Coast to Coast - Day Three

Day three: Stonethwaite to Grasmere (nine miles)

On the walk out of Borrowdale

It's indicative of how we are getting into this walking lark that we now consider a nine-mile walk and 2,000ft of climb to be an easy day. David's knee is a worry, but he has delved into his supplies and found an elastic knee bandage and a tube of Voltarol gel which acts as a painkiller by absorbing paracetamol through the skin. I discovered that Joyce had also packed a survival bag, but only one. In the unlikely event that we are lost in a blizzard, I might have to stage an unfortunate accident to acquire David's survival bag.

This might be only nine miles, but with washed out paths and a steep ascent, it is hard work and I developed blisters underneath both my big toes. We walked alongside the beck for a while and then struck up at the head of the valley to Greenup Edge past Eagle Crag and Sergeant's Crag to our right. It was great to hear a number of cuckoos on our climb; I haven't heard a cuckoo for years.

Pausing for breath near the top of Greenup Edge. We didn't know Karen was taking our picture.

Karen and Jess passed us on the way up and sat at the top taking pictures of us puffing up. We also met two girls in their mid-30s, who I guessed were German, but they informed me (rather indignantly) that they were Netherlanders. They were navigating mainly by means of the Trailblazer Coast to Coast book and were getting along very well.

At the top of Greenup Edge there's a flat boggy bit and first the path and then the cairns disappear. We kept heading more or less in the right general direction but came to the descent a little too far north and had to traverse the slope to reach Flour Gill (a small marker stream) and then over into Easdale. There was a higher-level alternative taking in Calf Crag, Gibson Knott and Helm Crag, but we kept to the valley. I would have quite liked the high route today. My first trip to the Lake District was with a school trip when I was about 14. We visited Grasmere and climbed Helm Crag.

Sue is good company and a good walker. She's done a crazy traverse of New Guinea (short but very tough) and did the Camino de Santiago last year (also alone). She was a nurse in recovery (where people come round after operations) and her husband Richard is a cattle farmer and runs an engineering business. They live in Adelaide, which is, apparently, the non-convict area of Australia.

She surprised us by announcing, totally out of the blue, that wombat shit is a perfect cube, like a pile of dice. It was a rather strange thing to say, but we had been spending a lot of the walk trying not to step in sheep shit! We said if Sue wanted to walk with us, she would have to tell us an interesting fact about wombats every day.

It was a lovely warm, sunny afternoon when we reached Grasmere and it was strange to be in such as busy place after three days on the fells with relatively few people about. We sat and had a cup of tea, looking down our noses at the day walkers all kitted out with fancy poles and clean boots. My toes were blistered and I was less than chuffed to find that our B&B was a mile the other side of Grasmere. We had to walk out there, walk back in for food that night, back to bed and then back into Grasmere in the morning to meet Sue. Ha! What's four miles when you're walking 190?

Sue and David in Borrowdale