Skiddaw from Latrigg

Skiddaw stands at 931m above Keswick, traditionally counted as England’s fourth-highest summit, built from Skiddaw Slate, mudstone and siltstone laid down on the floor of the Ordovician Iapetus Ocean and later folded into hard rock. Cumbria Wildlife Trust now lists Skiddaw Forest, around 1,200 hectares of fell and bog behind the mountain that includes Skiddaw’s summit along with Great Calva and Little Calva, as a nature reserve, the highest in England by its own account, and plans to restore lost Atlantic rainforest on its lower slopes.

The route starts well above the town at the Gale Road car park on Latrigg’s shoulder, joining a stretch of the Cumbria Way before branching off past the Hawell Monument, a memorial to three generations of Skiddaw shepherds. From there the path climbs steadily up Jenkin Hill in a series of engineered zigzags, re-laid with an inverted-soil technique to control erosion on one of the Lake District’s most walked mountain paths, before reaching the broad summit ridge and its four tops: South Top, Middle Top, the true summit at High Man, marked by a trig column, and North Top beyond it.

Wainwright Routes gives the climb from Gale Road as 5km and 648m of ascent, about two hours twenty minutes, and the usual return reverses it, around 10km in all; a walker starting from the town centre covers far more. It suits a reasonably fit family wanting England’s fourth-highest summit without any scrambling, but the ridge is broad, open and exposed to wind with no shelter, which rules it out for young children or anyone wanting a short, sheltered outing. For a lower, shorter ridge walk from the same town, Catbells above Derwentwater asks under two hours; for a steeper mountain with famous scrambles on its flanks, Blencathra stands a few miles east along the A66.