19 Hours of Solitude and I Saw the Light!

What do you do when you decide you just want to switch off, cop out, drop off (from society) and just get away from having to ‘do things’ and all the rest. Plus just have some time to yourself?

Well for most normal people that probably constitutes any number of things. Maybe going for a walk, a drive out in the country, sliding off to your local pub on your own or maybe sit in front of the TV and watch your favourite series or immerse yourself in a film. All of which have their merits.

However, I don’t really DO, normal, do I? What you COULD also do is grab your sleeping bag and camp out in your back garden….in the midst of a bitter cold winters week! At 893 metres elevation, Cross Fell is the highest summit in England, excluding the fells in the Lake District National Park. Cross Fell is my back garden.

It being Tuesday meant – it was my “Fell Walk Tuesday”  but it was now almost 1pm. I’d had enough of screens and working on projects and stuff and blah blah. I needed my escape!  With the hours of daylight rapidly diminishing, I decided to do Cross Fell but that simply wasn’t possible in 3 hours. I needed 4 and a half for that. So, in rare flash of demented genius I thought – Why not spend the night up there? I threw everything into a big rucksack and headed off in the van. After a couple of errands in Penrith, I got to Kirkland, at the foot of Cross Fell for 2.30pm. I checked my kit was all in order, switched my phone onto airplane mode and headed up the track. Behind me, the sun in its colourful serenade was dipping behind the Howgills to the South, leaving me with rapidly chilling temperatures for my final 30 minutes before dusk.

 

I reached Greg’s Hut at 4pm. Bang on the time I’d predicted. It was deserted. The previous occupants had savagely cut large branches off the only tree that stood outside the building. A walled, almost ornamental tree, that compliments the setting of the refuge. What its not, is a callous excuse for ‘free’ firewood.

This building is lovingly cared for by the fine folks of the Mountain Bothy Associatiion. They have dozens of these ‘Bothies’ scattered around the UK. To be used as a shelter from adverse weather and are a true saviour for many a weary passer by. They are usually in remote locations where need for such a sanctuary is most cherished. Etiquette is to leave the bothy as you found it and to clean up after you. The visitors log book was nowhere to be found. Burnt? I presume. To be honest, reading some of the comments these days tend to cause more eyes to roll than hearts to warm. Such comments like ‘No wood was in the bothy for the fire’  ‘The water out of the stream was dirty’  (this was on the Scottish Isle of Jura – the ‘dirt’ was the peaty colour that makes the malt whiskies of Jura & Islay so popular.) I swear I even saw one comment threatening a bad review on Trip Advisor!

Thankfully, I had prepared for every eventuality and took my own wood and kindling and boy did I need it!

 

[ Equipment – Basic but essential . Sleeping bag and Mat. Spare clothes, waterproofs, bivvy bag and First Aid Kit. Compass, Whistle, Map, Stove, Fuel, Swiss Army Knife, Headtorch and my food for my meals. Oh – and my slippers!! Plus other essentials. ]

 

 

First step was to light the big 70 hour candle I’d brought up with me (Another lucky addition as there were none to seen at all in here. Good job that Visitors Book was missing! haha) Then I promptly made a pot of tea and got the fire going.

I rattled off a basic meal on my Trangia stove, consisting of pasta, a sauce and some reasonably fresh salmon. I say reasonably, because, No – I HADN’T just caught it with my teeth out of a nearby stream, it was bought from the reduced to clear section in Booths in Penrith an hour earlier!

After clearing up etc I stretched out in front of the wood burner, which by now had thoroughly warmed the room up nicely, and together with about 4 or 5 mugs of tea and a brownie, I got buried in my book. My current read is the Journals of Captain Scott and his tragic South Pole expedition. Its taking a while to get through and I feel like I’m living every step of it through those pages, Now THERE was a real sense of cold! It also enlightens as just how lucky we are these days. Bothies like Greg’s Hut used to be actual dwellings not much more than a hundred years ago during Scott’s lifetime. My candle plus a few more and some oil lamps would have been the only source of light in such darkened, thick walled buildings.

Inspired, I tried to read by candlelight….. sod that. I have a headtorch! Now USE it! Oh… hang on. Where IS my headtorch? Panic. I search everywhere. Even outside. I’m walking round the two rooms with my candle like Wee Willie Winkie. No headtorch. Its been taken! The same buffoons who left half a tree inside the bothy! Maybe its ghosts or poltergeists? I sit down in frustration, head in hands…. Oh – it was on my HEAD! I laugh loudly. Nobody hears me.

