AS YOU WORM your way down the tight-fitting road that leads deeper into the mountain-walled corridor of Great Langdale, there’s a point where you turn a corner and are suddenly confronted with the sight of the Langdale Pikes. I feel a jolt of excitement every time it happens, and today’s drive into the valley with my brother-in-law Chris, in the softening light of a warm, late spring afternoon, is no exception.
To my boyhood eyes, those bulging volcano-spewed summits seemed absolutely terrific, even unassailable. I remember once approaching them in the car with my dad and expressing a degree of trepidation – one of my earliest memories of being both impressed and intimidated by a mountain landscape. Dad reassured me that those sublimely craggy bastions were merely a façade; that they only look so imposing from down in the dale. Behind them, he said, the ground eases into bog and moor. Our subsequent walk would confirm the truth of this, and in the decades since then I have gone ‘behind the curtain’ many times more. I know that those peaks are not particularly big, even in Lakeland terms, reaching just 736 metres at their highest point. I have even climbed and scrambled on the crags themselves, further dispelling their fearsome illusion. Even so, they never fail to impress me.
