The penultimate walk (all 20 miles of it)…

Whatshaw Common: a good indication of the landscape from today’s walk

Before today I had 10 Wainwrights left to bag. Eight of them were over in the far east of the district, in the remote Shap Fells area, and grouped by Wainwright into the Seat Robert and Crookdale Horseshoe chapters. The first group (of five) had been made much harder to reach by the culling of most of the Shap buses — the latter three have always been a logistical problem.

But there were no other walks left to do, really — so they needed doing at some point. So walk 102 simply bagged them all in one big 20.2-mile hike — the longest of all the walks listed on this site. Read all about it on the walk page… including the sighting of the red deer, pictured here. Definitely the closest I have ever been to such a substantial herd of these beautiful creatures – not that they wanted to be anywhere near me.

Wild red deer on Seat Robert.

So with walk 102 done, I have bagged 328 of the 330 Wainwrights and have on;y two to go. These are Flat Fell and Dent, over near Whitehaven, and I hope to bag them some time in November.

Will this mark the end of my wanderings in the Lakes? No, I’m going to do them all a second time at least. But hopefully not too many more 20-milers, please.