Scafell Pike and the Underwater Gnomes

Ah yes, Scafell Pike. Perched in the west of the Lake District, it holds the title of being Britain's highest mountain.

It may not seem like much of a mountain, especially compared to the Alps, or the Andes, but it is a mountain nonetheless. The threshold for when a hill becomes a mountain, according to Ordinance Survey maps, is precisely 609.6m (2000ft), so at 978m Scafell Pike can safely be called a mountain.

We have 317 mountains in total in the UK - did you know that? No, me neither. Just googled it. A lot more than I thought there'd be. I mean, I know there's quite a few up in Scotland, and a handful in Wales, but over 300? Really?!

Up until last September there were apparently only 316 mountains - Calf Top Hill in the Yorkshire Dales was reclassified from a hill to a mountain when it was remeasured and found to have been 2cm taller than before, meaning at 609.602m it was now 2mm over the 602.6m threshold, and now officially a mountain! I'm hoping that if I grow an extra 2cm I'll be reclassified as a Victoria's Secret Model.

Calf Top Hill - sorry - I mean mountain, in Yorkshire

But anyway, I digress. Back to Scafell Pike we go. I have climbed Scafell Pike twice, and both times the weather was what can only be described in my mother's words, as pants.

The deceiving thing about Scafell Pike is that you can't actually see it's summit at all while you're hiking it, and more often than not the ascent to the summit is hidden in a plume of misty, rainy cloudiness.

Behold the plume of misty, rainy cloudiness. This was when I climbed it back in June.

The first time I climbed it was as part of the Three Peaks challenge back in 2015. It was 4am when our team of 8 arrived by minubus, having driven 6 hours straight from Ben Nevis. Dawn was breaking slowly behind a silhouette of mountain ridges. Tiny lights moved in a line up from the base of the mountain to the summit - fellow Three Peakers who'd hiked through the night - like a line of iridescent ants. As we parked up in the minibus, there was a definite lull in energy. None of us had really slept, or eaten.

Now I know what you're thinking - how can you just forget to eat enough?

Well, very easily, I can assure you (and this is coming from a girl whose days are planned entirely around food).

Like any would-be hiker, we'd raided Tesco the day before for supplies, and I felt like I'd walked out carrying half of the shop under my arms as I panic bought everything. Will I need Pom Bears on a mountain? Yes, yes I will.

But after finishing our climb of Ben Nevis at 11pm, soaking wet from the rain, and with only 5 minutes to grab clean clothes from our bags before we had to start driving to the Lake District (all squashed together in the back of the minibus, like a textiled game of Tetris), we were more concerned with getting dry, warm, and finding a comfortable enough position to sleep in a bit of than we were with eating more than half a sandwich. I think it took me a good hour in the minubus before I stopped shivering from the cold, let alone fall asleep.

Despite the severe lack of energy, I must admit that Scafell was, surprisingly, rather enjoyable to climb. I'd never seen any scenery like it before; it was like being in a Sci-fi film, where a space ship has landed on barren wasteland and is trying to discover what life forms are there. The last half an hour to the top is just mounds and mounds of crushed boulders. The low mist clings to the rocks, seeming to absorb all sound and create an eerie stillness.

Very other-worldly

Me being me (i.e incredibly inquisitive), I decided to Google why there are so many broken bits of boulder on the mountain when I was back home, and oh my. Turns out that the mounds and mounds of rocks that make up Scafell Pike are the remnants of a volcanic eruption around 400 million years ago. So I can say that not only have I climbed a mountain, I've climbed a volcano!!! (Well, kind of).

Scafell Pike and the surrounding mountains are together called the Sca Fells - not to be confused with the neighbouring mountain Sca Fell, which at 964m makes it the second highest mountain in Britain. It's all a bit ridiculous, if you ask me. Everything sounds the same! That's like having Mount Snowdon, and then next to it one called Snow Don, all part of the Snow Dons! Who names these mountains anyway?

