The sun dips behind Langdale Pikes lancing shadows down Langdale, the Lakeland valley with no lake.
With Harrison Stickle, highest of the sugarloaf Pikes and visible from Kendal some 20-odd miles away, Langdale has long been a magnet for visitors, especially climbers. John Porter reminds me of this as we clamber up the side of Mill Gill, the skein of waterfalls tumbling down from Stickle Tarn. (The tarn was recently put up for sale by the Lake District National Park Authority, which however did not receive any offers that met both its requirements and “some of the concerns expressed by the local community and various interested parties”.) Cupped below Pavey Ark’s rock-face, adjoining Langdale Pikes, it once supplied water to the Elterwater Gunpowder Works – much needed for quarry blasting.
For John, a 68-year-old with a slight limp and one of the founders of Kendal Mountain film festival, this walk is a pilgrimage. “It was high on Harrison Stickle in 2006 when the quadricep tendon in my left leg snapped,” he says, pointing up at the Pikes, as a fell-runner bounds downhill across rocks, disappearing within minutes. “I remember the pain and shock as I bum-slid down on the seat of my pants inch by inch in darkness.” It took him until dawn to reach the New Dungeon Ghyll Hotel.
A year later John’s tendon broke again, this time forcing him to hang up his ropes for good. “That’s mountains for you,” he says, stepping on the foot-bridge and gazing up to where a peregrine falcon skims across the bowl.
In the 70s, he and fellow Leeds University students such as the late Alex MacIntyre were among the top British climbers. His book One Day as a Tiger: Alex Macintyre and the Birth of Light and Fast Alpinism (published last year by Vertebrate Publishing) relates some of their scrapes. As well as the Alps and the Andes, they revelled in crags like Gimmer, Pavey and Raven, all buttressing this wild dale-head.
“To watch climbers on Raven Crag from behind the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel looks dramatic, yet modern equipment and technique make cragging relatively safe. You just never know.”
• This article was amended on 15 April 2015. Due to an editing error, an earlier version said that Harrison Stickle was 20 miles from Langdale. That has been corrected to say that it is 20 miles from Kendal.
