One Man and a Mule: Across England with a Pack Mule

In the matter of water, mules are somewhat dainty and if the supply is not to their taste will, unless extremely thirsty, decline to drink.

The War Office, Animal Management (London, 1923)

THE HONISTER IS the first big pass you reach when coming into the Lake District from the north-west. It lies at the top of a narrow, steep valley, with quarries to one side. As we breached the pass we could see the gentler slopes of Borrowdale descending ahead.

I wanted to take Jethro along the old pack pony path that wound from the quarries over towards the spectacular ring of mountains of the Western Fells, centred on the domed anvil of Great Gable. The path was called Old Moses Trod after a nineteenth-century quarryman who had designed the route to contour beautifully around the slope ahead of us, run for some fifteen miles across the Western Fells through Wasdale Head, and arrive at Ravenglass for the ships.

The only way to get the slate down from quarries like the Honister was to carry it in panniers on pack ponies. And very fine slate it was too. I have always loved the unusual deep green hidden in the grey of the stone which is only visible in certain lights, the result of the ferrous oxide content in the fine volcanic dust and ash. The slate from quarries further east, like Kirkby, is more blue, while that of Wales is a far plainer grey, to my eyes at least.

The non-porous, non-staining qualities of Lakeland slate have always been thought desirable. From at least the seventeenth century, when local records began, and probably from long before, it was mined at the Honister and other local sites to cover the roofs of northern England. First, the slate was blasted out of the quarry; then it was ‘docked up’ – turned into manageable lumps – before workers called ‘rivers’ would with great skill use a wedge-ended hammer to split the rock neatly down the cleavage plane. It was a source of considerable pride to the ‘rivers’ that they never needed to use a chisel. Finally, the slate would be dressed and polished before a line of pack animals would take it away and over the mountains.

We had a welcome cup of tea at the small café by the quarry workshops and I commissioned, for a modest fee, something I had long wanted: an engraved nameplate for my house, with the slate surface polished but the edges left rough-hewn. The lady at the shop showed me some samples, with script ranging from Old English to the wild Century Gothic. I settled for the more sedate Times New Roman.

‘You’re not from Wales, are you?’ she asked, with concern. ‘You don’t sound like you are. Not that I’ve got anything against the Welsh. But some of their house names are so long. It means we have to charge extra.’

Some people find the Honister Pass grim and the quarries ugly. It holds the record as the wettest place in Britain, and when the rains come down it can be miserable. But we had arrived on a day of clear sunshine.

We were only a little into the journey, yet Jethro was already walking quietly and calmly as we set off from the quarry shop; his ears set back, he looked engaged and interested. Jasper thought he had already lost a bit of weight. His cinches were fitting better and he was a smartly turned-out mule as well, in a striped Colorado riding blanket I had borrowed from Pippa, together with some leather saddlebags.

‘If we let him loose now when we were having a picnic, would he just take off or hang around?’ I wondered idly to Jasper.

‘He wouldn’t take off at all. He’s decided we’re his herd. Not a very pleasant herd, and decidedly lacking in intelligence, with terrible ears, but about as good as he’s going to get, so he’s making the best of it.’

There were different ways up to the high ground, but Jasper suggested we might as well take the full-frontal approach up the steep and stony old miners’ tramway. This was how the slate was originally lowered from the quarries.

Some school kids were sitting with their teacher on the track eating sandwiches, and we were a welcome diversion. They had come all the way from Gateshead – a long four-hour round journey to make for a school geography outing. But then the people of Tyneside have always loved the Lake District.

The teacher was telling them that the nearby pile of stones had once been a drum house which operated the cable of the tramway back down to the cutting sheds, so that the loads could be lowered. Like most industrial archaeology, it was the sort of detail more likely to appeal to an adult than a child. I could tell that he had lost his audience, who were preoccupied with who had got what flavour sandwiches and crisps.

‘So, are you a business?’ the teacher asked us, with the direct tone of someone used to getting prompt answers from the class – and perhaps as a way of getting back his own class’s attention.

‘What do you mean?’ I was puzzled. My wife pointed out to me on a regular basis that writing could in no way be considered a business. More a lifestyle with benefits.

It wasn’t such a bad idea – except that Jethro was unwilling to carry very much. He had the smallest saddlebags I’d ever seen on a mule: no bigger than the clutch bags carried by ladies who lunch. We were, as we pointed out to him occasionally, carrying far more on our own backs. He would never have made the grade carrying slate from the quarry. I hadn’t even been able to fit my new slate nameplate into his saddlebag to give him a spurious sense of historical validity.

The school kids asked about Jethro. By now I had a good brisk description of the difference between a horse, a mule and a donkey down pat. And they were impressed he had his own Facebook page – an idea of Jasper’s; for someone who liked to imply he would have been far happier living on horseback in the nineteenth century, Jasper was an avid user of social media. Although we were both irritated that Jethro had in a short space of time acquired more ‘likes’ than either of us.

