Lake District, June, Day 6.

A foggy start today and up early to get laundry washed and dried ready for travelling up to Mull/Iona on Friday.  Eventually we set off at 11.30 for Cockermout to see an exhibition: Scree, in The Wordsworth House.  The journey went well with no holdups in either Windermere or Ambleside.  Parking was at a bit of a premium, though, but we managed to get in the last available parking space in a car park we knew.  

Walking through the town we couldn't resist the old-fashioned ironmongers that we love.  Heather couldn't stop herself buying a garden sieve to hang on the wall/use to sieve her compost.  We soon reached the Wordsworth House where we chatted to the two very friendly and helpful volunteer staff.  Fortunately it is National Trust and so entry was free.  We found our exhibition on the top floor.  Scree is part physical exhibition and part online at www.scree.uk  Cockermouth poet, photographer and writer, Lucy Burnett has produced an alternative walking guide to The Lakes which encourages us to respond personally to this much loved landscape and the impact humans have on it.  Scree isn't any old guidebook of routes designed for their peak bagging or scenic potential, these routes are artistic provocations - experiments which playfully ask questions aimed at entirely rethinking our relationship with the Lake District.  The environmental topics explored are certain to dominate debate in the future.  Scree doesn't provide all the answers, it requires our participation, either by independently following the routes, creating and submitting new writing or art, attending a Scree Lab (workshop) or following route adaptations and virtual exercises to complete the experiments from home.  This exhibition has certainly given us both food for thought and we look forward to following some of the routes and exploring the website.

And so onto another guidebook: the teashop walks book Beth gave me for Father's Day.  With this in mind we headed for Buttermere to the excellent Croft House Farm Cafe for an excellent and well-deserved tea and stickies.  Not so sure about the well-deserved, though, as we missed out the walking part, it being, by now, quite late on in the afternoon.  Buttermere is a splendid location: right at the hub of high mountains.  It was pleasant to relive memories from past, and fitter, days: descending to the youth hostel by head torch from High Stile, picking up controls in the Saunders Mountain Marathon on Haystacks and Fleetwith Pike at the end of a tough first day and descending precipitously to Warnscale Bottom and the overnight camp and, more recently, with Thomas flogging up and over Scarth Gap Pass on mountain bikes carrying heavy loads on Wainwright's off-road C2C and then stuggling up the Honister Pass.  There was a wonderful view from here up Warnscale Beck to where the famous Bothy is.  This reminded me of old plans to walk up to it - perhaps they need to come back on stream when we come to the van in September.

All too soon it was time to drag ourselves away, over the Honister and through idyllic Borrowdale and back to the van for a very pleasant BBQ.  A splendid end to an excellent day.