Honister Pass

I drove Honister Pass in second gear the entire way up, which is not an exaggeration, and I still felt the car working harder than it should have to. The road between Buttermere and Borrowdale climbs through one of the starkest, most exposed stretches of the Lake District — bare scree slopes on both sides, no trees, no soft edges, just grey rock and the road cutting straight through it like it had somewhere urgent to be. At the top sits Honister Slate Mine, the last working slate mine in England, hauling green Westmorland slate out of Fleetwith Pike in more or less the same way it has for centuries.

I took the underground mine tour, which involves a hard hat and a minibus into the mountain itself and a guide who has clearly told the same jokes to thousands of tourists but somehow makes them land anyway. The scale of the workings inside the fell is disorienting — vast chambers hacked out of solid rock, veins of slate glinting faintly under the lamps, and a genuine sense of how hard and how dangerous this work was for the generations of men who did it with hand tools and candlelight rather than the diesel machinery now doing the heaviest lifting.

Above the mine, Honister’s Via Ferrata runs a fixed cable and iron rung route up the old miners’ tramway on the crag face, and I watched a group in harnesses inching along a ledge with what looked like genuine exposure below them, which is either an appealing prospect or a horrifying one depending entirely on your relationship with heights. I am firmly in the horrified camp and watched from the safety of the visitor centre café with a cup of tea instead, which felt like the correct level of commitment for me.

When to go: Summer for the via ferrata and mine tours, which run more frequently; the pass road itself can close in winter snow, so check conditions before attempting it outside the warmer months.