5 Frames Hiking the Lake District

I’ve visited the Lakes District in northern England on two occasions.  Twenty years ago I completed about half of the 190 mile Coast to Coast Trail which runs across northern England between the Irish and North Seas.  I had hiked from St. Bees on the shores of the Irish Sea to Keld about half way along the route before going on the play golf in Scotland. Much of the Coast to Coast Trail is through the Lake District National Park, renowned for its breathtaking scenery.  Early last fall my wife and I travelled to Scotland, England and Wales. It was no accident that I instructed our travel agent to include a stop of several nights in the Lake District.  I remembered how lovely it was and I wanted my wife to see it, and it would offer me the opportunity to do some hiking.  It was however, very much an accident that our agent booked us into an inn in the Village of Grasmere. I had spent the night there while hiking twenty years ago in what was a pretty basic hostel type of accommodation.  It was fine for the time and situation back then.

Grasmere is a delightful little place with shops, restaurants, a pub or two and importantly, a number of access points to the surrounding trails. Our accommodations in September were very comfortably situated at the Swan Inn – just outside of town. I’d go back in a heartbeat.

The morning after our arrival, while my wife slept in, I took the opportunity to hike.  There’s a quite handy app I use called “All Trails”.  With it you can find local trails wherever you are, read reviews, find trail conditions and use the app to guide you along your selected route.  I chose a trail that began in the village and headed up to Silver How.  I say up because the elevation change from Grasmere to Silver How is about 330 meters.  The hike was a challenge for these 67 year old bones but so rewarding!

The area was just as beautiful as I had remembered.  The view from atop Silver How is magnificent but just as impressive are the sights on the ascent and descent.  The plants, trails, stone walls and pastures are features of a landscape unfamiliar to me and where I live in Ontario, Canada.  Just minutes from town and I felt I was in another world.  I did see other hikers in passing, but the overwhelming feeling was of being up there quite alone.  Quite soothing really.

Although my intention was to travel light, I packed a couple of cameras anyway; my Nikon FA 35mm SLR loaded with Ilford HP5+ and my Yashica “D” TLR loaded with a roll of Kodak Tri-X.  I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to capture some images on medium format.  The Yashica is so light weight it was no bother at all. So with that gear, a bottle of water and an apple, I was off.

In all of my previous posts on 35mmc I’ve simply scanned my negatives and imported them unedited, directly into the my post. I neither possess nor do I have the inclination to fuss with the software required to tweek my images.   For this post I offer the scanned images of my darkroom produced prints.  I think they’re a more accurate representation of the images I had in mind when I fired the shutter back in September.  These are five images from that September morning.

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