I'll let the namer off the hook though. Apparently Scafell Pike was never meant to be called Scafell Pike - there was a mistake once upon a time on an Ordnance Survey map, and 'The Pikes of Sca Fells' (describing all of the mountains) became 'Scafell Pike'  (the tallest mountain) and no one ever corrected it, and so here we are, with lots of mountains with the same (ish) names.

The Sca fells - made up of lots of Scafells and lots of Crags. 

The second time I climbed the mountain I was with a man from the army. Neither of us had a map, or a compass, or anything that would be remotely useful like a GPS tracker or a torch (which is to be expected from me - I mean, I once drove to London for work and forgot to take any clothes other than my netball kit. But him? He had no excuse for not being prepared ). 

From about halfway up, there's no longer a stone-slabbed path to follow, but rather, you have to follow 'cairns' - large man-made piles of stones which act as a guide towards the summit. Easy to spot on a clear day, but nigh-on impossible in the rainy, spitty, plume of clouds.

A photo I found on the internet of a cairn on Scafell Pike and a man who looks like he was far more prepared than I was.

So it was about 3.30pm by now. The wind picked up, and it started to rain. We could now only see 1 metre in front of us due to the thick fog. The rain got heavier, and heavier, and heavier, the wind whipping it in waves into my face, trickling through my coat and down my back, and I was cold. I was soaked through from head to toe, shivering, and all I could think of was how utterly glorious a cup of tea would be right about now.

And then we realised we hadn't seen a cairn in quite a while. How long had it been - maybe twenty minutes or so? Or was it thirty? I started to panic a bit, because you're meant to see them every few minutes. I looked all around, but there was thick fog in every direction. We weren't sure which direction the summit was in, or which direction we'd just come from. Squinting in the rain, everything looked the same.

The safety bit:
There are on average 500 incidents up these mountains per year where search and rescue need to get involved, and now that I've been in that position, it's easy to see why. Lesson of the day - find a better army man take all the proper kit next time.

Fortunately though, we found the cairns. Of course we did, or I wouldn't be writing this post. We turned around and dragged our feet back the way we think we'd been walking. It probably took about another half an hour of walking in circles, a bit of swearing, scrambling back up rocks, more desperate thoughts about tea, and retracing our steps for what felt like an eternity, when we finally saw a cairn appearing in the foggy distance. Never has a pile of rocks looked so beautiful in my entire life. Cairns meant we were back on the path, which meant I was ONE STEP CLOSER TO TEA!

Summit selfie! A... summelfie? Smelfie? 

We found the summit after our hour-long detour, and honestly, there's not much up there. I'm sure it's incredible when there's a view, but as I said, both times I've climbed it I've never seen said view. There's a big cairn in the centre which has a plaque on it, which says that summit was gifted to the National Trust in 1919 by Lord Leconfield in memory of the men who died in the Great War. A very touching memory, but firstly, how on earth do you own a mountain, and secondly, if you're going to gift it, why only gift the summit? What about the rest of it?!

'This summit of Scafell was given to the nation subject to any commoners rights placed in custody of the National Trust by Charles Henry, Baron Leconfield 1919'

Apparently back in 2015 there was great uproar when a hiker discovered some graffiti on the above cairn at the sumit And not just the standard 'Jenni woz ere' in black marker, I'm talking a full blown inscription of verses from the Emerald Tablets of Thoth - an ancient Arabic piece of work written been the 6th and 8th century AD. The graffiti-er (who actually wrote his name at the bottom, wanting credit for his work), must have taken the actual book up with him to write it out, verse by verse. And oh my, the backlash he got...

"Literary vandal defaces the summit of Scafell Pike with poetry in permanent black ink"

"Walkers demand the culprit is caught."

Hey, while I'm not condoning graffiti, if he's taken the time to write out an ancient piece of work that people wouldn't have read otherwise, then leave him be. At least if it's foggy it gives you something to actually see while you're up there.

Graffiti isn't the strangest thing to be found at the top of the mountain, though; an octopus was found at the summit in 2013 by a team who climbs the mountain regularly to litter pick, and no one knows quite how it got there. Perhaps someone left it there as a joke? A drunken bet in the pub the night before?

