I'm going to a Beda Place - Photo Gallery

I parked the car at the Patterdale Hotel's pay and display car park and took the tarmac road opposite the Post Office through the cluster of stone built houses to the path leading to Boredale Hause. I had reached the last driveway before the path and it was raining, I was just about to put my camera away when I saw a red squirrel on the driveway and photographed it, it stopped raining and I didn't put the camera away.

The squirrel photo wasn't a great success, it was still a bit dark at 8:45 but later on I did get some reasonable pictures for the first time in a few weeks.

The path up towards Boredale Hause is a bit steeper than it looks, where the path forks take the higher path and after the first untidy looking Hawthorn tree on the left an easily missed hairpin turn takes you on a higher path up to the hause. The ruins of Chapel in the Hause resemble an old sheepfold at an unmistakable muddy crossroads, turn left for Place Fell.

The climb up to Place Fell is unremarkable, the view of Boredale Hause is forgettable and today all of the surrounding higher fells are completely obscured by bad weather clouds. An out of character small rock chimney leads up to the Ordnance Survey pillar at the summit and a short walk over greasy rocks leads to the summit cairn. The villages of Patterdale and Glenridding are visible through the mist on the way up and from the summit.

Instead of taking the popular path down to Low Moss I followed a path northwards and found and walked over an excellent little ridge, the object named The Knight on the map. Instead of being completely alone there are fell runners appearing in all directions even as I walked past the sheepfold at Low Moss, up to High Dodd and over to Sleet Fell although there were none on the direct (i.e. steeper than I would normally choose) route that I chose to descend from the summit of Sleet Fell.

The direct route down to Sandwick is steep smooth grass that is very wet and in spite of having a good tread pattern on my boots and being careful I was dumped on my backside twice and enjoyed a sideways slide.

Having descended to the road I followed it to the track that leads to the path up to the Beda fell ridge. It looks innocuous on the map but it is quite interesting as a series of scrambles, most of which are avoidable, with views down to Martindale and Boredale.

There is a cairn at a subsidiary summit with an expected one man sized shelter on the right closely followed by a cairn at a commanding view point over the Boredale valley. Shortly afterwards the summit is passed and the character of the fell changes immediately into a wet, boggy plateau.

The cloud over the High Street range threatened to close in and I was going to cut short my walk by heading back towards Boredale Hause but suddenly there were a couple of glimpses of blue sky so I carried on past Beda Head to Angletarn Pikes. From a distance the twin summits of Angletaren Pikes are very reminiscent of Wembley's soon to be demolished twin towers.

The higher of the Angletarn summits has a dainty cairn, there is a boggy path and a precarious scramble over greasy rocks to the slightly lower eastern summit. The descent back to the path passes the boggy remains of a tarn, the dark rocks and poor daylight make this place feel like a dungeon.

Rather than scramble directly down to Angle Tarn I found the path again but I was going the wrong way and ended up going across the wet grass to join the normally busy path back to Boredale Hause. Not many people or sheep to be found today and the rain that had been threatening all day eventually found me, but only for fifteen minutes.

Back to Patterdale, still dry but surrounded by bad weather.

Andy Wallace 7th December 2002