‘So does that mean,’ said one chubby kid, with the kind of leer that even though I have never been a teacher I could tell was trouble, ‘they can’t have children themselves? I mean, you know, can mules have sex and that?’

The class dissolved in titters and gave muffled snorts through their bags of crisps. It was time to move on. I left their teacher to explain things. He was, after all, the professional. Although for any readers who are wondering, the answer to that last question is ‘yes’.

For a late October day, it was unseasonably mild and sunny, giving us views of the sea through the gaps in the mountains. Wordsworth always claimed that October was the best month in the Lakes. To the north, I could even make out the faint glimmer of wind farms far offshore in the Atlantic.

Below us was the strange geological formation of Haystacks. Even in the clear sunshine it was a confusing mass of upturned rock formations, an extended plateau which commanded the valleys to either side like an enormous aircraft carrier.

It was impossible to look down on Haystacks without remembering it was the final resting place of Britain’s best-loved mountain guide. Alfred Wainwright’s beautifully produced volumes have become so iconic – there can be few walkers in Britain who have not held one – that we sometimes forget what an extraordinary achievement they were. Handwritten and hand-drawn, these are books made with the love and dedication of a medieval monk; and for Wainwright, his descriptions of each Lake District climb, along with maps and the odd trenchant comment, were worthy of a lifetime’s devotion.

The quality of his draughtsmanship was legendary. He used a special set of 1901 OS maps with the outrageous scale of six inches to the mile to make sure he got every detail right. Having spent the better part of a year on his first guide, he scrapped the lot and started all over again because he wasn’t satisfied with the right-hand margin. But there is also a quiet underlying wit which has helped many a walker through bog and mist.

I once heard of a woman who had designed her wedding invitation to look like a Wainwright illustration. There were dotted lines to lead guests from car park to church to marquee, ‘where hopefully the best man will keep his speech short’.

Alfred Wainwright was born in Blackburn in 1907. Despite doing well at school, he left early, at the age of thirteen, and worked as a clerk first in Blackburn’s council offices and then Kendall’s. In 1930, when he was twenty-three, he went to the Lake District for the first time, and began what he later described as ‘a love affair with the Lakes’, producing a prodigious number of books celebrating their landscape. He died in 1991.

Nor did he stop at the Lakes. He devised and published A Coast to Coast Walk from St Bees on the Cumbrian coast to Robin Hood’s Bay on the east coast, a walk that has now become one of the most popular in the world. Although we were not following the exact route of Wainwright’s Coast-to-Coast – for the obvious reason that he used footpaths while we needed bridleways – I had charted a rough approximation across country.

But however far he wandered, the heartland of the Lake District for Wainwright was these Western Fells, the mountains that fan out from Great Gable between the lakes of Wastwater and Buttermere. It was the area about which he wrote the last and most personal of his acclaimed series of seven Lakeland books (‘guides’ is surely an inadequate term) in 1966, when he was falling in love with the woman who was to become his second wife; and it is where he chose to be remembered after his death. Not coincidentally, it is one of the least visited corners of the Lakes, furthest from the M6 and the tourist magnets of Grasmere and Dove Cottage. You have to work to get here, and I’m sure that appealed to him. Wainwright did not go into the hills for company.

For many years, I have had a recurring dream. I stand on the top of Fleetwith Pike in the early morning. Below me, coming up the Honister Pass and fanning out, are the hunters. I stand deliberately on the very top of the peak so they can see me silhouetted against its chiselled ridge. Then I blow the horn. The noise carries and echoes off Great Gable, Haystacks, Kirkfell. And the hunters start moving with renewed purpose towards me.

I turn and run back off the Pike and along the narrow edge that drops sharply down towards the lake of Buttermere. It feels as if I am running off the top of the world. I run with both adrenaline and the horn beating against my chest. I can no longer see my pursuers, but I sense they are behind me. Buttermere seems to be under my feet, but also miles away. The hunters follow me and although I can no longer see them, I hear their voices over the bluff of the hill, echoing in the slate quarries of the Honister Pass.

The dream comes from the days when I took part in fell-running man-hunts across this area. A few runners were selected each day to be chased down by the rest of the pack. As a way of getting to know every last twist and turn of the landscape, it was hard to beat. Runners would deliberately access the most remote and difficult terrain, from scree slope to hidden high ravine. The broken tussocks of Haystacks, right in the centre of the hunting area and the Western Fells – and Wainwright’s favourite place ‘for a man with a persistent puzzle on his mind’ – could hide a determined ‘hare’ for hours, as the hunters circled round their prey, hearing his horn but never seeing him in the geological maze.

I tried to explain the hunt to Jasper, with only a modicum of embarrassment at the antics of supposedly grown men chasing each other over the hills.

