Faced with the end of our adventure and a six-hour drive home, we woke quite reluctantly on Sunday. However, we had a saving grace: during my waiting-for-Ryan-to-wake-up perusal of our Lake District climbing guide, I’d come across a crag that was on the way back and only a five-minute walk-in from the road and on our way back. Naturally, it was impossible not to incorporate it into our morning.

The discovery of Raven Crag at Langdale almost made up for the fact we’d missed out on climbing Corvus (see previous posts – I’ve probably lamented this fact in all of them). We left Glenridding early, made our way to Chapel Stile and tucked into the tiny roadside parking spot, from which we could see the crag just up a bracken-covered hill. The bare rock face lured us up, the unmistakeable clink of trad gear rattling noisily.

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We chose a 37m, two-pitch climb, Route 2, graded HS 4b and supposedly “one of the finest at the grade in Langdale”. I led the first pitch, which went up a corner groove and pulled out over a corner to an arête. It was quite straightforward and the rock was solid, and I found a nice thick tree on a ledge to belay from. I brought Ryan up and he led the second pitch.

It turned out that this pitch was a little more exposed, and one section in particular was quite hairy – a traverse of several metres, diagonally across and up a blank face with teeny little holds and zero gear placement. Ry made it up without issue, although there were a couple of disco-leg moments when I expected to catch his fall. He took a long time setting up a belay at the top, and it was only when I joined him up there that I saw that the anchor-building opportunities were very few.

Once I was up we took a moment to rave about how good it felt to climb, and another moment to admire the sweeping, green Langdale Valley. It was a walk-off crag, so we half-walked, half slid through the ferns to retrieve our stuff from the bottom of the climb, then plodded back to the van.

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We twisted along the narrow roads to Grasmere village and bought a load of the famous Grasmere gingerbread for our families. I could go on about this gingerbread – a work colleague once brought some in and having tasted its chewy, sweet, gingery goodness, I wasn’t going to leave the Lakes empty handed. There was a queue for the tiny, old-fashioned shop, right in the middle of the pretty village of Grasmere, which – although a bit touristy – was once home to poet William Wordsworth, and is probably worth returning to with a bit more time.

Satisfied with having found a multipitch climb and loaded up with gingerbread, we reluctantly left the Lake District. We fuelled up at Kendal early afternoon and arrived home just in time for tea, having killed the driving time by listening to the excellent audiobook of Aron Ralston’s 127 hours. So concludes a wonderful adventure – and we were fortunate enough to return with all eight limbs.

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