NEW EDITION JULY 2019

For walkers, this guide can almost be divided in two.  In the north, the routes described are classic Lake District walks: the climb up the Old Man of Coniston; the hill crossing from Coniston to Dunnerdale; the circuit of the peaks of Wetherlam and Swirl How.  This is Arthur Ransome country (the Swallows & Amazons books were largely based on Ransome’s knowledge of Coniston Water and the surrounding hills), with tight winding roads between stone walls, small fields, and herdwick sheep grazing on the fells.  It is also a post-industrial landscape, with the hills around the old mining village of Coniston riddled with disused copper mines and slate quarries (particularly impressive around Tilberthwaite – see left).  In the south, the hills decline into hilly farmland before joining the sea at the wide muddy expanses of Morecambe Bay and Duddon Sands.  Here the walking is very different, with gentle hill walking around Grange-over-Sands and Cartmel (the home of sticky toffee pudding!) and dunes and salt marshes around Barrow-in-Furness and Walney Island.  Both areas provide excellent – if very different – walking.

The usual small changes have been made to the route descriptions to keep the book up to date.  The only significant alterations are on the route climbing Latterbarrow from Hawkshead (where forestry work on the hill has completely transformed how the route looks on the ground) and on the loop between Dodgson Wood and High Nibthwaite, at the southern end of Coniston Water (where the pathless moorland section has been re-routed and rewritten to make the walk easier to follow).

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