Eric Robson's Wasdale and Gosforth...

If we're in Wasdale, the most atmospheric and brooding valley in the whole of Lakeland, I really have to tell you about my favourite walk. A short stroll in from the Wasdale Youth Hostel pops us in the middle of Britain's best view. You needn't take my word for it. Viewers of ITV voted for it. The lake laps quietly on a pebbled shore and ahead of us it ripples to the foot of England's grandest mountains - Scafell and Gable flanked by their lieutenants Kirk Fell and Illgill Head. On our right the Wastwater Screes, a fearsome wall of decaying rock that plunges into England's deepest lake towards a dark chaos of boulders on the bottom sixty feet below sea level. We're going to get a fresh perspective of the Screes by walking across them.

It's hard going in parts as you try to identify paths across the boulder fields. You'll find yourself concentrating so hard on your toe ends that inadvertently you get higher on the slope and every so often come to tongues of loose scree with scarcely a foothold between you and the waterline fifty or sixty feet below. Some of the rocks you have to negotiate are the size of small cars. Other parts of the slope are a jumble of smaller stones that shift and slide unnervingly as you put your weight on them.

And then you're across the wall of rock to an undulating grassy track heading for the finest valley head in Britain with its pattern of tiny stone-walled fields tucked away in the shadows thrown by an amphitheatre of mountains. One thundery summer afternoon here I saw a double rainbow across the head of the lake but I can't promise you one of those every trip.

A warning. This can be a spooky place. People have been driven mad here. We're passing the Corpse Road across which the dead of Wasdale were carried on horseback across a mountain pass to Eskdale for burial. Some still haunt the track. Here, too is the lair of a creature, part fox part wolf that terrorised Wasdale at a time when one of the valley head's notable residents lived in a turnip. The competition to find the world's biggest liar is also held not far from here.