Last updated 05:37, Friday, 29 August 2008

There are all sorts of words for walking – rambling, ambling, strolling, hiking, striding, shuffling – and there are all sorts of walkers.

Easy Rambles Around Keswick & Borrowdale by Vivienne Crow. Questa £3.99

Easy Rambles Around Ambleside & Grasmere by Vivienne Crow. Questa £3.99

There are ones who enjoy a leisurely stroll through peaceful countryside blessed by gentle sunshine – a rare, rare occurrence this summer – and there are those who carry mighty rucksacks over the highest peaks at incredible non-stop striding speeds and, I’m told, there are even those who will don shorts and trainers and run thirty or more miles over the mountains in a few hours.

Vivienne Crow’s well-presented little walking guides are for the first kind – the gentle, amiable, ambling walker who takes a pleasure in the countryside around him.

They are certainly not for the masochist sportsman who blinds himself to the world about him for the sake of the exercise.

The walks in the Keswick guide consist of 10 old favourites that must be familiar to everyone living in the Keswick area. They’re not strenuous – nothing over five miles– and they will take you through some of the finest scenery in the country.

Walla Crag is only 379 metres high, a pigmy among the Lakeland hills, but “The views from the summit,” Vivienne tells us, “are amazing. Looking from the left you can see up into Borrowdale, Derwentwater below, Bassenthwaite Lake (beyond that is Criffel in Dumfries and Galloway), Skiddaw and Blencathra.” Some of walking’s greatest pleasures can be achieved without excessive exertion.

And its good to be told more about the view. Derwent Isle was home in Elizabethan times to a group of Germans employed by the Mines Royal who fled from Keswick for fear of the lives after several were murdered by local people.

The island is also the place where, two centuries later, Joseph Pocklington built his Fort Joseph and staged mock naval battles for the edification of the tourist.

Another island is named after St Herbert who dwelt there as a hermit in the seventh century. He would have looked askance at the watery antics of Joseph Pocklington.

Vivienne Crow’s guides are particularly attractive because they are pleasantly informative.

Each short walk has its own points of interest. There was another hermit, one George Smith, who, in the 1860s, pitched his wigwam on a ledge on the side of Dodd Fell, earned a few coppers painting portraits of farmer’s wives and a few drams of whisky painting the pub landlords.

Another hermit – Keswick seems to have attracted them – was Millican Dalton, who came from Alston, and chose to live in a cave beneath Castle Crag. He was a lively, adventurous, eccentric man, who welcomed the challenge of the outdoors. On his 50th ascent of Napes Needle, he lit a fire on the point of the Needle, and brewed himself a cup of coffee.

I think Millican Dalton would have had a strong objection to the swooping A66 road bridge. Vivienne certainly finds it intrusive: “This hideous monstrosity won the surprising accolade of Best Concrete Engineering Structure of the Century in 1999.” It is obviously something not to be missed.

These are excellent, intelligently-designed guides. In their 40 or so pages, they provide a careful, accurate description of 10 routes, each with its own sketch map. But they are also alive to the landscape and its history.

You don’t have to be a hermit to enjoy the countryside around Keswick. Unfortunately you may have to wait a little for the gentle sunshine.

Easy Rambles are available at selected book stores including Bookends, 56 Castle Street, Carlisle, and 66 Main Street, Keswick.