Shaking my head at my own ridiculousness, I head out for Pee number 33. I’ve drank a lot of tea tonight. A LOT. I look up and am greeted by one of the finest clear and starry nights that I can recall for many a year. Everything was on show, constellations, distant planets, the Milky way. The lot.  But its about minus four or five degrees celsius. I don’t stay outside too long! Having lived a third of my life in Scotland and Cumbria now, starry nights – free of the light pollution that makes such things practically obsolete in suburbia are easy to take for granted. It’s often when friends from towns and cities come and visit me and are almost childlike in their amazement of how bright the night sky is, that I realise how lucky we are. We are truly blessed living out in the sticks and this night was a fine display across the North Pennines.

By 9.30pm, I had burned my last log and I was falling asleep in my chair. I allowed the late Robert Scott to settle in for the night at his Antarctic ‘Discovery Hut’ with their Blubber fuelled lamps and dreams of reaching the Pole and I curled into my own modern day, sleeping bag.

After what seemed a deep and dreamy sleep, I woke up at what I could only guess to be ‘around 5am maybe?’  I look at my watch.  11pm! I’d been asleep just 90 minutes. My left calf suddenly shot into a convulsive, agonising cramp. And I needed the loo. Again.  Back to sleep. Until 2am. And awake once more. Blmey its Cold! The log burner provides not a hint of its early evening flames and has reverted back to a lump of icy cast iron.

No more cramps this time! Best go pay another visit outside though. Stars were still out and sparkling, brightly. Heavenly! – quite literally,

And so after a night of ever decreasing cold temperatures, interspersed with a plethora of my usual crazy dreams whilst tossing and turning to get comfortable, I gave up and got off the sleeping platform at 6am. Despite the cold snap of the morning and the obvious lack of sleep, I feel full of energy and get straight into preparing a breakfast of porridge and coffee, though not in the same bowl. This restored some warmth in me. Several minutes later after packing my bag and sweeping and cleaning up, I left Greg’s Hut for home. By heck it was bloody cold out there this morning!

 

 

 

The overnight freeze has left a hard frost and iced over a lot of the paths. I realise just how cold it is when I fill my bottles up from a half frozen stream. The icy water rapidly chills my hands to the point where there’s a voice inside me screaming for my gloves. Crikey – Antarctica? I wouldn’t last two minutes, I ponder. It’s about three quarters of a mile up to the large conical cairn that marks the col where the Pennine Way path takes a right angled route up to the summit of Cross Fell itself. I push straight on over the other side back to Kirkland.

Its a glorious morning. The sky is blue and there’s not a soul around to witness this. I stop dead in my tracks. What IS that? Ullswater??

 

You can’t see Ullswater from up here. I know – you can’t. Then, I begin to doubt myself. Maybe it IS Ullswater?  Momentarily, my eyes tricked my brain into thinking it . No, this was something else. Stretching out in a long, thin, lake shaped, trail was a spectacular sight of low, pillowy clouds of freezing fog. Lying across the valley floor in all directions like a lightly crumpled, white duvet. It covered all of Penrith, the A66 and Eden Valley. My own village of Kirkby Thore didn’t escape its icy clutches neither. All you could make out were two plumes of white smoke gently poking through the fog from the British Gypsum plaster board factory.

This was my reward for the crazy notion of spending a freezing night on the Pennines. An absolute gift of a morning. I could have woken at home to a bitterly cold morning,  freezing fog and been filled with gloom and dread for the day ahead. Instead I was bathed in warm sunshine and views across Cumbria and the distant Lakeland fells that I’ll never forget. I couldn’t be happier. My brain, for some unknown reason that not even AI could fathom out in a million years, decided that I should start singing out loud. A song from Mary Poppins of all things. Namely – Supercalafragalisticexpealidotious! Yes folks… welcome to My World!!  I have no clue either! But I was happy enough.  And – even if it sounds quite good, the smell is quite atrocious!

I reached the van and headed back for Penrith.  A bit tired and dirty, I was still smiling a good hour later,  I turned my phone back on. It had been 19 hours of peace and bliss. My mind, body and soul felt completely nourished. Then straight back into pizza making mode.

 

 

 

A quick nod of thanks to Mick in Dufton, a lovely guy and a pizza customer. He told me on Monday that he and his wife had been up there last week in the snow. Didn’t see a soul. Whole fell to themselves. Whilst I do this stuff regularly anyway – his own tale, was the spark that ignited my own mini adventure. Cheers Mick & Lisa.

DISCLAIMER : I really shouldn’t need to say this but – Please don’t attempt such feats unless you have a good level of competence and experience in the fells/winter walking and can handle yourself. I have  over 30 years experience over 100’s of trips, have all the correct gear and know what to do when the shit hits the fan. It is very easy to quickly become unstuck if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, realise how quickly the environment and weather can change or if your navigation and equipment aren’t on point. Boring I know – but boring and competence saves lives, Make sure you have someone with you that knows the score