Drawing 337: Wasdale Head
Direction of view: SSW
Notes: Taken from the path up Kirk Fell. This scene does not appear elsewhere in Wainwright’s published works.
Comments: Image 1 was taken on slide film on 4th August 1979, during a solo youth hostelling trip around the western Lake District. I photographed the views illustrated in thirteen sketches that day.
Image 2 was taken for the digital project on 24thMay 2016 (see 257 for an account of that day). Anne Setright and I had lunch in the Wasdale Head Inn before setting off for this viewpoint; it was my first time on an open fellside since breaking my ankle on 7th March, so I was very careful; Anne waited at the bottom of the slope nursing cracked ribs!
When I was working on this project, a vital tool was a 1 inch map of the whole Lake District, to which I fixed small stickers, each numbered to reference the viewpoint for one of the 400 sketches. In some areas the map almost disappeared from sight below the stickers! There are five at Wasdale Head (85, 134, 285, 298 and 337), and Great and Green Gable together play host to ten! Spread the map out, and all the little stickers tell some interesting tales of where Wainwright went.
