Wainwright's Coast to Coast Walk (West to East) — Stage 4

Awful weather on the tops, but we still managed to bag a few peaks to supplement my 50 peaks challenge, and even for Deke a new one in Rest Dodd. It was not much fun at height though, being squally and persistently damp throughout the remainder of our time in the Lakeland Fells. The weather eventually cleared and the sun came out during our descent from the superb Kidsty range and during the walk alongside Haweswater Reservoir. Question: Has anyone else who has done the Coast to Coast looked to the reservoir's dams and seemed to walk eternally towards them without them seeming to get any closer? What a boring bit of the walk, blocked in by the water company's screening of the reservoir to the right and the formative hills of the Lake District closing you in to the left. After the tiring reservoir stretch, we collapsed for a bite to eat at the little hamlet of Burnbanks. It was here we first met a Canadian couple (Roy and Moira Ferguson from Guelph) who were doing the walk. Roy and Moira accompanied us on the remainder of the day's walking to Shap. We were to meet them again.

One thing to add: as we left the Lake District behind and walked across the countryside to Shap we came to a stile which had significance to me. Five years earlier on my first Coast to Coast walk my brother Dave was negotiating this very same stile. He had an aluminium framed backpack which tipped everything he was carrying onto the ground. He was not amused. Deke's thumbs-up gesture as he crossed the stile was in homage to Dave.

In the evening we stayed in the Crown Hotel bunkhouse (as Steve, Dave, and I did in 1994) and we got a real roaring fire going. Only snag: Deke, in doing the good deed of drying out our clothes, managed to burn my socks to the point of disintegrating the toes of one and rendering them useless. Luckily I had another pair for tomorrow. In the pub during the evening we met another couple, Chris and Zarina Brewer, who were to become good companions during later legs of the walk.

The crossing of Lakeland on the first third of the walk is a good enough reason in itself to embark on the Coast to Coast walk. It does not get any better than this start, but don't feel the real walking is done yet. The Lakes will have given you the stamina to go on (and in my case the blisters and collapsed knees!), but tiredness sets in during the middle stages of the journey where the obstacle of the Pennine watershed has to be overcome. After this, look forward to the delightful walk through Swaledale, a delight in itself if not with the enormity of the Lakes.