Rydal Cave

I was going to start this post with an apology for yet another Lake District post. But I’m not actually sorry; I want to show you all what a beautiful place it is! We stayed in Keswick for a few days before moving on to a picturesque village called Grasmere. There wasn’t a great deal of dinner choice there so we decided to walk to Ambleside (1.5 hours away) one evening instead.

We discovered this route in a book called ‘15 Walks From Ambleside & Grasmere‘, leant to us by the owners of the B&B we stayed at in Keswick. Each walk has a hand drawn map and written instructions. The maps are rough but the instructions are very good – they got us to Ambleside!

Along the side of the lake was a craggy path lined with thick ferns. The sun was setting and the light was low and warm.

The path climbed to a gradual peak so we did a bit of posing with the mountains in the background.

And then we stumbled upon Rydal cave. We’d spotted it on the OS map but assumed it would be a small hole in the rocks. What we actually came across was a deep cave filled with water. I found out it was man made over 200 years ago and was a roof slate quarry.

We hotfooted across the rocks into the dark depths!

How did these fish get in the cave? The water was full of them; the pool is stagnant and no water appears to flow in from anywhere else in the cave. Scott and I are stumped. Bit of a chicken and egg situation.

Our tummies started to rumble so we carried on following the lake path to Ambleside. The book said the route was about an hour and a half but it took us two hours and ten minutes from the centre of Grasmere; we explored the caves and I was stopping to take photos every five minutes! After dinner at Zeffirellis we decided it was too dark to safely walk back so we hopped in a taxi back to our hotel and flopped into bed.

The next walk I’ll write about is my favourite from our trip and also the last. Come back soon to see what we got up to.