Wainwrites: Whin Rigg to Illgill Head (to Irton Fell)
Slog, bog, sog, fog...
It was not an auspicious start to the venture when, turning a corner, the car almost hit a single magpie. My relationship to this ominous bird is complicated at best, and otherwise tending toward hysteric; beautiful, brightly-witted birds that they are, commanding a great deal of respect for their character, nonetheless the old rhyme is as worthy of consultation (to my mind) as the weather forecast.
The forecast, then, had been terrible. For two days we had been eyeing up various apps and websites and comparing results— the BBC was littered with lightning bolts; black-ringed clouds abounded across all predictions; nothing foretold of a less than 75% chance of rain. So perhaps, we thought, there wouldn’t be a storm at all. Weather in Cumbria is as trustworthy as a headline (ooh I said it!) and as changeable as a barista’s haircut (oat milk lavender latte please!). An information board at the beginning of our walk asked if we understood what the weather conditions were going to be and I wondered if it had been relocated from some distant, exotic atmosphere like Oxfordshire where they know things like that. The Cumbrian weather forecast is no such tameable beast. Fortunately, we are Wild Girls (Girls who live Wild and eat Berries and Live off the Land etc)/intrepid explorers/tough as old boots, and we decided to get two things: wet and keen.
Whin Rigg and Illgill Head are part of, and more recognisably known as, the Wastwater Screes, a villainous vision of rock lurching up from Wastwater. They had been nominated as being not too far from the office, and pretty easy up-and-down walks. A couple of Wainwrights bagged, and back home in time to do laundry and read some Waugh.
We approached from Nether Wasdale. It’s too nice to publicly recommend it. That’s the wonderful thing about this corner of the Lakes — there’s nobody here! So far, all of our post-work walks have been unspoiled by sightings of ‘other people’ and ‘human habitation.’ We are disappointed when we can see a road. The appearance of a car is conducive to potential misery.
Coming into the flat lay of the valley, you might be taken aback by its resemblance to parkland. I was certainly confused by the situation of the trees across the basin, but given that there is a fairly large house nearby at Irton Hall, and also Wasdale Hall, my feeling is that it was parkland of some description. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the trees didn’t look quite right where they were. I do know that many of the surrounding forests are newer plantations, and that there is a lot of volunteer forestry going on in the area; the reintroduction of species that once made up so much of this landscape. The same to be seen at Gummers How, for anybody interested in such things. And for those who aren’t, lack of curiosity is a tragic thing, and you may find you lack in character. Curiosity may have killed the cat but a lack thereof kills the dinner party.
We parked up in a curious little dell and, heartened by the sight of two magpies at The Sawmill, we began our ascent.
Whin Rigg taken from Nether Wasdale starts off along a flat, stony track, without much to remark upon except for a beautiful conservatory attached to a house where the track leaves the road, and the aforementioned oddly assembled trees. Then, in turning a slight corner, the screes begin to make more of themselves.
I have, so far, come up with a vaguely defined progression of incline. There are precisely three modes of upwardness: Piece of Piss, Slog, and The Fucker. The Nether Wasdale ascent to Whin Rigg kicks up a good 1400ft in less than half an hour of walking, which makes it not quite The Fucker (see Rannerdale Knotts), but definitely a bit of Sloggage. A Slog can become The Fucker on a hot day, or in deep going. The Fucker can be demoted to Slog by the consumption of bilberries, or if you need a bit more, pop a couple of Mini Eggs.
It is my good and honest opinion that a scramble up rock and river is preferable by a mile to a steep grass slope. With the coarse approach of scrambled rock, one is wholly distracted by the placing of the feet, and by the pleasurable imagination of being a mountain goat or similar Creature of the Terrain. The grass slope makes no such effort, and there is nothing to take your mind off The Slog.
Halfway up The Slog, we paused to watch a military plane crawling on its belly barely 2000ft above Wastwater. I could have given the pilot a cheeky wink. I told my friend about the plane wreckage littered across the Cheviots, which I had tracked down— aided by compass bearings and map— in the fog with my family a few years prior. At the time, I was unaware that there was also plane wreckage in the Great Gully of Whin Rigg from a 1945 exercise gone wrong, and the parts of another wreck scattered across Illgill Head and the Screes from a 1973 collision.
Certainly not an area without its risks, as Wainwright himself set out in his idiosyncratic way:
… with the end almost in sight, there comes a vicious quarter-mile compared with which the top of Scafell Pike is like a bowling green… ladies wearing stiletto heels will be gravely inconvenienced and indeed many a gentle pedestrian must have suffered nightmares in this dreadful place and looked with hopelessness and envy at people striding along the smooth road on the opposite shore.
— Alfred Wainwright, A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: being an illustrated account of a study and exploration of the mountains in the English Lake District, Frances Lincoln 10th Anniversary ed., 2025, Illgill Head 3.
Whilst I have conquered a few Wainwrights in a dress, and bagged a peak in a pair of battered Dubarrys, I was at least in fell runners on this day — though three times at least I’ve been told by separate people that they wouldn’t be surprised to hear I’d gone up a hill in heels.
