Wainwright Challenge: 14 & 15/214 Little & Great Mell Fells

 

As I was at the top of the county already for Talkin Tarn Country Park parkrun, I decided to add a couple of outlying Wainwrights: Little Mell Fell and Great Mell Fell. They are between Ullswater and the A66 and often only walked by folks trying to get the 214 set. I didn't do a great research job and missed the easy parking for Little Mell Fell and ended up much lower down than I needed to be. Undaunted I set off up the path to get to the 505m summit, when I saw the parking bay I so wished I had parked there and just had the almost straight up path:

This a summit which has an obvious top as it has a trig point. If you parked at the bottom it would take less than half an hour to summit and get back down:

It was the perfect conditions for being on the top with views across the Lake District and to the Pennines:

I attempted to get down a less steep way and ended up on a sheep trod! On reaching my car I made (what turned out to be daft) decision to walk to Great Mell Fell as on the map it looked easy... little did I know that I would have to attempt to navigate a bog of doom (yes I ended up hip deep and was glad I had double laced). Getting to the final stile was a huge relief:

Great Mell Fell has a few ascent options and I opted for the one that looked the least steep - turned out to be rather wet under foot! I saw barely a soul as I climbed up over the old army shooting range:

The summit seemed to take ages to get to and was a lot less obvious than on its fellow Wainwright. It does give great views of other fells such as Blencathra though.

Sensibly, I took the gentle route back down and slogged back along the road so that I avoided a repeat of the bog. This gave me a good view of both the fells:

After my experience I would say to do each as an individual walk but easy to do both in one visit. This is my full video: