There and Back (Again)

(Globe and Mail TRAVEL,  Saturday November 11th 2017)   There and Back Again GLOBE & MAIL

Nursing both my throbbing feet and a pint of Thatcher’s cider, I eased back into my chair by the smouldering coal fire at the Wasdale Head Inn. Today was a failed attempt at the treacherous summit of Pillar. But a few weeks hence I’d be back home and likely facing the question again:

“Back to England? Again? …Why?”

 “ ‘Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are’ is true enough but I’d know you better if you told me what you re-read,” said the French writer, Francois Muriac.

Francois was onto something, and his theory applies just as tellingly to travel.

Are you a bucket-list location ticker? Or are you, like me, pulled back by some unseen gravitational force time and again to a particular place?

Some places just feel right, like going home. They’re a movie we want to see again, a dog-eared book that never gets old.

For me, it’s Britain, with its ancient culture, mellowed architecture and daily routines that are immediately familiar while still surprisingly novel. Tightening the focus further: the English countryside, Blake’s “green and pleasant land”. If pushed, the epicentre of my longing is the North, with its desolate moors, raw and ever-changing weather, wild coasts and brooding mountains.

Specifically, the Cumbrian mountains in the Lake District, an area which just this year has been awarded UNESCO World Heritage status, joining the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal and the Grand Canyon in winning one of the highest accolades on the planet.

In addition to the official attribute-speak that comes with such a designation, standard phrases like “natural beauty” and “stunning vistas”, I’d add a host of other things. What’s not to like about a place peppered with weathered villages folded into heathered crevices redolent of coal smoke and sheep dung?  The names are evocative of some other time: Yanwath, Temple Sowerby, Nether Wasdale, Crackenthorpe.

These mountains are a compact, scaled-back Alpine jewel box, chock full of hulking masses whose rugged truths are soon apparent when the actual climbing starts.  Seen through the smoked windows of a tour bus headed for touristy Keswick, they are a picturesque back-drop. Yet these are true mountains with all the inherent mystery and danger such terrain can bring and noble names to match: Blencathra, Skiddaw, Great Gable.

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Beatrix Potter – many writers called these hills home and the Romantic poets haunted these heights for inspiration. John Ruskin wrote of his love/hate relationship with the country he knew so well, “Blind, tormented, unwearied, marvelous England,” he said. And then, under the spell of Lake District beauty, he built his home, Brantwood, on the shores of Coniston Water.

Around 18 million people are likewise enchanted and visit the Lake District each year, spending close to 1.5 billion dollars and employing 18,000 people in the process. They come for a variety of reasons: a lungful of fresh air, a trip to the flowered tea rooms of Grasmere, a pilgrimage to Wordsworths’ grave perhaps.

For me it’s about many things: my grandmother’s ancestral home in Langwathby, the upland sheep-farming culture, the architecture of the villages that take rustic-chic to the next level.

And the Walking, capital ‘W’. In Cumbria, it’s a term that covers a whole dictionary of movement: including rambling, scrambling and climbing. Our first trip to Cumbria almost 30 years ago introduced us gently to this pursuit, a half-day hike as part of an old uncle’s car tour.  Subsequent return visits have helped us discover the nuance, refine our approach and extend our journeys, walking, as Hillarie Belloc said so eloquently “Across the great wave tops and rolls of the hills.”

This in itself is reason enough to re-visit a favourite place.

Recently I found myself yet again in a favourite part of The Lakes, the Wasdale Valley, often called the home of British Climbing. In Wasdale are England’s deepest lake (Wastwater) and highest mountain (Scafel), and arguably favourite view (from Great Gable). It’s an isolated place high in the dark, Western fells, a deep valley of scree slides and jagged cliffs, ancient sheepfolds and thick cloud. Difficult to get to, difficult to leave.

It’s a place of sheep farming and mountain climbing: little else matters. A night in its silent, dark embrace re-sets your expectations and your preconceptions of what really matters.

Could it be that some of us are pre-wired to eat porridge, climb fells, endure hurricane winds and end up by the fire at snug pubs at sunset? Life distills neatly into this simple pattern.