‘But this is a huge area.’ Jasper gave a sweep of his hands at the twenty square miles in front of us, from the Honister Pass to Wasdale Head. ‘Surely, the hares just get lost. So it must be frustrating to be a hunter.’

‘The hares wear red sashes which are visible for a long way. And everyone can hear the horns they blow for miles. There are usually three or four hares each day, criss-crossing the area, so the hunters have a good chance of finding one – as long as the hares give good sport and keep running rather than hiding, which would be too easy.’ My much faster and fitter brother Ben had once gone and hidden for some time under a log in Ennerdale Forest, about which I occasionally teased him (not least because at the time he was being chased by me).

‘And what happens when they catch you? If they catch you,’ asked Jasper politely, and unnecessarily, as I have always been very thoroughly caught.

For this being a very English affair, instead of ripping me apart in bacchanalian fashion after the passions of the chase, my pursuers would then pause for some genial conversation – before I would set off again, blowing my horn to lead on a new set of hounds.

It was something I had done in college, and then later at intermittent intervals through every decade of my life, so it had provided continuity; even if it was also a measuring stick by which to gauge my increasing slowness of speed. The last time the Master of the Lake Hunt had asked me to be a hare, I had refused on the grounds that, at fifty, I would be caught so often my entire day would be spent eating sandwiches and discussing the weather with jubilant hunters. I might even put on weight, which would defeat the whole point of the exercise.

Just across from Fleetwith Pike, where I had often led the hunters, we could look back to see the Honister quarries more clearly from afar. A few years previously, they had been at the centre of a controversial attempt to attract younger visitors to the Lakes. Mark Weir, a flamboyant local entrepreneur who flew to work in a helicopter, had already built a via ferrata, a climbing route with fixed holds and aids, in the old quarry workings. He had also reopened part of the site, making it the only working slate quarry in the entire country, and set up the shop. Now he wanted to add a zip-wire, so that those of an adventurous disposition could swing down and across for 4,000 feet from the summit.

There was uproar. The Friends of the Lake District, a local pressure group, declared, ‘This is just the wrong place for a new visitor attraction aiming to attract large numbers of people.’ But I disagreed, very publicly, in a piece for The Times. It seemed to me that without just this sort of expansion of tourist activities, the area could die on its leather-booted feet. Not all children get excited at the idea of a day’s walking in the hills with a packed lunch. And the Lake District can’t live on sheep, tea-shops and Beatrix Potter dishcloths alone. Moreover, the original quarry would have had pulley wires slung all over the place, so in some ways, I argued, Mark was attempting a restoration; the council should have given him a grant.

The zip-wire never happened, and Mark died tragically in a helicopter accident not long afterwards. Many locals remember him as someone who, while controversial, tried his best to bring much-needed employment to the area.

Would A. W. (he would have thought it overfamiliar to call him plain Alfred) have approved of the project? Wainwright was not sentimental – and was always interested in the industrial archaeology he came across on his walks – so might have been sympathetic, at least to the idea of employment. Perhaps not to the zip-wire, however: he would have seen that as an abominable way of getting down a mountain, although the thought of him taking one is agreeably comic. And I also liked to play out a fantasy in my head in which some fell-running hare, cornered by a set of baying hounds, would take to the zip-wire and swing like Douglas Fairbanks Jr over the heads of his pursuers with a merry quip, the horn tucked into his bright red sash. ‘Some hare’? I must, as always, be honest with my readers. In any such fantasy, it would of course have been myself.

As we got closer, Haystacks unfolded her many layers of fascinating complexity below us. It is possible to wander for hours around those heather-clad knolls and never quite take the same route twice: a delight for a hare trying to hide from his pursuers, and a great spectator sport if you happened to be, as we were now, above Haystacks. I had seen a hare run up to the top of one of the mounds, toot a horn cheekily at his pursuers, and then be away and up another mound before the hounds had even reached the first one, a game that could continue for some time.

At the centre of Haystacks was Innominate Tarn, a lake that some argue Wainwright named (if you can be said to name something that is innominate). On earlier maps – like my old OS map from the 1970s, which cost £1.50, dating it considerably – it is anonymous. More recent ones have followed the name he gave in his guide: ‘nameless tarn’.

That it was a special place for him is clear. In Fellwanderer, his autobiography, he made a very public wish to have his ashes scattered ‘where the water gently laps the gravelly shore and the heather blooms and Pillar and Gable keep unfailing watch. A quiet place, a lonely place. I shall go to it, for the last time, and be carried: someone who knew me in life will take me and empty me out of a little box and leave me there alone.’ And this is indeed what happened.

Looking down at the heather-rimmed tarn, in the bowl of what Wainwright called ‘the sunset side’ of the Lakes, I also remembered the typically self-deprecating comment with which he had followed this rare statement of emotion: ‘And if you, dear reader, should get a bit of grit in your boot as you are crossing Haystacks in the years to come, please treat it with respect. It might be me.’

