Martindale
Martindale was restless under a pale sun, animated by patchy clouds driven by a stiffening breeze. Meanwhile the head of the dale was spilling over with a snowy cap which hid something darker, something boiling and possibly nasty. Rampsgill head! It’s not a place for the faint hearted in bad weather; but I only say this because it scared the pants off me last time I was up there. I recall the wind tore my map in two – a shrieking banshee, blowing a horizontal rain with tracers of hail, like machine gun fire. The tops were just a few degrees above freezing that day, while at Side Farm, tucked away safe in the sunshine of the Patterdale valley, they wore tee shirts and shorts and sucked ice-creams.
Hallin Fell from the Beda Fell ridge
I chose Beda Fell instead, thinking it the lighter option. I’d spent an hour the night before at Kung Fu practise, punching a bag and leaping about with a broadsword, and calculated, correctly, my physical reserves were still somewhat depleted. Beda Fell therefore did not fall easily and the ascent was interrupted frequently with pauses to admire the northward aspect towards Hallin Fell and Ullswater, and to take photographs. Wainwright was correct when he said the fells demand a high standard of fitness. To walk here you have to train here, and I’ve been a stranger to the tops lately.
Anyway, I took the line of that lovely ridge to where it meets the path coming up from Dale Head farm, then cut back down to the car, a short circular walk of some two hours but one that left me aching and wobbly. By now the stuff pouring over Rampsgill had turned the dale grey and cold, and not a bit spitty. I saw no one on the fells at all.
We can be a bit a blind in our wanderings, us fell walkers, our heads always turned towards the next objective so we often fail to see what’s under our feet. The flora of the lakes seems often to me quite dull – just sedges, and fern and they only survive because the sheep won’t eat them. I presume they don’t like common butterwort either as I managed to find a tidy colony of it hiding by the side of a beck. I should add the butterwort is carniverous, but only to creepy crawlies.
Common Butterwort, Martindale (UK). Carniverous, but only to creepy crawlies.
The weather held sufficiently for me to risk driving out of Martindale with the top down. I’m sure it seems a childish fascination to other drivers, or the non drivers among you, I mean this topless motoring I have only recently discovered. But driving like that you feel the world, you hear the stirring of the trees, feel the tug of the wind on your neck, feel the turn of the day in the air. It’s good to notice these things, and not take them for granted.
The weather caught up with us at Glenridding, so I had to stop there to put the top up. Also it was about time for that coffee and cake I’d promised myself. The carpark here is one of those that reads your number plate as you drive on and you can pay by debit card, because no one carries that much loose change any more. However, my experience of such technological marvels is that they don’t always manage to read your plate when it’s raining, and the card readers aren’t reliable either. This serves only to add frustration to the expense, so it’s wise to have that shrapnel handy anyway. Or if you’re lucky you can park an hour for free at the roadside. I was lucky, tucked the Mazda into a spare slot and fastened down the top just as the rain came on in earnest.
I bought coffee at Kilners, part of the old Glenridding Hotel, and sat out under the awning as the rain poured in fine silver threads. It was refreshing, and as I sipped the coffee I rose on a swell of satisfaction at the way the day had gone. My sense of smell even put in a rare return so I was able to smell and taste the coffee, and it was the finest thing, this completion of my senses, adding a sharpness to my observations.
I note several whining “Tripadvisor” pundits berate Kilners for poor service and poor coffee. But the young lady who served me could not have been sweeter, nor more helpful, and the coffee was just grand. It did cost me a fiver, and it was a very small piece of cake – two mouthfulls I’d say – but this is the Lakes, and you must be prepared for that – it’s right up there with Switzerland.
I’ve sat in this place, and its various past incarnations, on many such occasions after walking – coffee, and fine rain in Glenridding – though the occasions be interspersed years apart and spanning decades, but somehow each feeling the same, and timeless in the moment. Only when I rise and continue my journey do I feel the passage of time in the changes of my life.
When I returned to the car I found the rain beading all over it, little glass pebbles that would suddenly form little rivulets, which slid off in pearly splashes, the paintwork a deep blue lustre underneath. She looked small, tucked in between a couple of generic four by fours, but she can certainly move and climbed those zig-zags into Martindale like a rat going up a drainpipe. She’s a sparky old lady for sure.
In that instant the day crystallised into a perfect memory, frozen into the time-zero of all my days in the Lakes: a long drive to a lost valley; visiting the grave of a forgotten Victorian Orientalist; puzzling over the enigma of a man who puzzled even those who knew him; a hike up a sharp hill, one that left me blowing and wobbly; good coffee; avoiding the National Trust car park, twice; and the rain beading on the old girl’s admittedly overwaxed paintwork.
It’s hard to explain what any of this means, all of it ephemeral, but we’ve each felt it in our own ways, and through our own experience, from time to time, and I know you know what I mean. We are all of us, essentially nobodies, going nowhere. At first pass it sounds a depressing concept, but really it’s not. We are more than dust, and it is not the form of the thing that’s important, not the doing, not the seeing of the thing in itself, but more being granted the trick of insight to glimpse the magic beneath the fabric of the world, and to touch something “other” in the seemingly mundane, like,… I don’t know,… the beading of rain on the paintwork of an old car.
Then the door opens to the possibility of touching something other, touching it with our hearts, rather than just our hands.
The Rivendale Review 
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