down a side road. It takes a bit of finding but we have a fried English, washed down with pots of refreshing tea while sat outside in the reasonable weather.

The way to Wast Water is also off the main road and around 10 o’clock we drop down to the junction and make a sharp right. There's no traffic - the route is single-track and although it hasn’t rained, the surface of the tarmac has a sheen to it from the dampness in the air. The sky's grey and rain seems likely.

The long lake has a high ridge on the far side, to our right, rising up steeply with scree covering the lower half, forming a huge ramp into the rippling water. Serrated rock looms above it, while rolling hills line our side and in the distance is the brutal peak of Great Gable, looking squat yet beguiling.

We stop and recreate the sketch that Patterson made of a cyclist attending to his rear tyre and then make our way along the undulating road, past a junction with a road heading west and soon catch sight of a pub, which marks the end of the tarmac route.

Beside it is a gift shop and the owner isn’t sure if the track going up the mountain is really doable with a bike. A customer – a local woman who seems to know what she's talking about – says it is, although it’ll be pretty tough going.

We can see that, with the faint line of it wiggling up the side of the slope at quite an angle. They reckon it’ll take us a couple of hours, which doesn’t seem too bad and certainly appeals more than going around on the side road, so we says to ourselves we'll get to the drystone wall cutting across the route and then see how we feel.

It starts off okay. The grassy path is wide and level but once over a small wooden bridge, it begins to incline more and we can see it's going to be a long slog. Rocks litter the way and there's no way anyone could ride on a regular bike - certainly not with panniers.

It takes us quite a while to reach the drystone wall and once there we don’t feel like going back down.

The sky gives us cause for optimism, with shafts of sunlight occasionally breaking through the clouds, lighting up the green landscape, and we carry the bikes and panniers in turns, ferrying them up in 100-metre sections.

This obviously makes progress slow and there's no way we're going to make it in two hours. If we get to the top in four, we’ll be happy.

We pass a few pairs of hikers coming the other way. None think we are sane and a couple say we ought to go back down, as further ahead it's going to get very tricky. We stubbornly refuse and reckon we can get up one way or another.

It's hard. Dave and I have to lug each bike between us, climbing up rugged sections where the path is nonexistent. It's near one of these that I slip on wet stones and gash my bare ankle. It looks like someone has taken a Stanley knife to it; the wound a couple of inches long and open. It really needs stitches but fortunately it doesn’t bleed too much and I hold my foot under a chilly stream cascading down, which seems to do the trick. If I’d have sprained it, we'd have serious problems.

Mist and drizzle greet us near the top and we wear jackets, but we get too hot with them on, so just kept going up in our shirts. Once at the crest, we see the water of Styhead Tarn.

There isn’t much of a path at first and we walk across the knee-high grass, round the edge of the lake and down, unable to ride our bikes as the rocks that litter the way are too big and dodgy.

The land is boggy and our feet are regularly submerged in rust-coloured muck. We follow a stream and cross it a few times - me washing my cut ankle - trying to find the best route.

Our jackets come out as the weather gets worse.

It's hard to get a good grip on the steep sections – the stones being wet and very slippery, especially in SPD shoes - so it's a relief to reach the relatively flat bottom section that takes us towards the dinky village of Seathwaite.

A sign at the start of the narrow tarmac road tells us it's the wettest place in the whole UK. No kidding.

We're tired and ready for a decent meal as it's gone 5:00 PM and taken us over five hours so far.

We pass a Youth Hostel set back from the road, but decide to ride on and soon come to a pub doing B&B.

The Royal Oak Hotel isn’t cheap, but it is my birthday and the place looks clean and cosy and the receptionist offers us a package that includes dinner and breakfast, so we collectively bite the bullet, wheel our bikes into a lockup around the back, quickly shower and change into dry clothes, eager to dig into a hot dinner that we're only just in time for.

The Royal Oak Hotel in Rostwaite (Borrowdale)

Today's ride: 27 km (17 miles)
Total: 3,744 km (2,325 miles)

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