Patterdale

Patterdale is two pubs, a church, a small hotel, and a cluster of houses in a valley that is essentially all mountains. I arrived on a weekday morning when the only other people in the village were a group of six fell runners in matching club vests stretching in the car park before heading up Grisedale, and a man walking a large and disgruntled-looking Herdwick sheep on a lead down the road. Neither of these things seemed to require explanation. Patterdale is the kind of place where the context supplies itself.

The valley sits at the southern end of Ullswater, enclosed on three sides by fells: Helvellyn and its long eastern ridge to the west, Place Fell to the east and north, St Sunday Crag to the northwest. The combination of enclosure and elevation gives the valley a particular quality of light in the mornings — cloud lingers in the valley floor while the ridge lines catch sun, and the effect is of walking through mist while the mountains rise clear above it. I walked the ridge of Place Fell in this kind of morning and spent the first twenty minutes in cloud and the next three hours in brilliant autumn clarity, looking down at the valley I had just walked out of.

Striding Edge begins about two hours above the valley, reached from the path that leaves Patterdale and climbs the long shoulder of Birkhouse Moor before the ridge appears. The first sight of it from above is genuinely arresting: a blade of rock that narrows to a metre’s width in places, dropping away on both sides into the corrie holding Red Tarn on the left and the Nethermost Cove on the right. In summer you queue on it, which seems incongruous given the situation. In October I had it to myself for long stretches, moving carefully across the exposed sections, the wind coming over the col with serious intention. The path over the Edge is a scramble in places — hands required on the rock — but it is not technical climbing. It is just high and serious and exactly the kind of thing the Lake District does best.

The White Lion at Patterdale is the kind of pub that fell walkers have been dreaming about for hours by the time they get there. It is not fancy. The floors are flagstone, the furniture is practical, the beers are from Cumbrian breweries. I arrived after the Striding Edge round and ordered a pint of Bluebird Bitter and a cheese and onion toastie and ate them at a picnic bench outside, watching the mist move in long ropes through the valley below Helvellyn, and felt precisely the satisfaction that the day had been building toward. The pub has an honesty box system for the drying room, which is a detail that tells you everything about the community it serves.

There is very little to do in Patterdale beyond the mountains, which is the correct amount of things to do in Patterdale. The Grisedale valley walk — up the beck to Grisedale Tarn, the high mountain lake between Helvellyn and Fairfield — is shorter and gentler than the Striding Edge route and wildly beautiful in October when the grass goes rust-gold. The Coast to Coast Walk, Alfred Wainwright’s famous cross-England route from St Bees to Robin Hood’s Bay, passes through Patterdale at roughly its halfway point, and in summer you can tell which walkers are doing it by the slightly haunted expression they carry, the way people do when they have been walking for six days straight and have six more to go.

When to go: September and October for Striding Edge in manageable crowds and the best autumn light on the corries. May and June for the long evenings when you can complete the Helvellyn round in daylight with hours to spare. In winter Striding Edge can require ice axes and crampons — check conditions before committing.