Jethro chose that moment to disturb my contemplation by bolting sharply. Quite what it was that alarmed him, I’m not too sure; nor was this the first or last time it happened on our journey. It may have been a walker with a dog who was approaching, and was now amused to see two grown men running after the rope trailing behind Jethro, like balloonists who had lost their balloon.

‘You need to keep that donkey under control,’ he said helpfully, with a laugh.

A little later that day, despite having walked and run this route many times, and even with the Wainwright guide to hand, I managed to get lost contouring around Moses Trod. The paths had divided over the years, without the cohesion any more of being a pack-pony route. Humans are more prone to wander than animals led in teams. Or at least, that was my excuse.

At one point, therefore, Jasper and I found ourselves retracing our steps uphill, never good for morale. It was a reminder of the complete illusion that you somehow get wiser when old. This was an area I was supposed to know ‘like the back of my hand’; but then, as I told myself, I didn’t often study the back of my hand – in fact, would challenge anyone to draw the back of theirs without looking, and would find it slightly sad if they could.

In my defence – as I pointed out to Jasper, who at this early stage in the walk still assumed I might know what I was doing – the route had changed in many places to negotiate a newly strengthened boundary fence, which in the old days, as Wainwright attested, was broken and not much of an obstacle. The boundary fence was a rude reminder of something I had managed so far wilfully to ignore. Despite Moses Trod having always been a bridleway in the past, constructed for pack ponies, it had now reverted to footpath status; so when we came to the boundary fence, there was a quite legitimate – and impassable – stile. This was something we would encounter right along our journey.

We did what any expedition from the Andes to the Himalaya does when faced with a problem. We stopped for lunch.

While Jethro munched on some carrots and grass, Jasper and I made do with chunks of chorizo and Cheddar, with the odd sandwich. It reminded me of being caught in the middle of a lake hunt.

Jasper and I discussed how many obstacles we had already encountered in trying to get a mule across the countryside. For I was beginning to realise that to take a pack animal across England, which once would have been so natural as to attract no notice, was now working against the lie of the land; that the route was bifurcated with everything from stiles to boundary fences to the six lanes of the M6. The process of enclosure, begun so controversially in the eighteenth century, was still continuing.

Just then a woman came down the hill. She was in her forties, with a warm, approachable face. We asked if there was any way of getting Jethro over the fence higher up – which there wasn’t. But we did get to talking. There’s nothing like having a mule to provide a conversation point.

Sarah was attempting to ‘do the Wainwrights’ – all the hills and mountains described in his guides, of which there are 214, so a considerable undertaking. But that was only the start of her adventure.

‘I’ve given up my job. Given up work completely. I’ve moved out of my house and I’m living in a camper van. In a few weeks’ time, as the weather gets bad, I’m heading south. To Spain, maybe Morocco. England’s just going to be my summer holiday destination from now on. So it may take a while before I finish the Wainwrights. A few years at least.’

‘At the moment I don’t always know where I’m going to sleep. I could just stay over this evening in the Honister car park. Although I could do with buying a bottle of wine to keep warm. At least I’ve got a camper van. I met someone yesterday who was just going to put up a tent on Haystacks. Now that would be chilly in October.

‘I don’t have heating in the van. It’s not really a camper. It’s just an old panel van. I mean it’s lovely, it looks more like a gypsy boat on the inside. It’s got a curved roof and the cupboards are all home-made and look slightly Moroccan. So it’s beautiful … but cold!’

Sarah asked what the plan was with Jethro and where we were heading; in return, I wondered why she’d made the decision to leave everything behind and start a life on the road.

‘Because I was sick of working to pay the rent, the council tax, the bills, the water rates and everything. My happy times were snatches of weekend here and there. I wanted more. More time. My life was a constant rush, always. Now I just want to be free. It’s only two weeks since I packed in my job, so it’s all come as a bit of a shock.

‘I like your idea of travelling with a mule. I used to know this old couple who were in their seventies and had gone right off-grid. Gone solar, grew their own produce. Had nothing to do with the council. And the woman, Ruth, told me that when they were younger, they travelled right across country with a mule and a goat, stopping wherever they could and picking up odd jobs. And they did that for about seven or eight years before settling down. But they’re still off-grid. Completely off-grid.

‘Ruth told me that sometimes the mule would let her ride him, because she had a bad back, but the mule would always sense if her back was really giving her trouble or not. If she tried to ride him when she was actually OK, he wouldn’t let her.’

Jasper gave what I was beginning to recognise as his patented wise muleteer’s look.

‘Ah yes, well, they’re very intelligent, mules.’ This sounded even more definitive with his soft, slow Irish accent.

