Kendal to Keswick – 40 miles
Another late start. I had trouble pumping my tyres with a flash new pump I’d bought specially for the trip. I felt I had to lube my chain too. Almost every attempt we’ve made to leave before 8.30 on this trip had so far failed. Ah well…sloth has other benefits.
We rode out of Kendal on roads already thick with traffic, past Stamronsgate, where my great great grandfather lived with his large family in the 1880s, making fish hooks to earn his keep. His son, my great-grandfather, became a bank clerk and moved to Liverpool, where my grandmother Maud grew up. I feel proud, absurdly so perhaps, to have a great-great-grandfather who made fish-hooks in Kendal.
We climbed on roads lined with dry stone walls as the country opened out, the hills rising bare-backed and imposing, the cottages getting quainter, up the N7 cycle path alongside a busy highway to a kind of col from where we caught our first sight of Windermere. The town was choked with traffic, which made cycling its dips and hills challenging and occasionally scary. All around I could see evidence of the Victorian love affair with this place, in hotels built like mini baronial castles, in statues and bandstands.
The Romantics pioneered the idea that the Lake District is beautiful. Before them, nobody in their right mind would have considered its gnarly vistas in any way pleasing. Local boy William Wordsworth was like one of the proto-hippies of the 1950s and 1960s, who found remote and little known places to ‘escape’ the exhausted materialism of modern life and by seeing them with new eyes, inadvertently made them beautiful and desirable to many. In the trail of Wordsworth and the lake poets came painters who helped to broaden the appeal of this wild and remote corner of England. Today, when we set eyes on that combination of glassy water, barebacked hills, thick broadleaf woodlands, fields, roads lined with drystone walls and blue skies filled with blousy clouds, all the romantic landscapes we’ve ever seen on Christmas cards, in galleries, art books, on the walls of houses belonging to our grandparents, aunts and uncles suddenly come to life and we can walk into them and feel their warmth and chill, hear the dancing rivers, smell the compost of mud and leaves on a forest path. The effect is exhilarating, like walking through a dream we once had. Thankyou Wordsworth.
Exhilarating to me, to us, and to thousands of others who clogged the road to Ambleside, bumper to bumper. We kill the things we love, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, and that’s true of any relatively accessible place that has become famous for its beauty. I couldn’t help time-travelling and imagining unpaved roads with a few carts and packhorses on them and a grand silence all about them as we rode the fine line between traffic and curb. Arriving in Ambleside was a relief and so were the coffees and the scones, cream and jam. Several portions were ordered, partly to satisfy Tim who had revealed himself to be a veritable foodie with a wide knowledge of different cuisines and a huge appetite. Annoyingly huge for someone so trim and well proportioned.
We ate overlooking the lake as tourists disembarked from the ferry, and others set off in their rowboats. Ahead of us loomed the daunting prospect of Dunmail Raise, the highest point of the main road that heads north to Thirlmere. It looked like a shark’s fin on the Komoot elevation profile. I struck up a conversation with a man who was looking at our bikes. ‘Are you going up The Struggle,’ he asked. I thought he was using some local term of endearment for Dunmail Raise, but it turns out The Struggle is the official name of an even steeper ‘B’ road that heads north east out of Ambleside. This was very good news, though, in truth, it takes very little for us to baptise any hill ‘the struggle’.
After paying 50p to use the public urinals near the cafe, we set off towards Rydal, then diverted on to a cycle path that goes round the southern shores of Rydal Water and Grasmere. The views here were breathtaking. The paths were busy with day-trippers, families, dog walkers, the young and the old, the occasional cyclist. People were either delighted and curious about our little convoy, or irritated by our tinkling bells that demanded clear passage along tracks that were often steep and rutted.
We were taking photos of the scenery, and each other, when we struck up a a conversation with a couple with Manc accents. The man said that he could have sworn that Phil was Whispering Bob Harris, a confession that produced a lot of mirth and endless quips from Phil. Then, for some obscure reason, the talk turned to the man’s prostate problems, and his partners hip operation. She had been a keen cyclist but was now confined to walking. They’d undertaken this trip to the Lakes, she told us, so that she could prove to herself she could still walk the hills. She then offered to take a photo of all four of us and we parted only to bump into each other at least another four times in the following hour, Phil calling out each time ‘Hey, it’s me again, Whispering Bob!’
