On the drive up the motorway I wondered what the conditions underfoot would be for this walk as, on the previous weeks recce, they were pretty bad with loads of mud and flooded lanes. However, for the 15 people who turned up conditions today were perfect. There had been a hard overnight frost so the ground was easy to walk on and the lanes had dried out.

We set off along the canal for about half a mile before leaving it for the first climb of the walk crossing over Hanging Hill. Although not a big climb it soon had us all warmed up, the sun was out and things were starting to look good as we continued through Burton-in-Kendal and along Slape Lane before turning left through the parkland of Clawthorpe . After another stretch of canal we had a short coffee stop before starting the biggest climb of the day up Farleton Fell. The views all around were quite stunning with the Lakeland Fells, the Howgills and Ingleborough all covered in a layer of white snow and really standing out in the almost cloudless blue sky. We then commenced our descent from the top, which was quite a gradual one, coming down  alongside crags and woodland on a path not shown on the OS map. We met a mountain biker pushing his state of the art bike up the fell and he told us that it had cost £4,000 and the tyres were £500 each! We then picked up on a section of the Limestone Link path which we followed to reach some rocks where we stopped for lunch in the sunshine.

Because of the limited hours of daylight we couldn't overstay our pleasant stop and after 20 minutes set off again to go along the Kelker Well path which runs along the northern edge of Hutton Roof Crags dropping down to St James church in the small hamlet of Hutton Roof itself.We then crossed a few fields before heading, in what seemed more like a warm spring day than a late autumn one, in a south westerly direction, again on the edge of the crags, to reach a small picnic area where we had an afternoon stop.The final four miles took us through Henridding, Dalton Old Hall and Coat Green Farm, where we came across the only muddy bit of the day, before reaching our cars at 3.50pm. Just as we got to the car park we looked up to see Farleton Fell glowing bright red in the late afternoon sunshine. Although it only lasted a few minutes it was quite spectacular and a brilliant finish to what had been a great day out.

Thanks to everyone who came including 3 visitors, Geoff from Kettering, Martin from Lincoln and Dave from Manchester. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I had.

To see who came on the walk please press the photo below

 To see all the photos please press Here then the first photo followed by the right hand arrow