I mentioned in the Blog on Gowbarrow how I plan our trips and which fells we are going to complete. With Graystones it seemed a fairly obvious one to do. When we stayed in the North Lakes earlier in the year, we had walked 5 of the 7 fells in the Northwest part of Bassenthwaite and so I thought we should knock the other two off this weekend.
Our start point was to be near Whinlatter forest which I love but a diversion took us through Cockermouth and nearly an hour longer than I had planned on. Still we found a parking space and headed for the start of the climb. We were using, as usual, the guide from Walklakes.co.uk.
They mention it starts with a steep climb. They're not wrong. It was steep and grassy and with a bit of moisture on it we had to take care to keep upright. I mentioned to Theo that we'd need to be very careful coming back down!
The view below is about 15 minutes into the walk. The bridge you can see is near to where we'd parked so you can see you climb very quickly.
After the initial steep climb you do get the odd bit of respite but this picture shows you teh angle of the slope a bit better perhaps!
There is a lone tree near the wall which we were aiming for as we hoped things would flatten out a little by then. once you pass that tree you can see there is light at the end of a tiring tunnel!
As you can see, Theo had again gone on ahead to check out where the summit was. I wasn't tired by the way I was just soaking up the view and getting pictures for the blog and that (honestly!).
After about an hour we had made it to the top of Graystones and we rewarded ourselves with a humbug. Funny how I thought there were more in the packet than seemed to be the case??
We were still pretty dry although there was the hint of rain in the air a couple of times on the journey up. With Graystones done we looked towards our next target and the final felltop in this area. That was Broom Fell.