‘I worked in a school with special-needs students. Still keep in touch with some of them. Although they can only get in contact when they turn eighteen. I had to be strict about that. Wonderful job – I really loved my students. I had a text from one of them today who’s just turned eighteen, saying “great, I can talk to you now!” I’ll miss all that side of it, but I won’t miss the stress.’

‘Probably down through France, maybe staying for a while in the Dordogne, and over the Pyrenees into the Picos mountains. Then down through Portugal to the south of Spain. I was going to carry on into Morocco, but I’m a little bit … my brother is ex-army, but he still has to do with intelligence and he was telling me it’s not really a good place to be travelling at the minute, with all the ISIS threats and everything. We’ll see.’

‘I guess you have to be careful,’ I said. ‘But it all sounds good and adventurous.’

‘Slightly terrifying. I think, though, you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone in life. You have to. What’s the alternative? Just wait for your retirement and die? I don’t want to look back on my life and think, “What did I do for half of it? Worked and was tired and never had any time.”’

Sarah went silent. I sensed there was more to the story, which all of a sudden came pouring out.

‘The thing is, I started doing this all with my boyfriend. But before we were due to go, just before, he decided he didn’t want to do it. And he didn’t really want me either. So, you know, we split up. Which has been a shock, really. I keep thinking about it as I’m walking. This was going to be the thing we did together. Now I’m doing it on my own, which is much more difficult.

While Jasper and I absorbed this last revelation, she told us the van had a shallow space cut out at the back for a shower. ‘It’s great if I’m on my own and can have a shower in the open. And can sing for happiness. But if I need to keep the back door shut, it’s a little claustrophobic.’

Sarah reminded me of Vashti Bunyan, the folk singer who had travelled north from London to Skye in a horse-drawn caravan in 1968, composing the songs that went into her album Just Another Diamond Day – songs I had played as we drove north with Jethro. Sarah was another remembrance of a time when there was still a yearning to be free, even if there was always the danger, in Janis Joplin’s words, that ‘freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’. We wished her well on her adventure.

Open country, indeed, it was. At this time it was scarcely cultivated save in a few fields round Seathwaite or Rosthwaite. It lay in purple shadows with splashes of glittering sunlight, a lost land, untenanted by man, no animal anywhere visible, dominated entirely by the mountains that hemmed it in. To David’s right ran the path up to Honister, where the mines were; this country was forbidden ground, for here all the rascals and outcasts of the neighbourhood would congregate to scrape among the mine refuse and then sell the scraps of plumbago to the Jews in Keswick, who would meet them at ‘The George’ or ‘The Half-Moon’ and then bargain with them.

The stories were that titanic battles were fought above Stye Head and on Honister between rival bands of robbers, disputing their plunder, and it was true enough that many a time, walking up Honister, you would find a dead man there, by the roadside, his throat cut or a knife in his belly and often enough stripped naked.

Hugh Walpole, Rogue Herries

Hugh Walpole’s novel is an enjoyable bit of hokum about the Western Fells. Published in 1930, Rogue Herries received rapturous accolades from critics. John Buchan said it was the best novel in English since Jude the Obscure; a judgement so delightfully absurd that it needs to be viewed against the literary politics of the time, when established figures like Buchan, Wells and Arnold Bennett were fighting the forces of modernism in a rearguard action.

Walpole is now an almost forgotten figure, with few of his books in print. Well considered in his day, he was knighted for services to literature – and was more popular on lecture tours of the United States than Charles Dickens had been. The Herries Chronicles performed for the Lake District what Poldark did later for Cornwall: ripped open the bodices and celebrated a family of ‘drunken, robbing freebooters’. The books chart the fortunes of the Herries family, beginning with the ‘Rogue’ of the first book, a swashbuckler who chases wild gypsy women and challenges any man who crosses him to a duel.

Some contemporaries were amused that it should be Walpole – a gay aesthete and avid collector of fine books and antiques – who championed the wilder shores of the Lake District. He had, said Anthony Powell, ‘that exacting brand of homosexuality which drew him towards middle-aged married men’. The Rogue’s son David is a quieter, more reflective figure, more in the author’s own image, who is uncomfortable with women, and the sagas continue right up to the twentieth century in a sweep that attempts the epic.

But Walpole was appealingly self-deprecating. He described his Rogue Herries more accurately than Buchan as ‘a fine, queer book in the big manner’, and confessed he had allowed himself to be, for the first time in his adult life, ‘what I really am – a little boy telling stories in the dormitory’. He was well aware that it was no longer possible to be successful with both the public and modernist critics: ‘There is at the present time the superstition far too general among clever people, that if a book has any large sale, it cannot be good literature.’

‘It was true enough that many a time, walking up Honister, you would find a dead man there’ is a delightful conceit, not made any more likely by the corroborating detail: ‘… his throat cut or a knife in his belly and often enough stripped naked’. It is not at all ‘true enough’, even though the plunder they were disputing, plumbago – which we would now call graphite – was of exceptional quality and some of the finest in the world. Walpole was just trying to animate a dramatic landscape with events that lived up to its operatic scale: Rogue Herries sells his mistress at an auction, a woman accused of being a witch is drowned and there are brigands behind every bush.

