Country diary: Lake District

Last week I clambered laboriously up the western slopes of Helvellyn far above the rock islands and shingle beaches now rising into view as Thirlmere's level gradually decreases day by day. And then the doubts set in as the further I toiled summit-wards, the thirstier I became. Where was the spring at the top of Whelpside Gill? Help! I could not find it. As the sun set to with its cosh, I imagined in black despair my aged limbs sprawled out on the scree, a victim of heatstroke. Yet I had had the best of intentions: carry the water bottle empty on the ascent to save weight and fill it only on reaching the spring, which reputation had it would be bubbling into view no matter how severe a drought. There is only one snag with this reasoning. You must be able to pinpoint this life-reviving source. How my rising panic brought back recollections of those other elusive sites of Lakeland spring water in the unlikeliest of places that have never failed to refresh over the years. I could see them in the mind's eye: spilling ice-cold in a trickle from near the base of "C" buttress on Dow Crag; issuing over rocks in a small cave on the Great Gable Traverse (near Kern Knotts); and brimming out from under Cambridge Crags at one end of the Climbers' Traverse to Bowfell Buttress. Oh, and on a rare terrace on the overhanging East Buttress of Scafell and within earshot of climbers. There, poised in the starkest of landscapes, each spring unfailingly wells from the rock though sometimes you need to press your face to the stone. So it was too on Helvellyn as I stumbled on with the view starting to swim in the heat haze. For then at last I saw it, the tonic of Brownrigg's Well pouring into view, with the summit just above, sheer nectar to those who have gained this point through countless ages.