Whinlatter Forest - Heavy Sides Walk
For some people trees have life, not the swaying in the breeze or shaking off the last vestiges of the rain just as you pass below, but like the long forgotten Ents in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Others see them as statues, immobile, and without life bar the bursting into leaf every spring. Our land was once covered in a rich blanket of deep forest where bear and wolf would lurk. No such wildlife in our woods of today though, perhaps sadly.
Whatever you see in trees and woodland hopefully they'll be something for you, be it the bushes and shrubs under the few fine oaks, or the dense slightly spooky pine plantations.
Park at the Noble Knott car park about midway up the hill to the Whinlatter visitor centre.
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Noble Knott Woods - Trail Marker
- Maps:
50K: 89
25K: OL4
- Start:
- NY223245 (get directions via Google Maps)
- Near to:
- Braithwaite, Keswick
- Tags:
- circular
- Distance:
- 2.8km (1.7 miles)
- Ascent:
- 130m
- Min. time:
- 0 hrs 46 mins
- View in 3-D:
-
- Terrain:
- 1 - easy
- Bog Factor:
- 1 - none
- Tech Diff:
- 1 - easy
Easy paths throughout. - Dog issues:
- None
Purchases:
Buy walk in Adobe/PDF format to print or for your phone or tablet
Buy route for your GPS
Walk height profile
note that gradients are usually grossly exaggerated
Route Description
Behind the information board in the car park is the junction of paths, bear right, following the white banded markers, passing the Words in the Woods post No.1.
Continue along the path through mixed woodland with the road not far below you. Bear right at the first junction. Carry on the path, traversing the hillside, across two simple wooden bridges (which are very slippery in the wet) which span small streams.
Bear left onto the track. At the crossroads continue straight ahead. Just before the path swings right to go over a bridge, our path, marked by white posts goes straight ahead and then bears left to climb the hillside in some gentle zigzags.
Noble Knott Woods
The path joins a fence line, but does not cross it, which is the last before the open fell. Continue along the fence for a while.
Meeting the wide track turn left on to it, more white markers here for reference. Drop down, as the track swings left another track comes in from the right. Turn right here and continue to the next junction with a forest road. Turn sharply left.
After approx 100m (110 yards) take the path on the right, now the marker has both black and white bands. Drop down through the dark and dense thicket of pines and bear left to climb back up the hillside a little way.
It then meanders some more back to the junction of all paths, and the car park.
Noble Knott Woods - Heavy Sides Trail
If you like this walk then why not try one of our other nearby walks:
Unless otherwise stated the text in this walk is the copyright of Hug Solutions Ltd trading as The Hug and the photographs are the copyright of Elizabeth Oldham. Hill data is derived from Database of British and Irish hills which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Maps contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2011 and paths © OpenStreetMap Contributors,CC-BY-SA, 2011