Fix the Fells ranger update

Fix the Fells ranger Patrick gives an update on last year’s work and what lies ahead.

Friends of the Lake District sponsors Patrick’s role to support his work of repairing upland erosion and maintaining paths across the Lake District fells. Click here to read more about the Fix the Fells partnership.

It’s been a long time since we last spoke! What have you and the rest of the Fix the Fells team been up to?

Last year we focused a lot on the Coast to Coast path which connects St Bees to Robin Hood’s Bay. My team focused on Loft Beck, which comes up from Ennerdale and takes you up and over towards Honister Slate Mine.

We did a lot of work up there – a lot of pitching and a lot of landscaping. There’s a massive revetment up there – a wall made out of rocks essentially that’s a bit like a retaining wall that holds back the land. Another team did a lot of the work building that, but we helped with the finishing touches.

We put a lot of hard work into it last year. We had some good days, but there were lots of days when it was absolutely tipping it down and we were wet through. But it was really good, really rewarding, to work on something as important as the Coast to Coast path. I’m really proud of the team.

Because this was such a big project, we put to one side some of our other work. Last time we spoke we were on Whiteless and we didn’t get to finish some of the planned work we had there, for example, so that’s a potential job for this year.

I’ve also been back our working with our volunteers. Like other rangers, I run volunteer sessions throughout the season. I generally ask for a maximum of 12 people, but it can be anywhere from 12 to about two. Most of my volunteer sessions last year were on Carl Side. We did loads there. There are around 50 drains in that area, and we redid around 43 of them, so it got a big, massive overhaul.

For the first volunteer session this year I had 12 people, and we worked on the bench path on Carl Side. It’s amazing that people give up their time to do this.

What have you got planned for the year ahead?

This year, the big project is Helvellyn. This will involve nearly the whole of the Fix the Fells team working together.

We’re doing a lot of pitching, basically getting the main path back up into shape again because it’s such a well-used path. The old path isn’t really good enough now. It’s not wide enough and people are short-cutting and going round it because of how bad it is and how much it has degraded over time.

The work on Swirls Path is the first significant repair work there since the 1980s. A section of around 250m needs major work. We need to take out the old stone path and replace it with more modern stone pitching designed to be easier to use and better for the fellside environment.

There’s got to be a limit, of course, to how much we widen the path. Popular paths could just get wider and wider with the amount of people using them. We try to stick to between 1.3 and 1.8 metres when widening a path.

We’ll be working well into July and possibly after that on the Helvellyn project. But I enjoy working on it and look forward to getting it finished.

Photos: work underway on Helvellyn and the eroded path (before work started) on Catbells.

Apart from that, we’ve recently completed some work on Catbells. We do something on this fell almost every year because it’s so well used. It’s the busiest hill in the north by a long shot. You could have a whole team just on Catbells, to be honest.

There was path that only appeared within the last nine months or so , and one particularly eroded section where it looked like three paths had spread out. We’ve now done some great work there. It included digging a pinnel pit. That means excavating a channel in the subsoil and filling it with gravel-like stones to create a fresh path. Then landscaping out the two sides.

What have you learnt, and what has changed for you since last year?

The main thing has been trying to maintain the level of fitness between when the season ended last year and started this year. I’m definitely a lot fitter than I was this time last year. I’m getting there.

Things have changed a bit at Fix the Fells recently. There has been some team restructuring. We’ve transitioned to working all year rather than working for Fix the Fells for seven months and then five months on other projects. It’ll be interesting to see what happens during the winter months. We might do some work on the lower-down – stuff that we don’t usually get the time to do during the main season.