Skiddaw is often crowded with walkers on the easy ascent from Keswick. But this doesn't deter Lord Bragg, who comes at it from the desolate north and rarely sees a soul before the summit.
It's a favourite walk of his, starting from his cottage on the northern rim of the Lake District, eight miles from where he was born. Like Scafell Pike via Piers Gill or Helvellyn via Nethermost Cove, it shows the unusual side of a familiar mountain.
"Skiddaw's a grand old fell," he says. "It's underestimated because it's overused. But there's a way to wander up Skiddaw that remains deeply attractive."
The route takes him at first through the grounds of a large house, which burnt down in 1958: "There are still traces of its grandeur - water gardens and pathways through the woods, and there the kind of feeling you get in LP Hartley of 'once there was, and now he's gone'. It's a nice, melancholy start."
Cutting across the fields, he passes a little-known curiosity - a sandstone pillar with the carved head of the great huntsman John Peel, whose grave is not far away - "a kind of cross between the Lake District and Easter Island: very odd."
An ancient drovers' road, layered into the hillside, gives some fast walking before he heads for Dash Falls.
"I like the waterfall - it's so gloomy, doesn't seem to get any sun at all. It could be one of those terrible dells where the fifth most important character in a novel drowns himself or herself. The long valley at the top has that desolate feeling I particularly enjoy."
This brings him to a height of 1,500ft and a clump of trees sheltering a desolate former shooting lodge called Skiddaw House, now a youth hostel. From there, it's about an hour's steady climbing to the top across a pathless grassy hump called Sale How.
If it's a clear day, the reward at the summit is the sudden view of Keswick clustered round the head of DerwentWater and, beyond it to the south, the full vista of the lakeland mountains. There's also a stone shelter and - as likely as not - clusters of other walkers.
"The last time I was up there was with my son Tom; we spent about 10 minutes watching a hawk, only about 10 or 15 feet from the ground, in a very high wind. We were sitting against the cairn getting battered, and it was perfectly steady, seeming to enjoy the wind hitting it. It was very, very good."
The descent towards Keswick, with the lake growing from the size of a handkerchief, is the highlight of the walk for Bragg, full of memories of school trips and family outings: "It's a mixture of landscape and history and literature and personal history. It has lots of layers for me.
"Then it's into Keswick, through the park, and into the pub. It's about six hours of walking - a good day whatever the weather - and, because you're going over a mountain and into a town, there's a feeling of arrival, a feeling of going from nowhere into somewhere.
"And I just feel better for it. I wouldn't like to make any great claims that some people do about walking - most spectacularly, Wordsworth. He did walk his poems, didn't he? Composed them while walking, with a walking metre in his verse, if you like.
"And I know quite a few writers who swear by walking as an aid to composition. It doesn't happen as neatly as that for me. I just feel six or seven hours out in that sort of empty place is something I'm very lucky to have. I'd even go as far as saying I need it, although that seems to be rather overprivileged."
'They know not Skiddaw who have climbed it only from Keswick!"
So says Alfred Wainwright, the late guru of Lake District fanatics, in the 28 handwritten, densely-illustrated pages which he devotes to the mountain in his 1962 guide, The Northern Fells.
"It is an easy climb, yes; its slopes are smooth and grassy, yes; it has no frightful precipices, no rugged outcrops, agreed; it offer nothing of interest or entertainment to rock-gymnasts, agreed. But are they not quite minor failings? Are they failings at all?
"The summit is buttressed magnificently by a circle of lesser heights, all of the members of the proud Skiddaw family, the whole forming a splendid and complete example of the structure of mountains, especially well seen from all directions because of its isolation.
"Its lines are smooth, its curves graceful; but because the slopes are steep everywhere, the quick build-up of the massif from valley levels to central summit is appreciated at a glance. This, then is Skiddaw, a giant in stature. But an affable and friendly giant."
The practicals
The best rail stations for the northern Lake District are Penrith, Carlisle and Wigton: national rail enquiries 0345 484950. For buses, call National Traveline (0870 608 2 608). Cumbria Tourist Board: 015394 44444 or 08705 133059. Lake District National Park Authority: 01539 724555. OS Outdoor Leisure map (2 inches to 1 mile), no 4 (English Lakes, NW Area), £6.50. The Northern Fells by Alfred Wainwright is published by Michael Joseph at £10.99.
· The Soldier's Return, by Melvyn Bragg, is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £6.99
