Their story, in their words…
We had an unforgettable time in the Lake District, with many challenges and hurdles that came at us, but we managed to achieve our goals and also had an amazing time while doing so.
On our first day we travelled up from London on a long coach ride to Penrith followed by a bus then taxi (as we had missed the last bus) to the campsite, arriving over 12 hours after we set off. Luckily it was not raining when we arrived and so we were able to put up our tents with ease. We also realised that we were in a valley where we were staying (just outside of the town of Seatoller), and there was no phone signal for at least 2 miles, but this didn’t affect us as we had planned out our journeys beforehand.
Unfortunately, on the first night it did rain quite substantially, and we realised one of our tents was not as waterproof as we had hoped, and many items had gotten soaked. Kindly the owner let us leave our stuff in his barn and we had to spend the next night all in one tent which was a squeeze but also definitely a laugh with 4 of us in a 2-man tent! Non-the-less we still did out planned walk in the rain around Derwent Water which took longer than expected but we had a nice stop halfway in the town of Keswick when the rained cleaned up a bit more and we finished the walk back to our campsite. However, the walk did prove to be more of a challenge than we had through as the last nights rain had path over the small tributary to a river very flooded and so we really had to test the water proofness of our boots!
On the third day after a bit of a restless night sleep we climbed Scafell Pike, we set off early giving ourselves plenty of time to get up there, where we had beautiful weather the entire time. The walk to the base was quite long but not challenging, once we had reached the mountain we started at a good pace and made good progress up. Except for one navigational error at a junction where a few groups of people were also looking confused, we made it to the top in about 5 hours where we had a good rest and enjoyed the views which went on for miles, we could see right across the lake district and even to the Isle of man! This was followed by a hard walk back down; the stretch of the mountain is all loose stone and so going up wasn’t that bad but coming down there were a few slips and falls. Eventually, we made it down and back to our campsite, taking about 10 hours in total, which we are very happy with.
Our last day before returning was also challenging on the weather and so we decided to do a shorter walk in and around Keswick before stopping there and enjoying the local town, then we returned with no issues the next day.
We learned a lot from this trip, one thing being that cooking in the rain is more of a struggle than anyone thinks. And also, to check many times over that a tent is waterproof as even in the summer it rains in the Lake District!
We are very grateful to the Mark Evison Foundation to for giving us this opportunity and it has inspired us to do this again some other time together.
