This is my entry to the Kendal Mountain Festival Open Mountain Competition. It was not selected so I am sharing it here.

Background

The county of Cumbria is not well served by public transport. The central massif of rock that barricades the valleys, the lakes that stretch the roads; our geography is almost as big a challenge as the years of cuts to council budgets and the subsequent reduction in the subsidies demanded by private companies, who are ill- equipped to provide a public service.

Hence there is no direct bus service between Barrow, where I live, in the extreme south of the county and the county town, Carlisle, in the extreme north. And visiting the Lake District by public transport requires precision planning.

Train lines encircle the county but no longer run through it. It takes as long to travel by train from Barrow to Windermere as it does from Manchester! The direct bus service from Lancaster to Keswick is just under two hours. From Barrow it can take four hours with at least one change.

As a non-driver I have thought a lot about access. I love the Lakes and since my retirement have used the Barrow Ramblers Club coach on a Sunday to reach more fell tops than I ever managed during the thirty-five years I worked in the town.

And thanks to my bus pass I have experimented to find viable days out using public transport. The first hurdle is to get to Windermere or Kendal. These are the only two direct services connecting Barrow to the Lake District, this despite our borough’s constituency boundary extending to Cockley Beck in High Furness, to the north of Coniston!

My best effort so far has been a six hour round trip to Grasmere to climb Fairfield. Will I ever make the eight hour return journey to stand on Skiddaw? I will probably wait for the next time it appears on the Barrow Ramblers Club programme: only four hours on a coach, six hours on the fell and time for a pint before the journey home. Anyway, this is how I imagine it.

From Barrow to Keswick to Walk

Before the creep of dawn I wake
And in the softening darkness walk
To stand within that time between
Late night revellers returning
And early morning workers leaving home.

Booted and suited for the fells,
My sack is packed upon my back.
I’m kitted out. I nothing lack.
My bus pass will provide a ticket
To ride. The Number Six arrives.

We wind around the country lanes
Exchanging fleeting greetings with the dawn.
We make good time on empty roads
And hand it back at station stops.
We stand for passengers but no one boards.

My journey joins with those who come
And go until “All Change!” at Kendal,
Giving me the time to watch the town
Awake while waiting for the bus to take me on.
Five, five, five – the number of my beast arrives.

School uniforms all change, from Windermere
In deckchair stripes to Troutbeck Bridge maroon
And grey, then black and white in Ambleside.
Now the rucksacks outnumber backpacks.
So we come at last to Derwent Water’s Town.

And now I’m here I’ll climb a hill
And hope I’m down in time to catch
A bus that takes me back between
The workers, home returning and
The revellers, adventuring once more.

An eight hour hour day I will have worked these roads
To make myself a vacancy in time
In which to find my own adventure:
A five hour interval of turf and rock
Beneath my feet; my head in clouds.