3

Roaming Free

IN 1965 THE concept of a gap year between school and university did not exist. Going abroad at all, even across the Channel to France, was a distant dream. But Dave and I ached for adventure, and what could be more adventurous than spending a week in the Lake District crossing the hills from one youth hostel to another? It would be our first time away from home on our own, free of adult control. The very idea of it was enough to induce giddiness.

The only fixed points on our itinerary were Keswick station, where we would arrive and leave, and the three 3,000ft summits of Skiddaw, Helvellyn and Scafell Pike. As we possessed neither tent nor camping equipment, youth hostels provided the only food and lodging we could afford. We highlighted all of them on our one-inch-to-one-mile Ordnance Survey map and, throughout the winter of our last year in the sixth form, pored over route possibilities as though planning a Himalayan expedition. Sir John Hunt could have been no more thorough.

A summer spent freezing peas in a Humber Bank factory provided funds and we detrained in Keswick scarcely able to believe that our plans had come to fruition. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that ‘to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive’ but he might have changed his mind had he seen Dave and I standing wide-eyed on Keswick station platform.

On our first day we climbed Skiddaw, using Poucher’s Lakeland Peaks as a guide. I remember nothing of the ascent but, according to the diary I kept of the trip, we encountered cloud, rain, bog and river crossings. Apparently, we thought it a good idea to make do with one rucksack and take it in turns to carry it. It was an experiment we chose not to repeat. Yet still I managed to note in my diary, heavily influenced by Poucher’s ornate prose, that Back o’ Skiddaw was ‘a paradise of wilderness where a man can finally be as free as nature intended him to be’.

Looking cool on Striding Edge

In the ensuing week, no matter how often it rained or how many times we lost our way, we kept strictly to our planned itinerary. We had to. We’d pre-booked every hostel so we had to reach each by 7pm or miss a dinner for which we’d already paid.

From Keswick we crossed the hills to Helvellyn and descended Striding Edge. My diary informs me that ‘such grandeur we had never seen before’. The following day we climbed Helvellyn again by Swirral Edge and descended to Grasmere. After that we worked our way down to Coniston Old Man and back over Scafell Pike before returning to Keswick via Borrowdale.

I wish I could recall it all more clearly, but the details are lost to memory. When I look at my diary now, it could have been written by a stranger. I find it hard to believe, for example, that we lost our way simply trying to get out of Keswick, or that for lunch I carried a packet of Sugar Frosties, a bar of Aero and a carton of Ribena.

The only hostel I remember is Coniston Coppermines, then a bleak, rarely visited building 500ft up the hillside, run by a big bearded bear of a man. He hadn’t eaten hot food for a week and was glad of our arrival so that he could cook a basic meal for the three of us. There was a lot of cabbage. When we left the following morning, he called after us heartily: ‘The next time you’re passing… just keep passing.’ It became a mantra that kept us going when energy lapsed.

My diary records one forgotten incident when I nearly lost my Wainwright guide to the Southern Fells (from his still unfinished Lakeland series). It fell out of my too-small anorak pocket and tumbled down a steep hillside into the confines of Tilberthwaite Ghyll on Wetherlam. At a cost of 15 shillings (75p), it was far too precious a purchase to abandon, so I made a hair-raising scramble down steep grass, retrieved it and carefully wiped each page clean as best I could. This incident must have occurred, because I still have that guidebook; it still falls open at Wetherlam and its pages are still a muddy brown.

Such details have faded with time, but what I shall never forget is the heady freedom I discovered in the hills that week. It is a feeling that has stayed with me in the years since, has lured me back to the hills time and time again, and is rekindled even as I write these words now. Fittingly, my diary of my week in the Lakes ends with a stunned revelation: ‘I am at home here.’