Glaramara via Hind Gill - one for the connoisseur

Wainwright describes just two routes up Glaramara- one from Strands Bridge in Borrowdale and a second from Langstrathdale. However, the OS map shows a third route - one that starts just to the south of Seathwaite Farm and makes a beeline for the summit up the side of Hind Gill.

Both Wainwright routes are excellent, but the Seathwaite one looked interesting, and I thought I'd give it a try.

As things turned out, however, there was a big difference between a line on the map and a path on the ground. Without my GPS, I'd have walked straight past the start point on the Stockley Bridge track. Certainly, there was a field gate that actually opened, but no sign on the other side that anybody had been here recently. What there was instead was a scene of total devastation.

Clearly, at some time in the not-too-distant past, Hind Gill had been hit by a flood of apocalyptic proportions. Rocks, boulders and tree trunks were piled in confusion over a wide area that stretched for several hundred feet up the fellside.

But I've seen worse. To the left of the wreckage, a drystone wall still survived, and I reckoned that anybody else trying to follow the OS map would surely have come this way. Sure enough, as I hauled myself up alongside the wall, signs of traffic slowly began to appear. Higher up, to my immense relief, I found myself on a clear path.

Things settled down nicely now and before too long, the valley's fell wall (the one separating the cultivated fields from open fellside) appeared ahead. A gate let me through, and now I was climbing alongside Hart Gill itself through bracken on a very respectable zigzag path.

At this point, Hart Gill, arched over by trees, looked dramatically deep. I wondered if it might offer opportunities for gill scrambling, but for now I had more immediate issues. This was the steepest section of the route and the zigzag path began to offer multiple dodgy alternatives as it worked its way through a succession of rocky outcrops.

This went on for quite a while, but eventually the gradient relaxed, the gill lost its ferocious rocky banks, and the path headed for a clear skyline, with the summit of Glaramara itself now visible to my right. It finally merged with the main drag from Strands Bridge in a sort of "alp" between Glaramara's summit and the rocks of Combe Head,

I wouldn't call this route a classic, but for drama and novelty, I think it beats the Strands Bridge approach. It certainly warms you up for the splendid little scramble up onto Glaramara's summit!

For descent (being in "bagging mode" I now continued along the ridge to Allen Crags and returned to Seathwaite via Grains Gill). But sensible people would surely go north towards Strands Bridge.

Here's a map showing my route

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