INDEX	November 18, 2022
Climbing (and falling down) the Combe
If anyone tells you that running shoes are not suitable for climbing hills (known locally as combes) you can tell them with perfect confidence that they are completely wrong. It's coming back down having done the climb, that they become a nightmare! Running shoes on slippery wet mud are extremely dangerous. I fell quite often; too often. And somehow the last bit was the worst I don't know why. Perhaps I was tired. I had set out with a fair degree of confidence expecting to complete Wainwright 74. I even persuaded the ticket office clerk to sell me a return ticket from Silecroft to Green Road; a bit tricky since we were in Millom, half way between the two stations.
My confidence was based on the fact that I had walked the route as far as Langthwaite Bridge a couple of times before. I knew all the false turns and dead ends because I had tried them! From Langthwaite Bridge it all sounded straight forward. Pass the cottages; up Whitecombe and on to Black Combe. I already know the exit point from Black Combe to Silecroft because I had walked there. A piece of cake on a grey rainy day like today, it would not be. But it should be do-able. Little did I know that when the instructions said turn right they should have said turn left. So instead of a few hundred yards on the A595 I had a long, dangerous trek walking on a road only just wide enough for the lorries that came hurtling past.
		Annoyingly, after about three hours walking I got to Hallthwaites and found a sign saying quarter of a mile to Green Road, my start point. The instructions told me to expect a row of cottages but cottages there were none: so I interpreted some rather wonderful looking abandoned buildings as the cottages and began trying the climb. Paths became streams, there were lots of sheep and some cows in the distance. Eventually I was corralled by a plethora of 'private' and 'no access' signs into walking into the Heavy Horse camping centre, where a very interesting character, English but fresh from Malaya, opened up the cafe and sold me a coffee. I needed it.
From there I managed to find a track to a farmyard. Through the farmyard there was a gate which if you opened it allowed you to stand in a stream, to lock it. But here there was a path, a sheep path probably; but it was going up, seemingly to the top. I climbed, slowly but steadily until I saw a brilliantly bright rainbow on the other side of the valley. Clearly it was going to rain soon and it did.
So I gave up. Coming down was frightening. My shoes were just not up to it, slip sliding everywhere. Perhaps because I was paying too much attention to my feet, perhaps as a result of a general incompetence when it comes to matters geographic; when I came down I reached an entirely different spot to the farmyard. No matter. I got through a series of fields back to the road. And there were the cottages and a sign to Whitecombe, my original destination.
I was just a few hundred yards from Langthwaite Bridge but you have to turn left not right. https://214wainwrights.wordpress.com/walk_list/walk74/
INDEX Jonathan Brind		November 18, 2022