Tangling With Tussocks on Caldbeck Fells

After having a trundle in the Borders significantly delayed and shortened by the eight sets of roadworks between Knipe Towers and Langholm – thats a set of traffic lights every ten miles with very little evidence of anything much going on (the Longtown delay was the longest), I decided to have another bash at walkies in short order and drove off in a bit of a huff to Mosedale, which is just a bit to the right of Penrith.

And so, on a summer’s day which wasn’t really too hot, me and LTD tripped the light wotsit up  the little dale past Swinside to the Cumbria Way whoch follows Grainsgill Beck past the old tungsten mines (all tungsten is quite old, apparently) to Lingy Hut.

Lingy Hut has been dunnup by the Mountain Bothies Association since I was last there which was some significant time ago. I spent a draughty night with two peeps who’d got a bit lost in the hillfog and who opted to stay there instead of their planned B&B in Caldbeck. We had a nice night. They played Beach Boys tracks on a sort of boombox thingy and I shared a bit of whisky…

Anyway, it’s been dunnup and draught-proofed. You could spend a night there and it would probably be quite nice, but you’d have to carry up some water from Grainsgill.

The objective of today’s expedition, though, was to add eight new tops to LTD’s bag. This involved wandering about quite a lot, doing some contouring, tangling with tussocks, blundering through deep heather and snoozing on soft bilberries, or in LTD’s case, on some rocks.

The tops in order were these:

Great Lingy Hill 616 metres

Miller Moss 609 metres

Little Lingy Hill 600 metres

Coomb Height about 620 metres

Won’t tell you the name of the next one – Pike (dhuhh) 590 metres and a bit

Knott 710 metres

Little Calva 642 metres

Great Calva 690 metres.

As for me, I’d never been to Pike before. It was very nice. It has a cairn and a nice view.

We snoozed in the sun for a long time on Great Calva before plunging the 1000 feet down to the path back to Mosedale through the Very Deep Heather.

Its a bit of a plod back to Mosedale, so I was more than gruntled to discover that The Friend’s Meeting House has a pop-up tearoom, staffed, presumably, by volunteers and serving pots of tea and dangerous-looking cake and they let me take the dog in.

We did 15 miles and 2880 feet of ascent.