Coast to Coast, Shap

29th June 2007

We set off to Cumbria for a bit of a holiday. We are staying in Shap as we are doing some of our Coast-to-Coast in circles! We stayed at Green Farm, a Caravan club certified location. It is a nice field looking over the hills and a small compound with a cow and 2 small calves and sheep. Very peaceful even though it is close to the A6.


30th June 2007

The next stage of our coast to coast walk starts from Haweswater. We had done a stage leading to Haweswater in November and were ready to get c2c'ing again.
It was raining a bit but we decided to walk anyway. We parked at Mardale head at the bottom of Haweswater and set off in the misty rain. We walked along the shore of Haweswater until we reached the path that went over the crag. We followed that until we rejoined the part of Wainwrights c2c that we reached in November. It was very pleasant walking and surprisingly high above the waters edge. We saw lots of birds including yellowhammers and chaffinches and a large bird of prey which may have been a golden eagle but was possibly a buzzard! Lots of wild flowers too. We only saw 1 other walker all day and he was an English American who was walking the c2c from RHB to St Bees. We got to Burnbanks a strange modern village which was not in character with the area. We left Burn banks through woodland and left the c2c behind. We followed the track to Naddle farm and then followed a track for a bit longer. It said it was North West water and there was no access but we assumed that was for cars as the path was marked on the map. We started to lose the path and we were walking along very boggy, sphagnumsheep trails. Johns gps helped but the path that should have been there was non-existant. We were both very wet by now. We found our way but it was blocked by a wall, fence and gill so we had to follow the wall upstream until we found somewhere where the wall had collapsed. The gill was also a bit narrower there. We then eventually found the path again and crossed another gill. Eventually the path became clearer and we followed it back to the road. When we got back to the car we emptied the water out of our boots and wrung our socks out. The walk was about 18km and quite fun really.