Along the narrow path between our B&B at Burnthwaite farm and the Wasdale Head Inn, sits tiny St.Olaf’s church, built, so they say, from Viking ship timbers. In its tiny churchyard enclosed by ancient stone walls and wind-twisted yews, the tilting grave markers tell a story of mountain climbing tragedy. This was a tiny detail I’d missed on previous visits. Re-visiting gave me the chance to delve deeper. Records of deaths on nearby fells, often of more than one climber at a time, are common, speaking both to the inherent dangers of the area and the love that people have had for these hills over the years.

Alfred Wainwright, king of the fell-walkers and guide book writer extraordinaire, once said: “The fleeting hour of life of those who love the hills is quickly spent, but the hills are eternal. Always there will be the lonely ridge, the dancing beck, the silent forest; always there will be the exhilaration of the summits. These are for the seeking, and those who seek and find while there is still time will be blessed both in mind and body.”

Edmund Hilary’s team used the ‘exhilarating summits’ to train for their Everest conquest, and the lobby of the Wasdale Head Inn is a makeshift museum of hob-nailed boots, climbing axes and frayed ropes. Faded photos show jaunty Victorians posing on impossible pinnacles like Napes Needle, tweeds and all. And later, eating in the inn’s pub with climbers from Holland and Australia, Billy, the wired-haired terrier who regularly goes ‘down the pub’ on his own, visits our table in search of a handout, unimpressed by whatever feat of endurance we’d performed that day.

We’d seen Billy before of course, on previous trips. But on this return visit, we were starting to feel as through we knew him, just as we were coming to know the hills. One visit would have never done it for us. Two even, would not have been nearly enough to start the process of unlocking the mysteries of Wasdale, of the Cumbrian Mountains’, of northern England, of Billy the wire-haired terrier.

For some, the travel experience is ten thousand miles wide and one inch deep, a shopping list accomplished, another day…another flag. I’d argue for a narrower focus and a deeper, more local experience.

Returning to a familiar spot is less about comfort-zones and familiarity than you might expect. In fact, taking your exploration to that next level, past that introductory tour-guide stage and really jumping into the deep end of intimate, vulnerable contact – that can be the risky sort of travel that is asks more of you – and ultimately gives more in return.

To paraphrase Muriac: “ ‘Tell me where you travel and I’ll tell you who you are’. That is true enough but I’d know you better if you told me where you return to time and time again,”.

And no matter how my aching feet might protest, I know I’ll be back in a remote pocket of England’s north again, squinting up at the so far evasive summit of Pillar, reading the clouds, getting to know a beloved place better and better with each visit.

IF YOU GO

When To Go: The Lake District is beautiful in its peak season which runs from late April to early September, and everyone knows it. So consider visiting outside this period if you can. Prices drop and the crowds thin in October, just as the best colours come out on the hills, and the trails are drier underfoot than in spring. The average temperature in October is 9C, making a pub fire at day’s end just that much more inviting. There are some quiet lakeside paths in this area, but for the most part, Wasdale is for people with good hiking boots, all-weather gear and good map-reading skills.

Sleep:   Burnthwaite B&B is a farmhouse bed & breakfast on a working National Trust farm at the foot of the best mountains run by Georgina & Andrew (and Billy the wire-haired terrier). Accommodations, in the 17th C. farmhouse, are simple and comfortable – geared to walkers and mountain climbers. The breakfasts are hearty and legendary.

B&B from £33 per person per night, £38 per person per night en-suite.

bookings@burnthwaitefarm.co.uk

Getting there:    A car is essential. There is a good selection of rentals at Manchester Airport ( we used www.Europcar.com) and then there is a 3 hr drive to Wasdale. The M6 motorway makes the first 1.5 hrs an easy drive, then the roads quickly get progressively narrower and twisting as you wind your way up the western coast of Cumbria and into the mountains.

Eat:     Burnthwaite farm is just a ten minute walk from the local pub food and drink served fireside at Ritson's Bar at the Wasdale Head Inn, the self-proclaimed “Birthplace of British climbing”. The bar, open all day year-round, is named after the first landlord, Will Ritson - huntsman, wrestler, farmer, fellsman, guide, raconteur, and the first "World's Biggest Liar". The Inn also rents rooms in its atmospheric old building at the foot of Kirk Fell. 

reception@wasdale.com

www.wasdale.com

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There and Back Again GLOBE & MAIL