Thrashing Around On The Old Man

Having aborted our trip up The Old Man of Coniston yesterday, and made do with just a trip over Dow Crag, The Old Man seemed like a good objective for today instead.

That idea nearly got abandoned about half a mile in, when we caught sight of quite how low the cloud was. I’m generally a fair weather hill-goer, preferring to see something if I’m going to slog up a hill, so I suggested that we should drop back down and just take a stroll around Tarn Hows instead.

For reasons I now can’t quite recall, we didn’t loop around back into the valley, but continued our route, which was to take us over Little Arrow Moor onto The Old Man.

Perhaps we should have taken one of the main paths up, because we were soon not only in the snow, but also in thick cloud. This snap was taken just a handful of steps before we lost the trodden line entirely:

We thrashed around a bit looking for a sensible line to take, and considered just heading straight up, but the combination of such poor visibility, the snow and the presence of crags/slagheaps in the area suggested it wasn’t a wise plan. Back down we went, as far as the fenced-off deep quarry we had left a wee while before, but instead of retreating from there we looked at the map and decided to see if we could contour around the hill to pick up the main path to the north. The obvious obstacle in our way was another quarry, but we hoped we would be able to pass above it.

Mine workings just before the quarry gave good shelter for elevenses (time was flying; elevenses turned out to be at half past twelve!). As you can see, visibility was still poor:

Alas, when we reached the next deep quarry, we found ourselves thrashing around again. The lack of visibility meant that we couldn’t see whether it was feasible to make our way around it on the uphill side. Neither did an exploration down the hill reveal an obvious way around in that direction, and we didn’t want to risk a ridiculous move which saw us both plunging to our deaths, so we did the sensible thing and turned back. Quite literally, we retraced our steps (handy thing about snow!), or at least we did until Little Arrow Moor where (having dropped below the snow line) I missed a turn and took us a far more ‘interesting’ route back down to the Walna Scar Road.

So, our objective was missed for the second day in a row. But, do you know, I reckon today’s outing was far more interesting than a trip up to the hill-top would have been. Had we simply followed a path it would have been a plod in the cloud with nothing to see. As it went, we saw some interesting relics of the old mining activities and frequently had to stop to think. It may not have been what we intended, but it was a good day out.

With a trip into Coniston on our way back, our outing was 8.6 miles long with around 2400 feet of ascent.