As England’s largest national park, and a muse to the likes of Wordsworth and Swift (Taylor, not Jonathan), the Lake District needs no introduction. My friend Anthony, on the other hand, who has not yet appeared on a postcard or been recognized by UNESCO, almost certainly does.
Anthony and I have been friends since college. Between our second and third years, Anthony found himself with the daunting responsibility of marketing that year’s theater company production on the outskirts of Edinburgh. When I saw Anthony’s call for help posted on a notice board in the campus laundry, I unwisely offered to be his assistant for a fortnight. While the task of achieving a feminist adaptation of The Wind in the Willows was rarely easy, the ordeal did yield the significant benefit of forging a solid friendship that continues to this day.
The Lindeth Howe hotel was extremely accessible – at no point did I have to piggy-back Anthony
Partly because of his cerebral palsy, and partly because of his role with a charity called Able Child Africa, Ant has not seen as much of Britain as he would like. So when I suggested a winter trip to the Lake District to climb a famous waterfall, after hearing of a newly curated range of accessible routes in the area, it took him just a few hours to come up with the idea. He had initially objected because he would miss Bake Off.
After a test afternoon on the M6 we arrived in Cumbria just like Storm Debi. As a result, we spent the first part of our holiday admiring the beautiful interior – namely the cozy interior of our hotel, a country house – once owned by Beatrix Potter – on the eastern shore of Windermere. Lindeth Howe was not only the hotel equivalent of a charismatic great aunt, but was also admirably accessible, meaning that at no point during our stay was I obliged to give Anthony a lift. The highlight of the evening turned out to be a short blackout during dinner. Ghost stories swirled around the room, the best of which involved a ghost with amnesia.
When I woke up the next morning, it took me a few seconds to remember why I was lying within three feet of a geography graduate. Anthony was already awake and in a devilish mood. “Coffee,” he said. “I like one,” I said. “That wasn’t a question,” he said. These charity types, huh?
It didn’t take long for me to draw the curtains to find that it was still blowing a hoolie. Despite the bad weather we managed to create an interesting morning, especially with a visit to an Arts & Crafts house down the road called Blackwell, where we admired the handicrafts and wondered about William Morris’s golden rule – that people don’t in their homes that they do not know to be useful or that they do not think are beautiful – do not bode well for the two of us.
It was about now that Storm Debi finally tired of watering the lakes and started dumping her load on Merseyside instead. Sensing that our moment had come, we got into the car, hitched it to Windermere, quickly hopped on and set off to the top of a nearby hill.
The path to Orrest Head is one of more than fifty routes that are part of the Miles Without Stiles initiative. They have all been chosen (and in some cases tailor-made) with wheelchairs and strollers in mind. The collection offers a great variety: a round of Buttermere, a stretch of Derwentwater or climbing Latrigg Fell. Furthermore, if you have the will but not the wheels, a number of locations in the region rent out fairly robust mobility scooters, known as Trampers, for as little as a fiver.
The view was full of crags and tarns and hills and corrie, full of valley and sheep and weather and quarries
The first stages of the climb to Orrest Head wound through a patch of venerable woodland, thick with oak and ash, beech and plane trees. The path had happened to become a carpet of fallen leaves, and the stone walls that flanked it were covered in vibrant green moss. Despite some early wheelspins due to jet lag (we’d traveled up from London), the climb was more than feasible for Ant in his new ride – an SD Motion Trike, kindly loaned from Steering Developments. He kept saying words like traction and muffler, and showed no remorse whatsoever as he overtook a mobility scooter on the straight.
Not that we were in a hurry. In any case, we were dragging our feet, trying to take in everything better: the chiming bells of a church far away, the potential flash of a kestrel or a buzzard. Our minds, detached from their ordinary lives, had a new right to wander. Anthony took advantage of these new possibilities by wondering out loud which trees grow tallest and what the point of lichens is. Conversely, I took advantage of it by wondering how tricky it would probably be to get a ticket for the Girls Aloud reunion tour. Despite their differences, our minds had something important in common: they were better and lighter for the journey, for the climb, for the walk. The simplicity of the intention, the surrounding nature and the fresh air all came together to make it work.
But not as nice as the view at the top, which was better if you came straight away as you wouldn’t have caught a glimpse along the way. It was a true revelation, and bigger than expected. It grew west towards Dublin, moved north towards Carlisle, reached east towards the Pennines and Durham and the Netherlands, and descended south towards the once satanic mills of Lancashire. It was full of crags and tarns and hills and corrie, full of valley and sheep and weather and quarries. This was the vision that drove Alfred Wainwright; the view that almost knocked the boy from Blackburn out of his socks, and sparked in him a lifelong devotion to the region and its hills. Wainwright came here and saw something to live for. We saw the same thing.
Ant was silent until now, pointing out the changing palette of Windermere, a football pitch on which some whippersnapper had just drawn his lines, the classic Cumbrian cottages with their slate roofs and whitewashed walls – and then a rainbow, suddenly proud and radiant and above all different. I asked him how it felt to stand here, in front of all this. “I could offer you something fluffy and floral,” he said. ‘Something about God and Mother Nature and the Sublime and all that. But actually it just feels nice. Really fun. The kind of kindness you don’t feel very often.”
And on that note – on that very nice note – the weather began to throw away, and all our light-hearted feelings gave way to the weather, and we once again cursed our rain-soaked abode and rushed to the nearest inn (with an accessible toilet ), where we found plenty of solace in glasses from the local porter. No doubt there were other ways we could have responded to the return of bad conditions, but at the time, and for the life of us, we couldn’t figure out what they were.
Travel arranged by Cumbria Tourism and visit England. For more information about the Lake District and Miles Without Stiles, see visitlakedistrict.com. Superior accessible double room with double bed and private wet room with shower chair in 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 Stuurontwikkelingen.co.uk