Silver How and Lang How from Grasmere

Winter isn’t always the best time to visit the Lake District, but it is the time of year at which the hills are supremely peaceful and all but empty.

We stopped off for a return visit to the Waterhead Inn on our way back from Scotland on what turned out to be a particularly lacklustre couple of days just after New Year in 2019. We spent the single day we had in the region visiting Grasmere for the obligatory gingerbread, before donning our waterproof gear and squelching our way up to the undulating tops of Silver How and Lang How, the former of which overlooks the village and the mere itself.

It was a distinctly wet and cold day: parts of the surface of the small tarns and some of the particularly sodden boggy heather and peat were frozen, so we were glad of the winter gear we were wearing. We walked up from the village car park, across Kelbarrow and along the long stone wall pictured below, before making the stepped ascent to the first fell top. My knee played up a bit on the steeper sections, but the walk across the top of the fells was comparatively easy-going. We stopped for a short time to sit and eat our packed lunch with a gloomy view of the Langdale Valley, but we enjoyed being in the landscape and a video call to family bolstered our good mood further. There was little photography to be had, but a few snaps documented this short visit to another of the Wainwright Fells.