Reasons to be Cheerful: Sunshine, Garden and Wainwright Bagging #R2BC

I am feeling in a particularly cheerful mood as I host for the last time before handing back over to Michelle! The financial pinch of 2 weeks with no paid work is over and although I am not working full time I can breath again... So here are my reasons to be cheerful this week:
1) Tutorial in the sun
We didn't have as long a heatwave as everyone else in the UK but my student on Thursday made the most of it by having her lesson in the garden:

2) Gardening 

Since writing about my front garden last week I have made even more progress! I grabbed some 50p bargain flowers from the supermarket to add some instant colour. My wild seedlings are beginning to sprout and since this photo the grass has been cut:

Just hoping that my sad looking jasmine will survive!

3) Wainwright bagging

Whilst filming the fell races on Saturday I took the chance to finally get to the top of Cat Bells. You can see how pleased I was with myself:

Wainwright bagging (2): Loughrigg Fell

Today my mum invited me to join her on a walk up Loughrigg Fell so she could check out part of the route for a Ramblers walk tomorrow. It was a fine Cumbrian day for a bit of fell walking using the Wainwright book as a guide to follow along with the Ordnance Survey map. There are so many little and large paths across the fell it is very easy to take the wrong one and in the book Wainwright warns of the dangers of mists on this fell. 


On this occasion we took all the right routes and had our first fab views from the cairn on the secondary summit. Even though it was midweek there were plenty of people coming up the fell from various directions as its accesible from plenty of paths. Coming up from Rydal like us is one of the gentlest routes and as we climbed we had many glimpses of places such as Windermere from a height:

Then we had a little boggy walk and a scramble up to the final top. It was amazing to see so many of the Lakes fells from the top. All of them much higher than the 1099ft of Loughrigg and a challenge for future days. My mum snapped me with the trig point just to prove that I had actually made it:

trig points hide a multitude of sins!

The descent down to Grasmere was mostly stone steps that had been created to mend the path. This actually made it a slightly less comfortable path to walk on and is apparently very slippery after rain. The reason for coming down this way became clear as we got close enough to admire the waters of Grasmere from above:

Just above the lake we chose to take the mid height path which took us through the abandoned quarry and let us see in the caves that were created by the quarrying of slate in the past. As Wainwright said you could fit the whole population of Ambleside inside the cave, even if some would be rather wet:

It was then a simple stroll back to the car park after our little meander up the fell. This was my second Wainwright as far as I know so I only have a couple of hundred to go!

Wainwright bagging (1) - Orrest Head, Windermere

My aunt decided today that my 3 year old needed to bag his first Wainwright so took us off up Orrest Head:

As my daughter has already been up one Wainwright I'm going to start recording the one's my son goes up. Chances are I'll be with him so it will be me too!

Here is the proof he made it:

Only a 30 minute hike but a good start to his rambling career in the Lakes especially as this was the walk that inspired Wainwright to write his famous books 80 years ago this year! Here's onwards and upwards to the remaining 213...