The Lake District, England’s largest national park and the inspiration for the likes of Wordsworth and Swift (Taylor, not Jonathan), needs no introduction. On the other hand, my friend Anthony, who has yet to appear on a postcard or be recognized by Unesco, is almost certainly the same.
Anthony and I have been friends since college. Between our second and third years Anthony found himself taking on the odd responsibility of marketing that year’s Edinburgh border theater company’s productions. When I saw Anthony’s call for help posted on a bulletin board in the campus laundry room, I unwisely volunteered to be his helper for two weeks. While the task of flogging a feminist reworking of The Wind in the Willows is rarely simple, the ordeal yielded the significant payoff of forging a solid friendship that continues to this day.
The Lindeth Howe hotel was admirably accessible; At no point did I have to give Anthony his back
Partly due to his cerebral palsy, partly due to his role with the charity Able Child Africa, Ant has not been able to see as much of the UK as he would have liked. So when I suggested a winter trip to the Lake District to climb a famous waterfall, it took just a few hours to hit upon the idea when I discovered there were newly selected accessible trails in the area. She had initially objected on the grounds that she would miss Bake Off.
After a testing afternoon on the M6 we arrived in Cumbria just like Storm Debi. As a result, we spent the first part of our getaway admiring the cozy interiors of our hotel, the country house once owned by Beatrix Potter on the east side of Windermere. Lindeth Howe was admirably accessible as well as the hotel equivalent of a charismatic great-aunt; This means I didn’t have to give Anthony a backpack at any point during our stay. The most important event of the night was the short power outage that occurred during dinner. Ghost stories circulated in the room; The best of these was a ghost who had lost his memory.
When I woke up the next morning, it took me a few seconds to remember why I was standing less than a meter away from a geography graduate. Anthony was already awake and in a demonic mood. “Coffee,” he said. “I love someone,” I said. “It wasn’t a question,” he said. These charitable types, huh?
It didn’t take me long to make sure he was still blowing holie when I drew the curtains. Despite the bad weather, we managed to create an interesting morning; Particularly visiting the Arts and Crafts house up the road called Blackwell, we admired the handiwork and wondered if William Morris’s golden rule (that there should be nothing in people’s lives) was true. Houses that they didn’t know were useful or didn’t believe were beautiful were a bad sign for both of us.
Around this time Storm Debi finally tired of soaking the Lakes and began dumping her load on Merseyside. Sensing that our time had come, we jumped in the car, secured it at Windermere, quickly dressed and set off towards the top of a nearby hill.
The route to Orrest Head is one of the 50-odd routes that make up the Miles Without Stiles initiative. All have been chosen (and in some cases, specifically designed) with wheelchairs and strollers in mind. The collection offers a wide range of options, including a tour of Buttermere, a tour of Derwentwater or a climb of Latrigg Fell. What’s more, if you find yourself in the power of will rather than wheels, some sites in the area rent out very sturdy mobility scooters known as Trampers for as little as a fiver.
The landscape was full of cliffs, mountain lakes, hills, gorges, valleys, sheep, weather conditions and quarries.
The early stages of the climb to Orrest Head were through venerable woodland with oak, ash, beech and plane trees. The path had incidentally become a carpet of fallen leaves, and the dry stone walls surrounding it were covered in vibrant green moss. Despite some early wheel spins, which he attributed to jetlag (we had traveled up from London), this climb was more than possible for Ant on his new ride, an SD Motion Trike borrowed from Steering Developments. He kept saying words like traction and muffler and showed zero remorse when he passed a mobility scooter straight ahead.
Not that we’re in a rush. If anything, the more we were dragging our heels, the better it would be to take in everything: the alluring bells of a distant church, the potential flash of a kestrel or vulture. Our minds, which have broken away from their usual paths, now have a new right to roam. Anthony took advantage of this new scope by wondering out loud which trees were growing the largest and what the lichens meant. Conversely, I took advantage by wondering how difficult it would be to get tickets for Girls Aloud’s reunion tour. Despite our differences, our minds had one important thing in common; they were better and lighter for traveling, climbing and hiking. The simplicity of intention, the surrounding nature and the breath of fresh air all came together to make things go well.
But it was not as beautiful as the view at the top, it was better to come immediately since it was not seen on the road. This was a real epiphany and it was bigger than expected; it grew west towards Dublin, moved north towards Carlisle, eastwards to the Pennines, Durham and Holland, and fell southwards towards the once evil mills of Lancashire. It was full of cliffs, mountainous terrain, hills and gorges, valleys, sheep, weather conditions and quarries. This was the view that motivated Alfred Wainwright; A view that stunned the Blackburn lad almost down to his socks and instilled in him a lifelong devotion to the area and its hills. Wainwright came here and saw something to live for. We saw the same thing.
Ant, who had remained silent until now, pointed out the changing palette of Windermere, a football pitch where some madmen had just fluffed their stripes, classic Cumbrian cottages with slate roofs and whitewashed walls, and then suddenly proud, sparkling and, above all, rainbows. Another. I asked him how it felt to be here in front of all this. “I can offer you something wooly and floral,” he said. “Something about God, Mother Nature, the Almighty, and so on. But it’s a really nice feeling. Really nice. “It’s the kind of niceness you don’t feel very often.”
And on that note – that very pleasant note – he started throwing it on the floor again and all our cool feelings gave way to the weather and once again we cursed our rain-soaked place and scurried off to the nearest tavern (an accessible toilet), finding much solace in the glasses of the local porter . Of course, there were other ways we could respond to the return of bad conditions, but at the time and throughout our lives we could not think of what they were.
Trip provided by Cumbria Tourism and Visit England. For more information about the Lake District and Miles Without Stiles, visit visitlakedistrict.com. En suite accessible twin/double room with shower chair at Lindeth Howe from £165 per night including dinner and breakfast, lindeth-howe.co.uk. SD Motion Trike on loan from Steering Developments based in Hemel Hempstead, sdmotion.co.uk or steeringdevelopments.co.uk