But in a way, what makes the Lake District so sublime is the very mundanity of its inhabitants. It is from the humble bus trundling up the Borrowdale valley – the one that Wainwright took at the end of his visits to his beloved Haystacks – or for that matter when trudging along with a mule, that the scale and grandeur of the peaks are at their most magnificent.

An old pack-horse route leads up from Threlkeld into the Northern Fells around Skiddaw. My old friend Jeff Ford, who lived locally, told me it had been preserved as a bridleway, so we would not have the same difficulties we had experienced on Moses Trod. Jeff knew the area well and agreed to accompany us.

He went even further: he offered to put us up for a couple of nights. As I should explain to the reader who is interested – and apologise to the reader who isn’t – there were some complicated logistics involved in getting Jethro cross-country. In Peru, you could simply stop for the night wherever you got to that day, and park your mule next to the tent – but I realised this might be unpopular in England, unless I had made prior arrangements. Instead, I had to set up a relay of bases where we could stay between stages of the walk, ferrying Jethro back and forwards in the Dodge horse van. This meant we could always carry on where we had left off before – or, as now, accommodate a small diversion.

We met Jeff near Threlkeld. He was duly impressed by our horse lorry (all five and a half tons of it). The Dodge was so old that it had a rope you pulled on to lower the ramp at the back, as if lowering a stage prop. And the whole process seemed theatrical, revealing the pantomime mule within, who sashayed down the ramp with great aplomb, as if it were a red carpet. I felt like the husband of some glamorously dressed starlet, keeping at a respectful rope’s length from Jethro’s left shoulder. A couple of other assembled walkers in the small car park gave an appreciative ripple of applause which Jethro pretended not to notice.

Jeff was a reassuringly large and steadfast presence. I had always liked him, since we first met on an expedition to the Nanda Devi Sanctuary in the Himalaya – not least because, among a bunch of mountaineers who often took themselves seriously, he had a well-developed sense of humour.

It was partly for that reason I had invited him to join me on an expedition to the Andes a few years later, an expedition for which we had both horses and mules. And on which, as he now reminded me, as leader I had got them all lost. Several times.

It was those expeditions in the Andes which had made me fall in love with the idea of a mule train: a line of mules, their bells tinkling, winding up a track, with the muleteers calling out instructions in a Spanish rich with imprecations and affection.

Clearly I was going to be more limited with just Jethro. And tempting as it was to let out the odd cry of ‘¡Mula, Mula, carrazo!’, it might alarm the Lake District natives. But there was still a certain romance to walking through the hills with a pack animal: Jethro in his white and red horse blanket with the Iranian saddle and Jasper, about as near to a professional muleteer as the British Isles would allow.

Jasper’s first question to Jeff as we started off was how the going would be up towards Skiddaw House: would there be grass verges to the track to give Jethro’s feet a break after the rocky surfaces near the Honister slate quarries?

Jeff assured him that this part of the Lake District was less hammered from stone than Great Gable, and we soon settled into a relaxed pace as Jethro found the comfortable grass verges. We came to a small waterfall tumbling off the side of Blencathra and Jasper stopped.

‘This is a dead ringer, with that little stream coming down and the curve of the hill, for a track I used to take in Morocco when I lived in a village there – must have taken it every day with a mule, so some sixty times.’

There were two ravens turning somersaults over our heads for the fun of it, having a dogfight with each other. What with the rowan trees by the waterfall, it felt very Celtic.

‘Yes, like a scene Gavin Maxwell might have written,’ Jasper suggested. ‘Raven Seek Thy Brother meets Ring of Bright Water.’

One of the things I liked so much about Jasper was that in addition to his fine mulemanship, he was a fine writer with a wide knowledge of travel literature. The reason he spent so much time house-sitting on a commercial basis was that he could write comfortably from those houses, as if enjoying a long series of holiday lets while being paid for it at the same time – ideal for an author. The houses tended to the large and luxurious side, and I teased him occasionally that he was used to gracious living; not something I could offer on this trip across England. But then he still did plenty of the rough stuff as well. He had recently walked from Munich to Paris in the footsteps of one of his heroes, the German film director Werner Herzog. And his book about canoeing around the entire coast of Ireland was both epic and enterprising.

On a fine summer’s day before this journey began, we had wandered along the Thames from Wittenham Clumps and swum out into the river, not far from one of those gracious houses, talking of Roger Deakin and putting the world to rights. Jasper had also been in demand as a guest at local parties in Oxfordshire for his Irish gift for telling a story and the slightly glamorous, rakish air he had about him.

