Sunday 25th August 2013
Wild Boar Fell
7 miles Grade 2
Leader: Pete Rutland
The walk description was quite clear – a nice, easy, A/B walk with plenty of stops and 3 miles shorter than the advertised B walk. The 17 (yes, seventeen) who turned up had to travel so far south to the start of the walk that we were looking out for gentlemen in berets swigging red wine and muttering “bonjour” or “va t’en” or similar phrases. We saw no locals because nobody had actually trodden what we took for a path but turned out to be steep boggy hillsides with Shake Holes all around – so called because they were deep pits going several hundred feet into the earth for the convenience of meandering pot-holers who had mistakenly come to the surface. The stops were to consult the map or Wainwright’s description of where we should have been. We somehow made it to the ridge leading up to The Nab, the start of a vast plateau that gave us tremendous views across to the Howgills on one side and into Yorkshire on the other. The views were superb and we were looking down at the odd train trundling along the Carlisle to Settle line. The whole landscape was very different from what we normally saw, with strange cairns and other constructions and one particular line of 9 or 10 cairns looked, from a distance, as though they were a line of folk on the summit. Eventually we descended back towards the valley and had photos taken on the Yorkshire border and then off to disrupt the peaceful Sunday afternoon of Kirby Stephen. Thanks Pete for an excellent, very different and enjoyable walk – pity about the 16 legal actions being brought under the Trades Description Act.
Peter Flynn
Carlisle & District Rambling & Fellwalking Club
Wild Boar Fell
