Lake District

Autumn has been slowly creeping up to the fells and the last day of the best summer for years will soon be only a memory. Perhaps it came the other day when I was wandering alone over Gable and the Borrowdale fells – a day of sultry heat and hazy blue distances, of lazy farm dogs sleeping in the shade and smoke from cottage chimneys spiralling slowly above the birches. Down by Stockley Bridge a proud father photographed his children splashing in the Derwent and higher up the fellside a paraffin stove, tended by two youngsters, was roaring away merrily on a shelf of rock by the beck – so still was the morning. Only one tent by the quiet waters of Styhead Tarn, nobody by the stretcher-box, but two or three specks of red and blue above Piers Gill on their way to the Pike. Far below, the great bowl of Wasdale slept in the haze and, in the distance, the length of Wastwater shimmered in the sunlight and the plains merged into the sea.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Inn at Wasdale Head, Lake District ,Cumbria. Photograph: Duncan Phillips/Alamy

Country diary: Buttermere, Cumbria Read more

Perhaps half a dozen people were on the well-scratched trail to Gable top, and the sight which, on a day of worsening weather, could have been alarming, became, on this lovely day, slightly comic. All were in low shoes and making poor progress in fits and starts on the sliding scree while one stout, middle-aged matron, in bright red macintosh, had abandoned the ascent half-way and was being helped down – vowing loudly never to return – on the end of a belt. But the summit was deserted and there was nobody to share with me the sight of the dark green carpet curving down Ennerdale, and the ridges of the Buttermere fells melting into the skies. And later, in the sun-kissed saucer of Gillercombe, on a couch of saxifrage beside the dancing beck, only the ravens and the sad-faced Herdwicks for company.