Grasmere Helm Crag Gibson Knott Calf Crag High Raise Steel Fell Grasmere
11.5 miles 2900ft of assent
Another walk with my son in the Lakes.
From Grasmere village we walked up Easedale Road past YHA Butharlyp Howe, now the only YHA hostel in Grasmere. You can cut off the road for a short way on a permissive path in the field on the left of the road, thank you National Trust.
After the road has crossed an open field we took the path to the right signed Helm Crag. The path here has been rerouted to control erosion so it is not quite as show on the OS map but ends up in the same place.
Looking back towards Grasmere with Loughrigg Fell behind.
Looking over to Sourmilk Gill.
Famously AW did not make it to the top of Helm Crag as to do so you have a bit of a climb up the Howitzer.
From the top of Helm Crag there is an easy to follow path which takes you along the left (SW) of the ridge. If you are Wainwright bagging make sure you pick up the tops of Gibson Knott and Calf Crag as you pass.
The path then meets another path coming up from the valley at a cross roads where we paused for lunch. We headed straight on, on a path that became more and more indistinct as we headed up towards Codale Head.
We were now completely immersed in the cloud and set off to try to locate the trig point that marks the top of High Raise. Not being quite sure where we had hit the edge of the plateau this was micro-navigation that I did not want to get in to so I decided that we would head back to the edge and follow it north to our path off at Greenup Edge. Of course as soon as I took the decision we found the path we had originally been looking for with no trouble and then followed it to the trig point.
While we found this tricky in poor visibility if you took this route on a clear day you would have no problems.
High Raise
From the top of High Raise we followed the obvious path North to Low White Stones and then North East to Greenup Edge. Here we took a path that starts off heading just South of East before it swings South East heading back towards where we had had lunch. On the way we crossed and sometimes re-crossed numerous streams and bogs.
Just before we got to where we had lunch we headed of North East to pick up a path along a fence to Brownrigg Moss.
Though both path and fence are overstating what is actually there.
This is a long section to walk and the skirting round bogs both here and earlier in the day was beginning to make this walk take longer than I had planned. For once I had actually left our route with someone in case anything happened as I thought, correctly, we would see very few people. I did wish I had told them we would be later back and wondered about phoning them but as it turned out we had plenty of time.
We continued following the fence posts and then an actual fence along the top past a number of small tarns across sodden ground.
Apparently it is not funny if someone else sinks in to the mud up to their calves and you should not laugh, at least that is what I was told.
From the top of Steel Fell we looked over to Helm Crag where we had been in the morning.
We then headed off the end of the fell on a knee-jarringly steep path to the scattering of houses at Helmside before following the minor roads back to Grasmere.