We intended, though, to bypass all that nastiness, and keep off the scree. Our ascent was moderately steep but certainly not The Killer (secret mode) territory, and once we came up onto the ridge it was a perfectly civilised walk along to the summit, and then further along that ridge on something with aspirations towards pathhood.
Herdies out in full force. My favourite breed of sheep (naturally), and such charmingly small late lambs, with their salt-and-pepper fleeces and Welsh sec A canters as they hopped over gullies.
Meeting the ridge, and the old sheep path that takes you across it, as well as the fog which had plummeted in from all sides, I was unsurprised to find myself recalling the stage production of The Woman in Black, and the dread sounds of the clattering wheels and the sluicing screams.
“What would you do,” I posed to my friend, “if the fog drew in closer, and over the hill you could see a carriage approaching, drawn by a single horse, and as it came nearer you saw that there was a coffin on the back.”
Alluding, naturally, to the notion of the corpse road, but also to general theories of ghostage. This had been a topic when I bagged Hard Knott, in similar— if worse— conditions. There, it was visions of Roman legions marching knee-deep that thrust forth. This is certainly excellent ghosting country. The landscape is terrifically Brontëan and there have been a few occasions during which a certain Kate Bush song has been warbled into the wind. Branwell used to get pissed and stumble back to his home in the office I worked in over winter. When they started leaving us bottles of port and sherry and Bailey’s in the kitchen, I turned roughly the same way.
Fortunately, anyhow (do I digress?), no charon figure passed us by. Our omens had been used up for the day. Well had they spoken, however.
From the sheep path to Whin Rigg’s summit was and indeed is a simple affair. The views? Well, dear one, there were no views. Not the fault of the summit, but rather the relentless fog, which seemed to be… Ah… Nearer and nearer crept the ghastly THING…
I released Little Rudi from my rucksack and took my usual picture of him perched atop the cairn. Number One, done. And it had taken us so little time! We’d be back home before we could say Jinxed That Massively.
Taking the ridge, one ought usually (hahahahaha “usually”) to see down gulleys over the screes, which incidentally are crying out for their own Mt. Rushmore situation of British National Treasures. Let’s get Miriam Margolyes all marmoreal, for crying out loud! Wrong stone, but it sounds good, and I’ve been editing a poetry anthology and the poets have taught me that I can say whatever I want because it just doesn’t matter.
We marched on.
At points, the clouds did part, and beauties were heaped before us; down, heartlessly down, towards Wastwater, the gullies that earned the place a name so close to the word ‘scream.’ Ravines of rib-sharpening rock that make you believe quite honestly in spontaneous sublimation of the knees.
Illgill Head is nominally not much further. The majority of it was boggy grass that claimed my entire foot, though thankfully didn’t get to the ankle. Everything from this point on must be imagined to the percussion of ambulatory squelching.
We met a cairn and it took us a bit of head-scratching to figure out whether this was the correct one, given there are two cairns on Illgill Head, and it was so foggy I wasn’t convinced I still had all my own toes. Seeing another in the distance, and having a couple of weeks prior touched about fifty thousand cairns before we managed to find the summit of Holme Fell, we decided to cover all our bases and touch both. If in doubt, get touching. [Please do not live by that advice.]
For a few minutes we stood, now shivering a little, waiting for the fog to clear so that we could catch a supposedly magnificent view of the Irt and Esk valleys. There were perhaps a solid five seconds in which we saw a few fields! And then nought. Well, it was what we got.
Sludgy and sluggy, we turned to leave. It was barely five minutes later that we heard the crinkling of thunder against the low-dropped sky. My companion was, I will gently say, not thrilled. Our instincts kicked in; there went our legs, a thousand miles ahead of us, scrimbling and scrambling across the ridge, which seemed to go on forever. And forever. And ever. And, erm, a little bit more. We haven’t passed the stream, have we? I mean, we came up the left side of— of Greathall Gill, right? Did we— was it this— erm— I don’t recall seeing any granite earlier, and that wasn’t— oh, that’s not…
A cairn.
An unfamiliar cairn.
Well.
Irton Fell is not much beyond the summit of Whin Rigg, but it is, crucially, not the summit of Whin Rigg. The map was consulted. Turns were abouted. Eighties were oned. A mild vibe of ‘hmm’ was upon us, commingled with the fog, and our ears were pricked to the skies for any further rumblings, but bar an unfounded accusation at thunder, we seemed to be safe. As safe as you can be in a place which seems to be like cocaine for crashing aeroplanes if crashing aeroplanes were middling politicians.
We picked up our ascending ““““““path”””””” (cannot express how little this was a path) and descended The Slog alongside Greathall Gill. Coming out of the clouds, we felt a little jubilant. An all-round handshaking and jolly well done sort of affair that would have prompted a scampish midcentury child in an adventure novel to say, “Gosh, what japes!”
We were off the hill in no time.1
No time typically equates to 45 minutes in the hillwalking
Wish I was there….