"Wheyy I bet you can't go to the top with.. uh... an octopus!"

I have an...inkling... this octopus didn't want to end up here. Heh.

If you think that an octopus is the strangest thing to be found in the Lake District, then think again. Back in to early 1900s, a boatman found what was called a 'Tizzie-Whizie', which although it sounds like something you could buy from Fred and George Weasley's joke shop in Diagon Alley, was actually a small animal that was allegedly part hedgehog, part squirrel and part bee.

A Tizzie-Whizie. Where are they and how can I get it to be my friend?

The one above was captured in 1906 and was apparently rushed to local photographer Louis Herbert's photographic studio in Bowness-on-Windemere. He 'calmed it down with some warm milk and morsels of ginger biscuit and took this immoral portrait of the Tizzie-Whizie before it jumped off his table and flew out of the window to freedom.

My common sense is telling me that this was a hoax, but there were hundreds ,if not thousands of people who believed it at the time - this very photo ended up on thousands and thousands of postcards in the Lake District, and there are still some holiday cottages around Windemere today called Tizzie-Whizie, as a little reminder of this strange (but obscenely cute) mythical creature.

Sorry, got sidetracked again there. Where was I? Oh yes, I was still at the summit. Yes, well it was at the summit I once again realised I hadn't eaten anything for hours and was feeling a bit low on energy (I honestly wish I could do this more in real life). I'd been to the little National Trust hut in the Wasdale car park before we started our hike, just to browse what they were selling (it was here I'd spied the cups of tea that were now the only thing keeping me going), and noticed that they were selling Kendal mint cake.

The town of Kendal is not that far from Scafell Pike, and I'd heard of the famous Kendal mint cake many times before. They sell it in shops like Cotswold Outdoors, and Milletts, and I'd heard that hikers who go up Everest often take it a a snack. So I thought I'd give it a go.

An advert for Kendal mint cake from 1953.

Warning: if you're expecting a cake (like I was), do not buy one.

It's like mixing a tube of toothpaste with granulated sugar and then putting a wrapper on it, but I doubt calling it 'Kendal Colgate sugar bar' would quite sound the same.

I took one minuscule nibble from the corner, and that was enough for me. Bleugh. Back in the bag you go!

Why is this a cake when it's clearly not cake? Was it named by the same person who named Scafell Pike, Sca Fell and the Sca Fells?!?

Though descending a mountain is usually less straining than climbing it, due to the fact you're not having to use as many muscles in your legs, I find it's actually harder - trying to avoid slipping over, for one, and the constant pressure on your kneecaps, step after step.

In my case, the third thing that made it harder was that my shoe fell apart.

This was on my first ascent of Scafell Pike during my Three Peaks Challenge in 2015. There I was, trying my best to hurriedly edge down the path without falling over (seeing as we only had 12 hours left to get to Snowdon and climb it), when suddenly I noticed that I could feel the stones under my left foot far more prominently than I could in my right.

Hmm, I thought. This feels a bit odd. I looked down at my feet, and they looked normal enough.

But lo and behold - when I turned around, I noticed that there, perched upon a step 5 metres behind me, was the sole of my shoe.

It was sitting there, like a badly behaved dog who doesn't want walkies anymore, and was most definitely unattached from the rest of the shoe which was still on the end of my foot.

I picked up the sole and it fell limp in my hand. What do I do with it? I looked around for the rest of my team and noticed most of them a good 100 yards ahead of me - too far to call for them to come back. Luckily, another of my team, a lovely French man called Guillaume (who I'm sure I pronounced his name differently/wrong every time I said it but he was far too polite to ever correct me) was also nearby.

"I zink I 'av some maskeen tape een my backpack," he'd said to me in his beautiful French accent, unclipping his bag from around his chest. I sat down and bound the sole of the shoe back to where it belonged and set off again, stepping very warily and checking every few seconds that the tape was still intact.

Held together with duct tape, though from the looks of it the left sole wasn't far away from detaching either.

