Harrison Stickle

Park at the National Trust's Stickle Ghyll car park beside the New Dungeon Ghyll Hotel in Great Langdale. It is pay and display, and members park free. The 516 bus from Ambleside stops outside. The path starts behind the hotel and climbs the stone-pitched staircase beside Stickle Ghyll. It is steep and well used, with a few easy steps of scrambling where the beck squeezes between rocks.

At Stickle Tarn the crags of Pavey Ark and Harrison Stickle rise straight out of the water. The summit is above the crags, not up them. From the tarn the usual paths work round to the west of the crags and come up from behind, with cairns leading to a short scramble onto the top ridge. You can also go direct from the hotel up the south side by Pike How, which many people use as the way down. From the west, Harrison Stickle comes at the end of a round over Loft Crag and Pike o' Stickle.

The top

The summit is a short rocky ridge with a cairn at each end. The south and east faces drop about 600 metres to the valley floor, which is why the Pikes look so fierce from Langdale. On a clear day you can pick out every main group of fells.

The tarn is larger than nature made it. A dam went in during 1838 to give a steady water supply to the gunpowder works at Elterwater. The Pikes have far older industry too. Neolithic people worked the hard greenstone below the main peak into axe heads and traded them across the country. Dungeon Ghyll, a deep ravine, marks the fell's south-western boundary.