Main image: View from Arthur’s Pike over Ullswater towards the Helvellyn Range as featured in Wainwrights Without a Car | Credit: Ron Kenyon
I really can’t be doing with hire cars. When you’re in a hire car, you’re still at home really, in your little tin box with the SatNav telling you where to go, your personal playlist on the sound system and the window wound up to keep away whatever fine holiday destination you’ve hired the hire-car to protect you from having to interact with. Whereas, in a bus or a local train, you’ve already started your holiday.
With all that comes the fun of getting tangled up in the timetable, sitting in some station waiting room drinking a slightly odd cup of coffee (what exactly is a ‘cortado’ anyway?) at an unexpectedly low price. Okay, the bus is slower and less convenient. But by adjusting your viewpoint so that public transport is part of the trip, you actually end up spending more time on holiday than you would in that hire car.
Unconvinced? Well, there’s a couple of other reasons you might want to visit the Lake District without encumbering yourself with a tonne of smelly metal. Maybe you’re a sensible city-dweller who doesn’t actually own one of the things. Or maybe you’ve driven up Borrowdale on an August Saturday, seen the roadsides decorated end to end with shiny aluminium and steel, failed to find a parking place, and realised this simply won’t do.
Taking private cars into this particular National Park is something that, in the end, is simply going to have to stop. They’ve done it at Yosemite. What the Americans can do, we can do even better, surely? Park and Ride everywhere west of the old A6; that’s what I’m waiting for.
While we’re waiting for that, this is a guidebook not so much to the hilltops as much as it is on how to get to the bottoms with all the detail you need from people who’ve actually done it, whether by bus, by train, or on the various Lakeland ferryboats. In this instance, ‘they’ are the Penrith-based Eden Valley Mountaineering Club, who completed the Wainwright summits over a single year in what the poet Browning (almost) described as a “first fine carless rapture”. For routes on the hills themselves, the author commends either Wainwright’s original Pictorial Guide or Mark Richards’s Fellranger.
There is also, of course, the option of learning how to read a map and making up your own ones (and my own Hillwalking Bible could even be a help there). However, Wainwrights Without a Car: a Year on the Lake District Fells records the actual routes used by the compilers, shown as lines on a sketchmap and a brief description. These are valuable inspiration, especially as they suggest routes only doable by bus: whether that’s the much better linear Latrigg day from Threlkeld to Keswick, or the great Grasmoor crossing from Borrowdale to Buttermere.
Let’s just not mention that Britain isn’t Switzerland, and that roughly one in twenty of the buses you’re awaiting in the rain is simply not going to turn up on the day… Top tip: put the linking bus bit at the beginning, rather than the end, of your crossing.
Ennerdale and Duddon are a little bit inconvenient, it’s true, but if you’re travelling up from London or coming in from outside the UK and you’re wondering whether it’s feasible to get around the Lake District, including those very particular places you’ve got your eye on, Wainwrights Without a Car: a Year on the Lake District Fells proves it is.
Wainwrights Without a Car: a Year on the Lake District Fells by Ron Kenyon (and collaborators) is published by Jagged Lakes (paperback, £20).