Further up, we stopped by a gate that overlooked Grasmere. Every twenty minutes or so a fighter jet would appear, silent until it was level with us, then bursting into consciousness with a huge roar that resounded down the valley. People would stop and chat: a couple of women riding electric mountain bikes who berated a dog walker for letting their mutt wander down the road off the leash, an awkward elderly man and his wife who offered to take our picture and told us that the level of Thirlmere was 20 metres below what it used to be because the thirsty citizens of Manchester were consuming too much of its water.
Compared to the paths we’d just ridden on, the village of Grasmere was strangely quiet. I’d googled Wordsworth’s cottage to see if it might be possible to pop in, but tickets were already sold out for the day. So we went to the Co-op to stock up on sugar highs. They were out of wine gums, to the great frustration of Phil and I.
Then we tackled the dreaded Dunmail Raise, which turned out to be more gradual than Komoot had lead us to believe, but long. The road was 50% wider than an normal 2-lane A road, with downhill traffic confined to one narrow lane, and the rest left free and unmarked for uphill traffic. This proved to be a great arrangement for pedallers like us. Trucks, lorries, vans could roar happily past us at a safe distance as we panted up the slope.
Jools and Tim clapped Phil and I when we reached to the top (Jools had the advantage of his eBike and Tim that of the strongest pair of legs in the whole crew). We stopped by an ancient AA cabin to drink and rest before cycling down the other side and finding a good spot off the cycle track for a picnic, where we could see the whole length of Thirlmere laid out before us. Another majestic vista.
The ride along the lake was pure joy, gliding along smoothly surfaced cycle tracks and almost traffic free minor roads, with views of the lake flashing between the pines, ferns and beech trees. At the top of the lake we cycled over a hulking Victorian levée made of huge granite blocks and into the farming country beyond. We tried to guess the names of the hills that rose ever higher in the distance – Skiddaw, Saddleback, Helvellyn. We were in an especially enchanting corner of the lakes–wide, majestic, freer of visitors and sightseers.
Hacking up the last hill before Keswick, we chanced upon the Castlerigg stone circle, which sits in a wide flat field surrounded by ancient peaks. Our ancestors couldn’t have chosen a better place for us to reconnect with the greater forces of nature – sky, sun, stars, mountains, moon. As we were pushing our bikes towards the circle, we were approached by a very bubbly woman from English Heritage who asked us if we would like to complete a questionnaire after we had visited the stones. Ok, why not, we replied. We grouped the bikes together in the middle of the circle and stood around for a while drinking in the view and taking pictures. Tim collapsed on the grass, clearly overawed.
‘It’s all about the bonking,’ Phil said. ‘Maybe a word like ‘fertility’ works better,’ I suggested. Just then the woman from English Heritage came striding over, with a purposeful yet embarrassed look on her face. ‘Someone answering the questionnaire tells me an interesting piece of clothing has been left on one of the stone,’ she said as she walked past. She went over to one of the further stones. picked up a pair of black frilly knickers pff them and held them up for us to see. ‘Not quite what we like to see on an ancient monument,’ she said. Once she’d walked back to her little camping chair and desk by the entrance to the field, Phil laughed and said, ‘you see…I told you so.’ Fortunately for us, the woman from English Heritage was busy with other respondents when we left the field.
Keswick was larger than I’d imagined, an old market town in the hills that has managed to reinvent itself as a Mecca for outdoor pursuits. The youth hostel was on the river (a lively gambolling mountain river) and accessed by a walkway that wasn’t bicycle friendly. We managed to find a back entrance, but were told that it was reserved for staff. The room was tiny, with two singles and a strange take on a bunkbed, with single on top, double on bottom. Every door and wall of the hostel seemed to be plastered with some rule or restriction. I was reminded why I don’t like youth hostels, though admittedly they’ve changed beyond recognition since my first hosteling forays in the early 1980s, when it was lights out at 10pm and chores in the morning. The situation was mollified by the presence of the Keswick Brewery Co just behind the hostel, with Keswick Gold and Thirst Quencher on tap. We sat there quaffing and eating salted peanuts, happy as larks. The arrival drink was always one of the high points of our day.
While the others went to find the local ‘Spoons (I was determined to resist the lure of both Greggs and Weatherspoons), I decided to get a takeaway and go back to the hostel to blog. Keswick was buzzing, its bars and restaurants full with no hope of a late table. The local Thai told me that the wait for a takeaway was one hour. I ended up buying a dirty burger and fries from Mamma Mia, which was a stodgy end to such an awe-inspiring day.
Andy Morgan.
