The path through the trees was narrow and overgrown, meandering its way through birch, oak and elm, climbing gently as it wound its way up from the valley. A few minutes walking brought me to the ancient moss-laden wall that surrounded the forest, from which a wooden gate led out on the hillside. From there the track quickly steepened as it wound sinuously up toward the mountaintop. I paused every so often to catch my breath, turning to watch the cloud shadows chase one another across the flanks of the hills on the far side of the valley.

Onwards and upwards I climbed, as the first hints of dusk began to take hold and the shadows grew longer. I gained the summit ridge just as the westering sun was beginning to sink behind a bank of clouds hanging over the distant Langdale Pikes, among the most well known of Lakeland’s hills and loved by the poets, by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey.[1]

Suddenly, as the sun dropped completely behind the cloudbank, the whole sky turned the colour of burnished gold and the clouds themselves lit up as if on fire, a maelstrom of red, orange and ochre, with the occasional flash of silver. At that moment, through a gap in the clouds poured a great ray of sunshine, streaming into the valley below like a searchlight and throwing into stark relief the lines of fields, lanes and hedgerows.