21st September 2008 - Whernside and Great Coum from Dent - 12.75 miles and 3000 ft of ascent
OS Explore Route
This morning I met up with Ady (from Accy) in Dent for a run around the race route of next weekend’s Whernside fell race. It was fabulously sunny with barely a wiff of wind and Dent and the whole of Dentdale was looking absolutely glorious. And without any delay we set off up the lane heading towards Whernside, which we could see side on making up most of the the skyline to the east. I guess we followed the lane for about a mile or so before finally starting our climb up the north end of the Whernside ridge…. and it started steeply too although it was definitely runnable all the way, even for me. The path heads fairly straight east for most of the initial steeper climb before eventually hooking south and heading straight in line with the direction of the ridgeline itself.
I was ‘comfortably’ running this all the way although Ady (bless him) had to keep stopping to walk from time to time………….. to wait for me to catch up! Eventually we topped out most of the worst of the climb alongside Whernside Tarns with a nice easy run to the trig point from there on, making the summit in something like 62 minutes. Ady managed to capture a great shot of my sticky out ears silhoutted by a low sun and Ingleborough behind:
Then it was a brilliant descent from the Whernside trig into Kingsdale; fast all the way, mainly on a fairly gradual slope over tusocky grass, not too rocky, although pretty boggy in places, and before we knew it we were standing in the lane at the foot of the valley. Ady (the small white blob in the distance) descending with Great Coum rearing its head to the left of the picture and the feint green line of Dentdale in the distance ahead:
Going up Great Coum was initially easy going, following a bridleway but, having referred to our race route map two or three times, we just couldn't see what path if any went from that up to the top ridge. Eventually we realised that we had probably missed a turn somewhere and just climbed the wall and took a direct line through boggy cotton grass up to the ridge - not easy going with a few sudden sinkages and stumbles along the way. Me and Ady posing for a self portrait picture at the top of Great Coum, a picture that I only managed to get right at the fourth attempt
Do you think Ady has a fake tan?
The descent of Great Coum was 'interesting' to say the least and will be even more interesting in the race if there's low cloud. We really couldn't find a path of any shape or size to begin with and our route down was all boggy grass, cotton grass and drainage ditches. We also started off too far left such that our line gradually curved back to the right (the right direction) in a big elongated C. Further down we did find a sheep trod and this finally met a better path, but we were almost through the field by then. This descent was quite dodgy with me plunging into thigh high, sucking bog twice en route.
Once at the bottom of this very large field though we knew we were home and dry and managed to sort of figure out the fiddly finish of the race route down to the playing field in Dent - we suspected they'd purposely routed this through fields rather than a much more obvious path so that spectators in the field below would have a good view of runners coming home from a mile out. Either that or the race organiser had just plainly lost the plot!
Anyway a cracking run with great company - 2 hours and 18 minutes including fannying about time.
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