We had come to a rivulet running down off the hills. As this was the last stream for a while, we wanted Jethro to drink. But as with horses, you can only lead a mule to water. Only after Jasper gave a peculiar noise of encouragement, like a kettle running dry, did Jethro bend his head and begin.

‘It’s a curious thing. A descending whistle for some reason makes a mule want to drink. You hear muleteers doing it all over the world. And they haven’t learned that from each other. Each country’s worked it out for themselves. The whistle tells the mule this might be the last bit of water for the next few hours.’

‘I always find that walking with an animal is like a marriage – without the sex, of course,’ he pronounced.

I refrained from reminding Jasper, a lifelong bachelor, that for many, ‘marriage is like a relationship – without the sex, of course.’ I could tell he was, anyway, just warming up.

‘Of course a mule is carrying your provisions for the trek, for a brief period. For the rest of the time, you’re constantly worrying about him. Whether he’s happy, about his feet, his clothing, his rugs, his straps and his girths.

‘And then you have to worry about his food, whether he’s eating the right stuff, whether he’s eating the wrong stuff, whether he’s in a field and not eating enough, has he got water, does he like the water? They can be fussy and quite often won’t drink if they’re suspicious of something.’

Jasper looked up at the cruel and empty sky and scratched his head under his beret.

‘You have to worry about any rubs or sores, you have to worry about his ears, about his teeth and his gums. It’s bloody endless.’

For it was true. One thing I had noticed about the equine world was the constant state of anxiety from which horse owners seemed to suffer. Any horse, and to a certain extent any mule, was always waiting to go wrong. Whenever we were settling Jethro for the night in a pasture next to neighbouring horses, the conversations with their owners revolved around a litany of problems: ringworm, ragwort, hooves, bone spurs and every horse extremity which needed attention.

Over the last few years, I had spent more time on a bicycle than a horse. A bike had the great advantage that if you left it in the garage, it was unlikely to break down. Whereas the more you left horses alone, the more prone they were to malfunction. At least we were giving Jethro constant attention – which, I was beginning to suspect, he rather liked. And so far he was proving easy to maintain, with low mileage and running costs. A few carrots aside, he was perfectly happy with grass and some pony nuts.

It was still a strange thing to be travelling across England with a mule: strange, because while once the whole landscape would have been filled with pack animals and it would have been unusual to meet anyone who wasn’t carrying goods, now these drovers’ roads were like motorways without any cars.

And that also made it exhilarating: the sense of reanimating a landscape. Already I found the way that Jethro pulled us along – or held us back – gave a different rhythm to the way we walked. I was enjoying the difference.

Some way on from the little waterfall, we came to heather uplands that stretched ahead of us into the Northern Fells. The heather was in flower, one of the glories of late summer in the Lake District. Jasper described the heather-filled landscape in a lovely phrase as ‘tweedy – full of bobbles and burrs and umber colours and knobbles and roughness’.

We met an older man striding across the heather towards us, lean and wiry, who had an attractive tensile strength to the way he phrased his sentences. ‘I’ve come from Mungrisdale Common. The long way round. I know these fells so well, my navigation is getting sloppy.’

The man had got lost on a few of the more anonymous-looking slopes. ‘Difficult to tell if they’re concave or convex.’ Rather, as I reminded Jasper later, what had happened when I managed to take the wrong twist of Moses Trod – still an embarrassment.

‘There’s a reluctance these days to allow too many bridleways. Because a bridleway doesn’t mean a horse, it means a cycle. And that can be controversial. A lot of people don’t like the way you get close to the top of Helvellyn and meet a peloton coming down.

‘Not just a lot of people. I don’t like it. And some old bridleways have off-road vehicles using them. Quad bikes as well. They’ve carved out deep ruts in the grass. I’m surprised they’re not down to the axles.

‘So you’re right, a lot of bridleways have been declassified. And I can see why.’

The man was intrigued by Jethro, although he kept his distance; I had noticed that it was women who instinctively went up to stroke him.

‘I haven’t seen a mule here for decades. Well – I haven’t seen a mule anywhere for decades, to be honest. Last one I saw was in 1976, in Wales. It was a bit curious.’

Jasper, Jeff and I – and probably Jethro – tensed a little as it was unclear where this story was going to go.

‘So the man put on some sort of loincloth and approached us from about a hundred yards away, demurely, to see if we had any cigarettes. And he had a mule.’

The walker quickly made his apologies and left, as if realising his story had run out of steam. I never learned his name. But for some reason, Jasper and I remembered this story of the mysterious naked muleteer, and would refer to it for the rest of our journey, inventing plausible ways it could have played out. Or even begun. It reminded me of a basic precept of storytelling. Think of an odd and engaging scenario; try and work out how the characters got there.

Skiddaw House lay ahead of us. It looked like something out of a Harry Potter film, a house that a witch forgot, encircled by trees on bleak moorland and with the wide expanse of the Northern Fells stretching away like the steppes. Once a shooting lodge and shepherd’s bothy, it was described by Wainwright as being ‘at the back o’ beyond’. This, from Wainwright, was an affectionate term. But then he didn’t like people.

