Most walkers take the ‘easy’ route to the top of Great Gable; but that misses out the best bits of this architecturally spectacular mountain. As part of this special feature looking at Britain’s most unusual paths, James Forrest circles this celebrated Lake District summit via two historic traverses...
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IT’S UNCANNY. This remarkable rocky outcrop, high on the flanks of Great Gable, forms the Sphinx-like outline of a human head. Not just faintly or tenuously, but distinctively.
It’s easy to see: strong chin, prominent nose, closed mouth, gentle eyes, sloping forehead and traditional headwear befitting of a chieftain.
I can almost sense character in the face too. I see wisdom, poise and resolve, the eyes angled over the landscape with pride, like a benevolent yet fearsome guardian of Gable.
Far below, Wast Water stretches sumptuously towards the coast, framed left and right by the heathery slopes of Illgill Head and Yewbarrow.
To my left is the faint outline of the trod – a rocky tightrope through the labyrinth – that led me here. Is it the weirdest, most wonderful, most adventurous path in all of Lakeland? Surely it must be.
Rewind a few hours and I head south from Seathwaite to cross the quaint humpback of Stockley Bridge, an 18th-Century packhorse bridge over Grains Gill.
My plan for the day is eyewatering: a high-level loop of Great Gable (the Gable Girdle), combining the classic south and north traverses with a visit to the summit via White Napes and Westmorland Cairn in between, all planned with the help of thekomoot app.
These two narrow trods, historically created to access climbing routes, snake below a maze of rocky towers and shattered crags – a ‘secret’ dimension to this ancient pile of lava and volcanic ash.
It is an exciting prospect, but I have to get to the action first. A stiff climb next to Taylorgill Force gets the blood flowing, as Borrowdale sparkles in the morning sunshine. Wobbly drystone walls segment the hillside, its lower slopes blanketed in birch and oak, its upper reaches dotted with the fluffy grey-white blobs of distant Herdwick sheep.
It’s a rural idyll, gentle in appearance – a far cry from what I’m about to experience. Beyond Styhead Tarn and the mountain rescue stretcher box, I veer north-west for Kern Knotts and enter a foreboding, chaotic world of rock.
Ahead the mountain snarls with intrigue. On Gable’s southern face is the Great Napes, a fractured blockade of rock with terrifying proportions. Jutting powerfully out of the mountain, it has front, side and back walls, forming a dark, craggy cathedral of gothic grandeur.
It’s a place of ornate spires of rock and gargoyle outcrops, soaring ridges resembling ribbed vaults and pointed
