THE latest film from award winning filmmaker Terry Abraham features one of the most popular areas of the Lake District – Great Langdale. It features four walks in this wonderful valley narrated and led by Mountain Guide and TV Researcher David Powell-Thompson. These are the ascents of Lingmoor Fell via Side Pike, Pavey Ark via Jack’s Rake, Pike o’ Stickle and Rossett Pike and finally Crinkle Crags via Gladstone Knott.

David, a former headteacher at Eskdale School, knows this area intimately and his love of the area shines through in the four walks that he leads the viewer on during the hour of this brilliant DVD. Each walk reveals breath-taking aspects of this iconic Lakeland valley including little known facts and stories from the area. David imparts to the viewer the history of the infamous scramble known as Jack’s Rake and also tells the story of how Gladstone’s Finger on Gladstone Knott was so named.

The ascent of Lingmoor Fell is via Side Pike and then returns down to Blea Tarn and Bleatarn House, best known in Wordsworth’s poem The Solitary as “one bare dwelling”. Pavey Ark featured in the second walk is one of the fells in the Langdale Pikes of which the guidebook writer Alfred Wainwright said, “No mountain profile in Lakeland arrests and excites the attention more than that of the Langdale Pikes and no mountain group better illustrates the dramatic appeal of a sudden rising of the vertical from the horizontal”. And the ascent of Jack’s Rake on Pavey Ark is a classic walk on these particular peaks. I remember taking a small group of scouts up here in 1975 and only recently one of them with whom I am still in touch reminded me of how much he had enjoyed that particular ascent.

The third walk over Pike o’ Stickle and Rossett Pike includes a visit to the old stone axe factory that is reckoned to be over six thousand years old and also visits the packwoman’s grave on the slopes of Rossett Pike which has been there for two hundred years. It is marked by a simple cross of stones laid on the ground pointing south-east. The final walk from Dudgeon Ghyll to Crinkle Crags is via Isaac Gill and Gladstone Knott. This walk in the Clive Hutchby revision of Wainwright’s Southern Fells Guide is not recommended in mist and on the first day of filming for this walk, those were exactly the conditions that prevailed at the time. Therefore, David did not attempt it and gives a warning to the viewer not to do so either in those sort of conditions – very sound advice. We then see a much better day with clear conditions and David making the ascent onto Crinkle Crags and climbing the “bad step” between the first and second crinkles. The DVD concludes with a 360-degree panorama from the top of the second and highest crinkle with David naming the majority of the seventy mountain summits that can be seen from there.

Four classic walks with great narration from David Powell-Thompson and superb filming by Terry Abraham whose award-winning films Scafell Pike – Life of a Mountain and Blencathra – Life of a Mountain have received many accolades over the last three years. The DVD also includes trailers for these two films plus selected scenes from Helvellyn- Life of a Mountain which Terry is filming at the moment and is due for release in the spring of 2020.

The DVD is available from Striding Edge at www.stridingedge.com priced at £14.99. This is an ideal Christmas present for any lover of the Lake District.

John Burland