In a bright, breeze-ruffled Derwentwater, a shoal of swimmers moves towards the shore. Dozens of wet-suited arms arc rhythmically above the water like small sea serpents, churning the lake as they go. A gauzy light filters down through high streaks of cirrus and ranks of towering cumulus look like smoke thrown up over the fells from a giant cannon salvo.
I watch the whole day grow, mature and wane from more or less a single spot. After my work at the Keswick Mountain Festival in Crow Park is done, I drive east with the sun well ripened into evening, but with a few hours of light left. As most of Cumbria settles into the closing hours of Sunday, I pull on my running clothes in the lane behind Scales and start up the unforgiving Mousthwaite Comb path with weary legs.
Everything is hushed, just bleats and skylark sounds and my own laboured breath. The Glenderamackin Beck shines like a vein of quicksilver in the shade below, while the low-angled light above accentuates the shapeliness of the underlying Skiddaw slate as opposed to the more jumbled forms of the rest of Lakeland. Crane flies scatter before me as I pick my way over Sharp Edge and the ebullient song of a meadow pipit contrasts with the shadowy sternness of the cliffs surrounding Red Tarn.
Blencathra has been dubbed “the people’s mountain” in a new film by Terry Abraham, which is a wonderful notion. With its tiger claw of ridges towering over the valley, Blencathra is like a beloved building, a focal point for a community of affection. Though the bid to buy the mountain from the Lonsdale Estate on behalf of the public looks to have indefinitely stalled, the detail on the title deed is in a sense irrelevant; Blencathra will always be the most public of mountains.
In the whole time I tread its slopes and ridges this evening, I don’t see another soul. I get to experience the people’s mountain without the people. But the prize I carry down from the top is the same as everyone – a little gem of joy which radiates its warmth all the way home and beyond.
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