4.5 miles from the walks to waterfalls book, Mapmywalk shows 4.6 miles
I’m going to be truthful about this walk, I’ll call it the unmissable waterfall that we missed 🙂 We have a book called Walks to Waterfalls, its walks to 10 waterfalls in the lakes; we choose this walk, as it was not too far from Dalebottom. We put the postcode of The Bridge Inn, in the satnav which was where the walk started from, one of the roads we came across on the way had a width restriction on it, but Evie was just under, the road was narrow, but there wasn’t many cars on the road and we flew though, it was alongside Crummock Water.
The carpark was a national trust carpark and wasn’t huge, so we were glad we got there early as it’s not that easy to park Evie in a smallish carpark. So with rucksack on back and book in hand, (well Steve did again) we set off. We read the 1st part of the instructions and turned out of the carpark, and were supposed to turn immediately to the right, to us it just looked like it went into a farm yard, so we thought it must be wrong, we should know by now to go and have a good look instead of thinking it’s not the right way straight away. We decided to head for what looked like the hub of the village and found a sign pointing to Scale Force Falls so off we went, great we thought a well sign posted walk, the views again were lovely, we eventually came to a stream and a stone bridge which when you went over it was like a T junction, there was no signs saying which way at all, so much for the well sign posted route, so we looked at the book according to that it said to head right, bearing in mind that we had missed most of the other instructions in the book as we didn’t find the turning that we should have taken in the beginning, however according to the small map in the book, we needed to be heading to the right
We headed off again, there was a clear stony path, it opened up to a view of Crummock Water and some glorious mountains on both sides of the water. Now on the only sign we saw it said the waterfall was a mile and a quarter from that point, we came across some wooden bridges and some very boggy ground which were mentioned in the book, we couldn’t see that there could be a waterfall anywhere and we had already gone more than a mile and a quarter, so of course the only logical thing would be starting to head up, we saw a man heading up on a path so presumed we must be right, so off we went again, it was not an easy trek up as some fences had fallen down and it was quite a scramble, we watched where the man went and headed that way, we lost site of the man as we stopped to take photos.
We came across another thin wooden bridge that looked like if you crossed it, it would take you in a wooded area which didn’t look like waterfall friendly at all, the book mentioned loads of names, none of which were backed up by any signs along the routes (we now know that hidden amongst those few sparse trees was Scale Force Falls with no clear path leading to them, duh). We carried on heading up and up and up, the weather by this time was turning really warm, we eventually came to a small gate with a path leading into the hills, but also a path leading up before the gate, so now we had no idea which way to head, Steve sprinted up the path to see what he could see, he also sprinted back down, he looked like a fell runner and sounded like one too with his huffing and puffing, he can’t remember the last time he ran anywhere 🙂 the only thing he could see was more hills.
We decided to have a sit, have a drink and enjoy the views and decide what to do, I didn’t want to carry on as we had no idea how long we would have to walk for and even if we could find the waterfall, we had another look at the book and couldn’t figure out where we were, we set off back down and just enjoyed the views again, don’t get me wrong we enjoyed the walk, but it would have been better to find the falls. As we walked along we had a right old moan about the lack of sign posts, moaning about how wrong the book was, a man and a dog followed us down so we asked him about the falls, at first he said that we were in completely the wrong area, well we knew we weren’t that wrong, he then went on to say that it was the other way and that we couldn’t miss it!!.We carried on back towards the stone bridge and thought we should have turned left there; we decided that we would do it again another time and write it off as a bad job or walk L. By this time it was getting really busy and there were cars parked everywhere, there was a nice looking pub in the village, but we decided to get back to Evie and get to the campsite, rather than stop and have a well-earned lager. We got back to Evie and set off once again to the campsite.
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