With my shoes intact once more, I set off down the mountain again. When descending Scafell Pike, the one thing that makes the view so spectacular is the the lake at the bottom - Wast Water. There's a glistening sheen to it, like a vat of oil has spilt over its surface. This is due to the fact that unlike the other 15 lakes* in the Lake District, it has no oxygen in the water, meaning there's no aquatic life in the lake at all. Nothing. Which if you ask me, is a little bit creepy.

*Actually, when you look at the names of the 16 'lakes' in the lake district, only one of them is a lake - Bassenthwaite Lake. The rest are classed as 'waters' or 'tarns' or 'meres'.

Wast Water. That steep cliff carries on down at that angle all the way to the bottom of the lake.

The creepy bit
In 1976, an air-hostess named Margaret Hogg was killed by her husband, pilot Peter Hogg, for having an affair with a banker. After he killed her, he wrapped her in a carpet and drove overnight from Surrey to Wast Water, before throwing her body into the lake, where it settled at a depth of 34m.

Eight years later in 1984, a search was being conducted for another missing woman, and the body of Margaret was discovered. Because there's no oxygen in the lake, her body was perfectly preserved in a wax-like state, and along with her wedding ring on her hand which had her initials engraved (I mean come on, really Peter? You left her ring on her?), she was easily identified. Peter denied he had killed her, but was later found guilty and imprisoned for four years for manslaughter.

At 80m, it's also the deepest lake in the UK, just shy of the height of Big Ben. The water in Wastwater is supposedly much clearer at a depth of 50m than Lake Windemere is at 10m, making it the perfect place for scuba divers to practice deep water diving. It's also incredibly cold; the depth-to-surface area ratio is much greater than other lakes due to the steep sides, so the sun can't warm up the water - the average temperature is just 4 degrees C (brrrr).  It's also notorious among the diving community for something rather peculiar - gnomes. 

The underwater gnomes of Wast Water with a Christmas tree

For the last 15 years or so, there has been an underwater gnome garden in Wast Water. The gnomes sit at a depth of around 45m, just on the threshold of where certified divers can safely deep dive to. Police have removed the gnome gardens many times, due to the number of deaths of divers who try to find them, but they keep on reappearing. Sometimes with additions like white picket fences, or Christmas trees with tinsel and baubles.

Underwater gnome gardens aren't just popular in Wast Water - it's apparently a 'thing' amongst the diving community worldwide, and you have to be careful about rival divers stealing your gnomes to put in their own underwater gnome gardens, aka gnome gnapping!

Personally I think it's all a bit of fun - it gives the divers something to look at, after all, given that there's nothing to see but mud and a dead air hostess in a carpet.

So there you have it -  now you know a bit more about Britain's highest mountain, and a few bits around it. I do plan on climbing Scafell Pike again one day actually, if only to see the view (and if you're reading this and have seen a view from the top - damn you!), but maybe in a few years' time. I might try and tackle some of the other 314 mountains in the UK first.

The End.

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I do actually have another fact about the mountain but I couldn't find anywhere to fit it in, so I'm just going to plonk it here at the end and hope no one notices...

The church of St Olaf, one of the smallest churches in England, dating from around 1550. The beams are said to come from a viking longship. This wasn't the fact by the way, just some interesting info about the picture. 

In the 19th century, the local Church of st Olaf's in Wasdale Head didn't have a licence to bury the dead, and so when a villager died, their body had to be taken by pony and cart over the mountain pass to St Catherine's Church some 6 miles away. One night in the early 19th century, a pony carrying a coffin took fright and ran off with the coffin, and the body was never found. The dead man's mother died a few months later, and the pony pulling the coffin bolted in the exact same place - neither were ever seen again. Rumour has it that the ghost of the pony and coffin gallop past lonely wanderers on Scafell Pike at night...

Definitely the End.

Oh, and I never got my tea by the way. By the time we got back down the mountain it was 5pm, on a Sunday, and the hut selling food and drink was closed and everyone had gone home. Picture the day you found out that Father Christmas wasn't real - that's how it felt that day. I was mortified. Bloody mortified.

Definitely definitely the End.