5. Black Sail

The forest was never-ending. In total I think there was around four miles of it, and it just seemed to go on forever. And it all looked exactly the same, so you never really felt like you were getting anywhere. Our feet and shoulders were getting sore, and we started to take it in turns to walk one behind the other, the one at the back hooking his arms underneath the leader’s pack and lifting it up, taking the weight off the other’s shoulders for a couple of minutes until we swapped.
‘I’m bored of this bloody paggering forest’, said Christian.

Eventually, as the afternoon drew to its grey close, we came to the youth hostel at Black Sail. It must be one of the most beautiful places to stay in the Lake District: a rustic former shepherd’s bothy at the head of a valley, where you can see for miles down over the tops of the forest to the lake beyond. That and apparently the warden is an amazing cook and if you let him know in advance he’ll get a bottle of wine in for you.

At this time of the year, Black Sail was locked up and deserted, lines of upturned mugs laid out neatly inside the window, but we sat on the bench in front of it, inscribed with the name of a guy from Leeds who’d once looked out from that very spot and been so overwhelmed by what he saw that he dedicated his life to bringing inner-city children to see the Lake District. You could see how it might have happened. Christian lit the Trangia stove, and with our hats and coats on we sat in the blue failing light with cold faces and sipped from steaming mugs. Christian had soup and I had a sachet of hot chocolate that I’d brought as a luxury. We knew our walking was over for the night, but we didn’t want to get on with the business of setting up camp and cooking supper just yet. Some of my fondest moments of the trip are of those quiet, tired times where we just stopped for a minute or two and soaked up the memories of the day.



I left Christian up by the hostel and took my mug down onto a small, grassy plain just below out of the wind that rushed up the valley, bouncing my heels on the spongy ground until I found a patch that wasn’t too damp. By the time I’d got the tent up it was dark. Across from us and a bit lower down in the distance, a growling forestry machine was finishing its work by the light of its glaring headlamps, but up where we were there was just the glow of Christian’s head torch and the flicker of the stove.

It was another ludicrously early night, but more disturbed than the last one. The wind rose, shrieking past us and rattling the flysheet savagely against the poles, and a couple of times when I’d just drifted off to sleep I was woken by concerned nudges from Christian.
‘It’s getting very fierce’, he hissed.
‘It’ll be fine.’
‘But what about the stove and the plates? They might blow away.’
I remembered bleakly that, to save ourselves rooting through rucksacks in a crowded tent before dawn, we’d left the stove and breakfast things in the back porch. Listening carefully you could just hear the rattle of metal. Presumably our most important possessions tumbling away into the woods to live with the fairies.

I unzipped my sleeping bag, pulled on my unlaced boots and ventured out into the cold. The forestry machinery had gone and all was black. It felt wild and hostile away from my warm bedding. The stuff in the porch was not in even the slightest disarray, which all goes to show that however rough it sounds outside, if your tent’s good enough, it should hold. Anyway, we’d put out every guy rope we had and tied the flysheet to the frame four times over, so if the little dome was going flying then so were we.

Back in bed, I’d nearly slipped away again when I got another nudge.
‘There’s a light coming towards us’, breathed Christian.
I couldn’t see anything, but a few moments later there was a definite flash of torchlight, which vanished abruptly then reappeared half a minute down the line, as if someone was crossing hummocky terrain towards us. After a little while we could hear the faint crunching of footsteps. Irrational fear crept over us.

Stay quiet, or make noise to show we were awake and ready? Whoever it was, it hardly seemed likely that they’d miss us, especially considering our tent was a conspicuous bright yellow, so in a sudden fluster, with the footsteps almost upon us, we shouted confused greetings and hurriedly unzipped the entrance.
‘Evening lads’, said a man’s voice, and we saw a thin silhouette with a small pack and a head torch disappear up the path beyond our camp.

It was only at a guess about half seven or eight at night, but where this cheery loner was going at even that hour of the evening, who knows. It was a mean old night and the path climbed up to exposed tops in every direction, with the nearest village near on five miles away, as far as we could tell.

Resigning ourselves to never knowing, we wriggled deep down in our sleeping bags and slept well as the wind moaned beyond our thin fabric walls.