At 1550 feet, Skiddaw House is the highest youth hostel in Britain. It is also one of the most remote. Normally these two statistics would make it an appealing prospect. But it had an unloved, unforgiving quality. Perhaps it was something about the grey stone. Without even stepping inside (which we couldn’t, as it was closed during the day), I suspected it would have a shower worthy of ‘Cell-block Number Nine’.

We stopped for a lunch that was fast becoming our standby: some oatcake biscuits (Jasper’s healthy idea), great slabs of chorizo sausage (my less healthy one) and Cheddar. To be supplemented when possible by any locally available pies, although Skiddaw House looked the sort of place where Oliver would have asked for more. My keen instincts for foraging in the wild told me that, even if it had been open, pies would not have been available.

As we lounged against the low stone wall that surrounded the grounds of Skiddaw House, enjoying the autumn sun and our picnic, Jeff told us about the Bob Graham race, which began over the same fells we were now crossing.

The Bob Graham race is an epic of endurance. It’s not only that the runners have to cover sixty-six miles in a day, hard enough in itself; each contestant also makes a cumulative ascent of nearly 27,000 feet by the time they’ve finished. That’s like running up Everest.

And the running surface is not exactly tarmac-smooth. As Jethro had found, even on a bridle path the going is by no means easy, let alone when you’re running the wrong way up a remote hill. So the roll-call of local athletes who have successfully completed the Bob Graham is a list of some considerable honour.

Bob Graham was the owner of a Keswick guest-house. In 1932, he decided to celebrate his forty-second birthday by traversing forty-two fells within a twenty-four-hour period – there’s a lovely symmetry to that – and the race was born. It starts and finishes in the Moot Hall at Keswick, and has a carefully prescribed route. Almost 2,000 people have now completed it, although to qualify for the Bob Graham Club – which must be a scarily competitive place – you need a relay of companions to verify that you have ticked off each summit. And, although this is an unspoken assumption, in case anything goes wrong.

The fastest time ever set was that of Billy Bland of Borrowdale, who in 1982 completed the circuit in a breathtaking thirteen hours and fifty-three minutes, beating the previous record-holder by nearly four hours. His name still dominates the board in a drinking hole I’m fond of round the back of Rosthwaite, the Riverside Bar. And a short while before, Nicky Spinks, a farmer from Yorkshire, had set a new women’s record of eighteen hours and six minutes – aged forty-seven, and after recovering from cancer.

It was clearly an event at which you got even better when older. Local sheep farmer and fell-running legend Joss Naylor decided that for his seventieth birthday, he would complete seventy peaks, which he did in under twenty-one hours. Being a farmer, though, brought with it occupational hazards that other sportsmen might not face: over the years, Joss had to deal with injuries from inhaling sheep dip and having a railway sleeper dropped on his foot.

‘I had a friend in my local pub who tried to do the Bob Graham,’ Jeff told us. ‘He failed to get within the twenty-four hours by a whisker. I think he was a minute and a half late.’

We contemplated this as we munched our oatcakes and chorizo, and watched Jethro grazing.

My immediate resolve when Jeff had started telling us about the Bob Graham – that I would never even contemplate an attempt – was seeming an even more sensible decision by the minute. I celebrated the thought with a pork pie I had found at the bottom of my backpack.

‘Then he tried again a couple of years later. But when he got to the Honister and realised how far ahead the Blands were, he just ran out of energy. He was demoralised. That’s what he was. Completely demoralised.’

Like the tale of the naked muleteer, there was nowhere left for this story to go and we fell silent.

‘I still think it’s odd,’ I said, ‘for Joss Naylor to spend his leisure hours running up and down the same hills he’s been farming all day.’

Jeff pondered. ‘I think it’s simply a love for the hills. The whole Bland family are fell-runners. Although Billy Bland’s more into cycling these days.

‘Most Bob Graham runners set off from Keswick late at night and in midsummer, so as to get as much daylight as possible up to the end of the run. The first thing they do is come off the back of Skiddaw past this house and head over to Great Calva. Then down across the A66 to the whole of the Helvellyn range – in the dark.’

‘The sad thing is, Hugh, that compared to us, they stay fresh – right through the twenty-four hours. Or they wouldn’t attempt it in the first place. And remember, these guys have support runners and a strict regime of food and clothing. They’ll have practised for years.’

I felt lazy by comparison as we ambled back towards Threlkeld at mule-at-the-end-of-the-day pace. Although I did notice – and felt duty-bound to point out – that when we got to an incline, Jeff became out of breath faster than I did. So maybe some distant vestige of a competitive fell-runner still lingered somewhere in my make-up, like junk DNA.

Chapter 2

The Naked Muleteer