Out-Herdwicking the Herdwick: people-watching on Catsycam

For the last few weekends, I seem to have kept on ending up in the Ullswater valley. I write this as if I woke up on a Saturday morning and lo and behold, there I was transported! Of course, I chose to go, and it’s a good 40 minute drive each way. My point is that, ordinarily as summer visitor numbers to the Lake District begin to increase, I try to avoid hotspots such as Glenridding and the Helvellyn ridges. In contrast, on this occasion, the aim of my upcoming new Catsy-cam experiment was to launch myself into the heart of the busy-ness, and to see how I felt. Of course, there are many reasons to visit the fells, but for me part of it is getting away from it all; being with and in the landscape. My aim with ‘Catsy-cam’? To listen and observe. We associate wildlife spotting with nature, and people spotting with urban environments (cafés, airports, public transport). Yet what if we turned this around? Because let’s face it, the Lake District is actually fairly denuded of wildlife, and with all of us around, no wonder (note to self to wildlife spot next time I visit an airport – I’d best arrive early.)

On my first recce, it hadn’t been long since lockdown had been relaxed, yet already both the sizeable main carpark, and the overflow field which has been opened for the summer, were nearly full. Right enough, I was arriving in the middle of the day when the carparks would be at their busiest having resolutely failed to drag myself out of bed early after a busy week. I grumbled at having to pay £8 to park. It felt wrong somehow – you know, as a local Cumbria resident and all that. Yet, as my two days of recceing would keep reminding me, I was a visitor to these fells as much as anyone. I was adding to the business of the fells and eroding them just as much as any of the other hikers I met along my way. I wasn’t a special case, and I certainly wasn’t in the slightest bit superior; I’d do well to see off any hint of judgement at the col.

To my own amusement, my first recce of ‘Catsy-cam’ was less than fully successful (a form of phrasing I once learnt from a marketing executive as an alternative way of communicating ‘failure’. ‘We don’t have failures here, we simply have less successes!’). Even on a route experiment where the aim was to overtly throw myself in amongst the crowds, I had not only chosen the most esoteric route up Helvellyn’s neighbouring fell, where I was likely to see the fewest people, but having set off so late, both Striding and Swirral Edges were fairly quiet by the time I reached the summit. People-watching? Eaves-dropping? Yes, I did do some. There was the conversation between a young couple who had accidentally set off down Catsycam’s ferociously steep NW ridge. Woman to boyfriend: ‘is that song you’re singing from Frozen?’ Cue: embarrassed silence. Boyfriend, a couple of minutes later: ‘I’ve had it with going down.’ Unfortunately for them, there remained a long way yet to descend, but at least the Frozen discography is a long one! At the summit of Catsycam I met a group of young men checking the football scores. Norwich, Man City, Chelsea. One nil up. How long will it take us to get down? Don’t know. Shall we go now? I’m getting cold. We’re going to miss the Grand National.

On my second recce I’d (slightly smugly) organized to park in the driveway of some friends who live in Glenridding. I hadn’t arrived early as such, but I knew that with a winter of hill fitness in my legs, I’d soon catch up with people on the climb. I met the same litter-picker on the approach path as I had on my last recce, who has obviously been hired by the National Park Authority to keep the trail clear over the course of the summer. We nodded and smiled our recognition. Beyond him, it wasn’t long before I came upon the ‘hordes’ up ahead, making their way up the side of the fells on this, a more familiar ascent route! It was a rare hot day this Spring, and many people were struggling with the effort. ‘Haven’t been to the fells all winter,’ one woman explained to me, as I passed. And of course she hasn’t, what with lockdown. It was a fairly innocuous and brief conversation, but significant for how it pricked the bubble of the experiment I was undertaking; it helped me realise how uncomfortable I was already becoming with eavesdroppping.

I usually love people watching, but in this context it didn’t feel quite right. Certainly, a sense of being unsettled is common to many of the experiments in Scree, since my aim is to challenge existing ways of thinking and being. But of all the experiments so far, I was feeling this most keenly here. I felt uneasy about how it set me apart from others, who (like me) were simply enjoying a day out on the fells. I was on high alert to being judgemental: I found myself laughing at a young man telling his girlfriend that Helvellyn was the second highest point in the UK. Yet what made me so special that I knew this wasn’t true? Indeed, as I entered the glacial cirque of Helvellyn, who was I to scoff at the lines of stick figures making their way along the ridges? Had I not traversed both ridges on numerous occasions myself? It was funny, however, when the same young woman asked her boyfriend what all these stick figures were? Rocks, the lad confidently replied. It must have alarmed them to notice that the rocks were moving. And as for the group of young men walking along playing loud music from a bluetooth speaker, strapped to their rucksacks? I’m saying nothing…

I had partly chosen Catsycam as the locus for this experiment due to its name. Its proximity to Helvellyn not only made it a good place to seek out the crowds, but I was also literally and metaphorically turning my camera upon people, including myself (I watched people posing for selfies along Striding Edge, then took a selfie myself). Red Tarn proved to be a great location from which to do the watching, nestled as it is in the corrie between the two ridges. Yet having sat down on a (stationary) rock by the waterside, it wasn’t long before I started feeling really uneasy. The atmosphere was intense. The glacial landscape creates a natural amphitheatre which was amplifying the sound of voices from all directions, near and far. To take a cliché – I wanted to ‘run for the hills’, yet here I was! It was like the sound of flies around a dead animal. As loud as the dawn chorus, but more frantic somehow. Or maybe it was me who was becoming increasingly frantic! I’m admittedly claustrophobic, especially amongst crowds, but this was the first time I had experienced it in the fells.

I soon moved on from the tarn to the summit of Catsycam itself, whose elevation allowed the voices to have become dispersed. I’d been on the summit, writing, for a good half hour when the search and rescue helicopter arrived to winch a casualty off Striding Edge. I hadn’t noticed Patterdale Mountain Rescue team arrive, but yes, there they were, I thought, packing up my super-telephoto lens and putting it back in my bag... Yet, of course, I wasn’t alone in being a peeping Tom upon the accident. Everyone’s eyes were trained upon the rescue. I’ve read about the science of disaster scenes – why we slow down as we pass a car crash and google what happened afterwards (just as I subsequently googled this rescue later that day). Our fight or flight mechanism is placed on alert, and the events cause us subconsciously to confront our own fears of death, pain, and meaning, from a place of relative safety. Similarly here, with all due respect to the man who had broken his ankle, the scene intensified my own focus upon the broader questions and meanings that this experiment, and Scree more broadly, explore.

While admittedly pushing the metaphor: we are all casualties of our unwillingness to challenge our thinking and behaviour, and prone to continuing as we always have. We laugh at the way sheep follow one another, but don’t we out-herdwick the herdwick? And no. Scree isn’t the mountain rescue team nor the helicopter. Scree isn’t going to rescue anyone, let alone everyone! But perhaps it might encourage us to stop a moment and reflect upon the meaning and consequences of our own actions, as the rescue did for everyone who observed it that day. I made my way down off the fell slightly more slowly than I might have otherwise. I was yet to know the nature of the accident by that point. But in retrospect: my ankles are my weak-spot, and with 22kg of photography equipment on my back…?