Day 1 Coast to Coast St Bees to Ennerdale Bridge.

Link to days pictures
A poor night’s sleep was not enhanced by the sight of rain on the windows of our B and B.
Breakfast, the usual cereal followed by fat, in the form of fried eggs and bacon.
“Get behind me English Breakfast”.
Replete and burping, we finally set off to the start of the Coast to Coast and our adventure.
Photos complete we head off, up a hill of course.

The start

Like all well known tracks, the C2C heads at 90 degrees to its final course for the first six kms or so and at one point, though we have done 8 kms we are only 2 km from our starting point.
The weather gets worse and it pack covers on, then soon after rain jackets, for the walk along to St Bees Head and the lighthouse.
The wind is strong and threatens to blow us inland. The rain finally clears enough for us to have quick morning treat at the point where the C2C finally turns inland and heads east at last.
It’s then inland down lanes through Sandwith, pronounced “Sanith”, back alleys, through farm yards and then fields.
We almost come astray when we almost overshoot a track that we need to take under a railway line.

Then it’s more fields, a nice bridge/stile and then onto a disused railway line, which serves as the local bike path and dog dropping repository.
What’s really odd is that all the droppings are either sprayed blue or yellow!!

We have lunch on another path, and are passed by other walkers, a man with his daughter in a pram, a couple of bike riders. That’s what you get for lunching on another bike path.
It’s then over the very pretty River Keekle and through Cleator where we find a lovely church that had a much better place for lunch.
Cleator, leads us across another pretty creek, through Black How farm, where we go slightly astray, and then our first good climb-Dent Fell.
This is a 351 metre monster, with a quite taxing climb up a very boggy track, then a number of false crests until we get to the top. The views are quite magnificent over the Irish Sea to the Isle of Mann, Ireland and perhaps even as far as Scotland to the north west.

The other direction, to the east is across to our future path, the Lakes district, and it looks hilly, no, mountainous.

High stile

The descent off Dent, takes us over the highest ladder stile I have ever seen. It’s then one of the steepest descents I have ever done, on a grassy slope. The grass however is dry and not at all slippery.
This leads to the endearingly named Nannycatch Beck where all the sheep have been doing paintball skirmishing, with blue and red and in some cases harlequin asses.

Nannycatch Beck

The beck wiggles back and forth and leads us right to our accommodation, the rather odd named Low Cock How Farm. There is an explanation for its name but I prefer mine.
The farmer and his wife were about to have sex and he couldn’t get an erection, his wife said “Low Cock! How?” and from that time the farm was named.
We luck out (an odd expression that) when our host offers me a twin room on my own, as we take over the what looks like a self contained cottage.

There’s a washing machine so we do some washing, and hang it all around the coal-fired slow combustion heater we have.

The place is over-heated as most places, here, however shower is hot.
There is no reliable wi-fi access-crap.
We are over a mile from the local pub, however we do have a pizza place at Frizington that delivers! Crap pizza though.