28.2.08

6. Honister

Cooking breakfast was dark and lonely. Wearing almost all the clothes I had with me I huddled over the stove in the drizzle, watching as the ghost of a day began to soften a horizon I still couldn’t see out beyond the trees. Christian was up with the dawn, and together we drank sweet tea and ate porridge, almost without saying a word.

He washed up our dishes in the beck that ran down the side of the hostel, and I dropped the tent, then we started off up the path, with hills springing up on all sides. That morning at Black Sail was the first one where we started to help each other put our packs on, saving ourselves that savage jerk when you arch your back and wrench your shoulder, tottering for a moment before you get the weight even.

The stony path quickly vanished into a barely defined track over marshy lumps of grass. We banked left and started to climb sharply up through a soupy, wet mist, tramping up uneven steps dug into the hillside by years of volunteers opening up the Lakes for a generation that have mostly abandoned them. I stopped Christian for a moment so I could take a picture of him damp and out of breath with the climb, so we’d be able to prove to any nay-sayers that it wasn’t all easy rolling and sunny skies. We needn’t have worried about that.



Up on the tops there was a biting wind, but we had good jackets, and with it came beautiful gaps in the mist where you’d suddenly see a deep valley open up to your left or right, only to be swamped by the rushing grey a few moments later. By this stage we’d worked out that in the cold you needed to be eating every couple of hours at least, so when one such view appeared below us we sat on our packs by the side of the path and ate a cereal bar for early elevenses. Along with his trolley full of Pasta ‘n’ Sauce, Christian had also bought us a few packs of glucose tablets, which we sucked on as we walked.

‘I got orange flavour, so we’d be getting some vitamin C. Just about all we’ll be getting I think.’ He was not wrong, and better men than us would have shuddered at what a diet of porridge, freeze-dried pasta and Bovril sandwiches was doing to our insides. But not us. In that stretch over the top, gradually soaking through, I started to feel strong for the first time. The sort of strong that comes when you’re a little bit beat and only really means you can feel your body and all your limbs and your heart thumping, but it’s good all the same.

We followed easy lines of small cairns along the top, looking for a ruined mine building that we didn’t see until we were almost on top of it, then stumped steeply down what I think might have been an old rail track to the Honister slate mine at in the valley. The Coast to Coast is a deeply crafty walk, the work of a complete obsessive. It winds its snickety route across the country through ways that only a man on his own two feet can go, and in these lonesome parts of the country where once industry cut the mountains to shreds, scarring the hillsides deep enough that you can still see it centuries later, a lot of the paths are old packhorse routes, or abandoned monorails. There’s something a bit comforting in their functionality.

The writers of one of our guidebooks, a home-made but terribly useful pamphlet called Camping it up on the Coast to Coast, end their book with a little note telling you to remember Wainwright. They say you are kicking at his heels the whole way across, and there are times when you feel like you almost are. Like you might come through a pass and find a bespectacled old man sitting on a rock, content in his own company. Wainwright spent years crossing and re-crossing these hills, totally in love with them in his cheerful, understated way, and you can look at the Coast to Coast almost as a novel about England, just you write the story yourself.

A dog sat outside the Honister mine, and there were the cars of tourists outside the shop. People were moving about round the edges of the youth hostel and after the solitude of the tops it felt quite busy. A lot of people stop and have a cuppa at the mine, but as ever Christian and I were chasing daylight, so we pushed on down a sloping road by a river to a little hamlet called Seatoller.

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