Hilly horizons and shooting stars: a car-free adventure across Coniston and south Cumbria

06.12.2023 - 12:15 / theguardian.com

The ripples are deep gold in the sunset light as we paddle across Coniston Water towards Wild Cat Island. Officially known as Peel Island, this is where the children camp in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. The canoe glides between rocks into the hidden harbour with its pebbly beach, and we climb, excited as kids, up through bronze-leaved oaks and tall pines to explore the clifftop clearings.

This morning, I took several trains and a bus, each journey more lovely than the one before, to reach Coniston in the Lake District. Tomorrow I’ll catch a boat to visit Brantwood, once home to the Victorian writer and artist John Ruskin. A champion of art and nature and an early observer of the damage that human activities were doing to the environment, Ruskin might not have approved of all my transport choices. He loved boats, but saw railways as part of industrialisation’s “frenzy of avarice” and complained, with characteristic paternalism, about the “stupid herds of modern tourists” who “let themselves be emptied, like coals from a sack, at Windermere …” Ruskin, writing before cars swarmed across the landscape, recommends hiring “a chaise and pony for a day”.

Today’s sustainable ways to explore the area include a network of year-round boats and buses. Cumbria, often swamped in summer, is emptier in winter, one of many reasons why this is a great time of year to visit. With fewer crowds and spectacular colours, the lakes and dramatic cloudscapes are skin-pricklingly beautiful. Tonight, I’m embracing the longer nights with a dark-sky canoeing trip. It begins in the fading afternoon light and proceeds from Peel Island along the eastern shore of the lake, skirting the wooded bays to shelter from the evening breeze, as night falls over peaceful waters.

Path to Adventure also offers full days of canoeing with bushcraft and winter ghyll-scrambling for £52. The company’s directors, Al and Heather Wolfenden, show us how to light a Kelly kettle for hot drinks, and we toast marshmallows over the embers as stars and planets brighten overhead: zigzagging Cassiopeia, the great square of Pegasus, and shooting stars. As we paddle back across the lake, a tawny owl is hooting and Jupiter has risen, huge and luminous, from the dark, hilly horizon.

The meeting point for the canoeing, five miles south of Coniston, proved slightly tricky to reach without a car. But Ease E Ride delivers ebikes to people who are hiring them for a couple of days or more, at £55 a day. Mike Turner and Phil Latthem recently launched the company with bikes based at Arnside railway station and elsewhere. The bikes are fitted with lights and come with a fluorescent tabard. “The experience of cycling after dark in winter can be an adventure in its own