Loughrigg truly explored

Loughrigg Fell, a modest 1100' at its peak, sits close to honeypot villages like Ambleside, Rydal and Grasmere, and hence is often climbed by people who might not venture further afield. For me, it's often a first day/last day/part of a day fell, an 'up and down in about an hour' kind of fell. It's not uninteresting, indeed Wainwright called it 'pre-eminent among the lesser heights of Lakeland', boldly claiming that 'everybody likes Loughrigg', but I'd never built it into a longer walk, and now seemed a good time to address that.

A circular walk in 'Best walks in the Lake District' (an assertive title for sure) includes Loughrigg and Grasmere in a 9 miler. To make life a little more challenging, I did the walk in the opposite (anti-clockwise) direction so that the directions were no use at all. This meant a good excuse to try three new navigation aids:

1. a super large scale map - 1: 16,000, covering a handy area and ideally designed for those, like me, with poor eyesight. Being compact also gets round that annoying tendency which maps have to turn into flags in high wind, so at £4, this Yellow Walk Map seemed an excellent idea. 
2. An app, Tom's Grid, for my phone which shows the grid reference in relation to the map, and works without a 3G signal. This felt important given I'm never quite sure where I am on Loughrigg, and Wainwright lets me off the hook here by saying its top is 'confusing' with 'a maze of paths which needs careful unravelling', such that it would be 'difficult not to go astray'. Phew, that's alright then.
3. Another app, this time from Ordnance Survey, the kings of UK mapping (for me, at least): OS Mapfinder. It had very mixed reviews so I was sceptical and resisted paying the £40 for the whole Lake District mapping. I bought a 10km x 10km square for £1.99 to test it out.

It's worth saying up front that using the apps did drain the battery of my phone so that in six hours it went from full to 20%. To rely on these apps, I'd need to carry a back up battery, and as my great dread is being lost, having to call out Mountain Rescue and having them sneer at me for relying on poor equipment, I would definitely do that in future, and also carry an actual map. In fact (1) and (2) above worked well together, with the app giving me the grid reference which told me where I was on the map.

However, the real test was whether (3) would do both jobs in one app. I do have a dedicated GPS unit but I find its screen awkward to use and it too eats batteries, so I was pretty keen to find out if the phone app would do the same job, and... it did. It provided grid references (as did (2) and a clear, bright 1:25,000 OS map which I could stretch on screen so that even a tricky route was easy to follow. There were a couple of awkward moments as it's not exactly intuitive, and walking companions are not too keen on tech try outs slowing down progress, but now I've worked it out, I think the OS app and an actual map will save a lot of time, effort and befuddlement.

So, enough of the tech, on to the walk... Loughrigg turns out to have much more to it than I'd explored to date. I hadn't really known this, but it turns out that my forays had never reached the summit, so it was actually a new Wainwright for me today. It was busy, inevitably, but the top is so extensive that there's room for all. I often wonder what some people make of the 'beautiful' Lake District when they only walk along the busy pavements in towns and villages, so hats off to those who make it up a fell, especially those with smallish children. What they find up there is pretty varied, with lots of mini-summits, bracken and small tarns:

Looking down on Loughrigg Tarn

Looking South along Windermere

After plenty of note on the top, there was a swift descent towards Grasmere (the lake) and, at the far end of it, Grasmere (the village - not included in the book's route but an important deviation for lunch). This view is of the lake, towards the village:

I think of this (below)  as 'Grasmere beach', I love the fact that people are out and about here, enjoying nature's adventure playground, skimming stones and mucking about by the water.

This beautiful waterfall is full of yesterday's 24 hours of solid rain! But not a drop today.

After a lunch which felt well-earned, the better path back to Ambleside ran along the Rydal coffin route, and what stout fellows the coffin carriers must have been. It wasn't hilly but it wasn't flat and it wasn't wide either.

A hugely enjoyable day which left me feeling I'd really got to know a fell which I'd thought was familiar. Sadly the calf niggle was back with a vengeance but it didn't get in the way of a brilliant day. Tomorrow, I swim...