What goes up, must come down

The welcome sight of a Cumbrian dry-stone wall on a murky February day offers John Lewis-Stempel solace, as he navigates the spooling, rocky path down from one of the Lake District’s cloud-capped peaks Illustration by Michael Frith

- John Lewis-Stempel

I’LL say it myself. I’d scampered up Harter Fell like a mountain goat, or at least like the Lake District’s local Herdwick sheep. Despite the incessant rain, I’d enjoyed the musicality of the stony Gatescarth Pass under my boots: the susurration on substrate, the decided bass ‘thonk’ on slabs, the lovely ‘tink’ of rolled pebbles. Sole music. There was no view from the top at 2,552ft: Harter Fell was cloud-capped and the view denied to me. There was only the intimation of forbidding mountains all around, of being in Lakeland, England’s own personal Himalayas. I wandered through the mist and thawing snow-sludge on the round crown for a minute or two to confirm my ascent, before heading down.

On reaching Little Harter Fell at 2,234ft, everything changed. The afternoon wind graduated and the rain attacked the face in flint shards. Yet a view, of sorts: the path spooling endlessly down the U-shaped glacial gouge with its litter of boulders scattered in the muted moorland grass. The frothing beck, paralleling the path, was scant company.

For the umpteenth time, I pondered the paradox that descent, going with gravity, is harder work than ascent. I, the former nimble ovine, was reduced to alternating between plodding dobbin placing its hooves charily or, to keep balance, the stooped Neanderthal from one of those ‘The Progression of Man from Ape’ illustrations in texts of palaeoanthropology. Sometimes, through squinted eyes came glimpses of the slatey surface of Haweswater, the end point as it had been the start line.